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Face of a movement: Reies López Tijerina fought for Chicano rights - El Paso Times

2012-02-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

Face of a movement: Reies López Tijerina fought for Chicano rights - El Paso Times
by Ramón Rentería \ El Paso Times
Posted: 02/12/2012 12:00:00 AM MST

Reies Lopez Tijerina, a well-known Southwest activist in the 1960s is often referred to as a warrior in the struggle for civil rights for Mexican-Americans. Tijerina now lives in Downtown El Paso. (Rudy Gutierrez / El Paso Times

Reies López Tijerina looks more like a respected abuelito alone with his thoughts than the once-radical activist whose relentless struggle in the 1960s put the national spotlight on land rights issues in New Mexico and the Southwest.

"Some people think I'm dead," he said. "But the spirit of the cause still excites me."
Tijerina, who now lives in El Paso, is often described as one of the important leaders in the struggle for civil rights for Mexican-Americans.

He is routinely identified as a warrior in the early Chicano movement, along with César Chávez, the farm labor organizer in California; Colorado Chicano activist Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales; and La Raza Unida Party co-founder José Angel Gutiérrez in Texas.

At 85, Tijerina spends what's left of his days in a cramped two-room tenement in Downtown El Paso, surrounded by books, Bibles, newspaper clippings, paintings and pictures - countless reminders of his turbulent life as a social activist most active in the 1960s and '70s.

"I am happy and proud God has given me 85 years," he said. "Nobody can erase my story."

Born in Texas, Tijerina is the only major activist in the Chicano movement who served time in prison as a result of his activism.

Tijerina takes oxygen and medicine for angina, a heart condition, and acknowledges that his mind wanders sometimes and that he once came close to dying during the five years he has lived in El Paso.

He still talks with his hands like the traveling evangelical preacher that he once was.

In 1963, Tijerina founded La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a grass-roots organization, to reclaim Spanish and Mexican land grants held by Mexicans and Indians in the Southwest before the United States- Mexican War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed after Mexico was defeated, guaranteed that Mexican citizens could keep their land grants.

The Alianza argued that the U.S. government stole millions of acres of land from Hispanics.

Tijerina recently made a rare public appearance at the New Mexico Statehouse in Santa Fe at an event honoring the 164th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

In New Mexico, Tijerina is perhaps best known for leading an armed raid on June 5, 1967, at the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla. A state police officer and a jailer were wounded.

Tijerina said he has been invited to Tierra Amarilla this summer for a ceremony commemorating the 45th anniversary of the courthouse raid. A lawyer once affiliated with La Alianza is organizing the event.

Eulogio Salazar, the wounded jailer, was slain in 1968 just days before he was scheduled to testify whether it was Tijerina who shot him.

Tijerina has argued for years that the slaying was a politically motivated hit designed to taint him and the Alianza.

Tijerina still asks: "How could I kill him, my friend who fed my children while I suffered hunger?"

José Angel Gutiérrez, a Dallas-area lawyer and co-founder of La Raza Unida Party in Texas, translated Tijerina's memoir, a manuscript first written in Spanish, and published by Arte Public Press in Houston as "They Called Me King Tiger."

Gutiérrez was a young Chicano in South Texas affiliated with MAYO, the Mexican-American Youth Organization, when he first learned about Tijerina and his land-grant fight in New Mexico through underground newspapers.

"What he did for my generation and the Chicano movement was to capture our imagination about our true birth certificates," Gutiérrez said in a phone interview. "He introduced us to this whole idea that we have rights written into basic documents and that treaties were the supreme law of the land."

Many Chicano activists embraced Tijerina's persistent message that the federal government and others blatantly disregarded the law and stole land across the Southwest.

"That gave us a homeland, the reason that land was stolen and a cause to try to get it back," Gutiérrez said.

A much circulated photograph shows Tijerina, Gutiérrez and "Corky" Gonzales, three of the four most influential figures in the Chicano movement, raising their locked hands in a Chicano power salute during the 1972 La Raza Unida Party national convention at the El Paso County Coliseum. That image, missing only union farm-labor organizer César Chávez, remains etched in the minds of activists from that era.

Gutiérrez credits Tijerina with having the courage to take on the federal and state governments with few resources at a time when other activists such as the African-American Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam only talked about engaging the government.

"That's why he had the National Guard and the entire judicial system against him. He fought them on his own," he said. "That made him a very important icon in our history, and that's the legacy that he leaves."

Gutiérrez laments the press and others who continue to try to associate Tijerina with Eulogio Salazar's brutal beating.

Over the years, Tijerina alleged public officials were responsible for burning his house, for bomb threats against him and his family, and for trying to discredit him and his cause. "Everybody thought he was crazy," Gutiérrez said. "You would hear that and also that he was very anti-Semitic. Well, he may be anti-Semitic, but he wasn't crazy about all the allegations that he was saying because I have proof."

Gutiérrez said he has documents in which a man identified as Tim Chapa and as an undercover agent for New Mexico State Police corroborates that he and others were responsible for many of the crimes allegedly committed by Tijerina. Gutiérrez will present a paper on his research at a conference in Oregon this spring.

Dennis Bixler-Márquez, the director of Chicano Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, describes Tijerina as one of the political pillars of the Chicano movement.

"Tijerina addressed the land title issue in New Mexico," Bixler-Márquez said. "He fought to regain the lands that were lost by the Mexican population after the Mexican American War, by hook or by crook, and paid dearly for it."

Bixler-Márquez suggests that history will remember Tijerina for helping form La Raza Unida Party and for his quest to restore landownership to those he believed to be rightful heirs.

Lorena Oropeza, then an associate professor of history at the University of California-Davis, wrote an essay in which she said Tijerina remained a controversial figure even 40 years after the courthouse raid.

While some New Mexicans denounced Tijerina as a "con man, a swindler, a born rabble-rouser and a bully," others portrayed him as "a dedicated defender of his people, someone who, despite the violence of the courthouse raid, was a sincere promoter of peace and equality for all," Oropeza wrote.

Tijerina's third wife, Esperanza, has been with him for 19 years since they first met in Michoacán, Mexico. He had 10 children with his previous wives.

"He encouraged people to struggle for their lands," she said. "And they still turn to him for advice."

Carlos Ortega, a Chicano Studies lecturer at UTEP, pointed out that Tijerina was among the first Hispanic leaders to reach out and try to form coalitions with African-American activists.

Tijerina still reminisces about his past relationships with black leaders such as Jessie Jackson and Elijah Mohammed and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign.

These days, Tijerina lives a simple life far removed from his often turbulent past.

What does Tijerina want his legacy to be after all the years of defending his honor and his cause, all those years of being despised and idolized by others?

"The truth," he said. "Humanity will decide what I deserve or what I left behind."
~~~~
Ramón Rentería may be reached at rrenteria@elpasotimes.com; 546-6146.

About Tijerina
Born: Sept. 21, 1926, near Falls City, Texas, to a family of migrant workers.

Education: He once studied for the ministry in Ysleta near El Paso.

Early life: Served briefly as a minister with the Assemblies of God before founding a utopian community in Pinal County, Ariz., in the early 1950s. He took up the cause of land-grant restoration in the 1960s.

Best known: As one of the earliest Chicano social activists. (He prefers the term Indo-Hispano). He became famous for his 1967 armed raid on the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, N.M.

Honors: He has received numerous awards, most recently the Mexican government's Ohtli award in 2009 for his lifetime commitment to human rights and civil rights for Hispanics in the United States. In 2011, the city of Las Vegas, N.M., presented him a key to the city.

Quote: "Tierra Amarilla made me bigger than any man can expect on this earth

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HELP 5-Point Survival Platform

2012-02-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

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~Humane-Liberation-Party~ HELP 5-Point Survival Platform
First Posted Online: January 1, 2001
Sacramento, California, Aztlan
#1. We demand our basic humane needs for the survival of our species: nutritional food, proper clothing, decent shelter, health care and quality education for our present welfare and future success in the New Millennium.

#2. We demand complete employment for our natural energies, relevant job training or a guaranteed income for our continued life existence as humane beings in order to work in decent positions as functional mature adults.

#3. We demand worldwide socialist democracy with proportional representation: wherein the majority rules, protects minorities and cares for all based upon 'one human being, one legitimate vote' in fair, free and open monitored elections.

#4. We demand equal respect for all humane rights: no matter the economic class, blood race, gender sex, national identity, native tribe. cultural origin or personal orientation and the conscientious resolution of violations against the humane rights of all indigenous native tribes.

#5. We demand true Peace on Earth and an immediate end to all evil unjust wars, regional conflicts and territorial disputes in conjunction with the total elimination of all Weapons of Mass-Destruction by any and all means mandatory.

When in the Course of Human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Humankind requires that they should declare the root Causes which impel them to the Separation.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Human Beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights---that among them are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness-That to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among People, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles and Organizing its Powers in such Forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes: and according all Experience hath shown that Humankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursing invariably the Same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under a Mature Fascism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their Future security.

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"Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people!"
~ El General George L. Jackson ~ Field Marshal Black Panther Party {1942–1971}

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Key Document Links:
Declaration of Independence ~
http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/declaration_transcript.html

Constitution of the United States ~
http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution.html

Bill of Rights ~
http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/bill_of_rights.html

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ~
http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/ghtreaty/
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Update 12-21-2011: @Peta_de_Aztlan
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On the Ideal of Global Revolution via @Peta_de_Aztlan

2012-02-09T16:21:00.000-08:00

http://wp.me/prH9G-5k
Posted on February 9, 2012

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
~ President John F. Kennedy, White House 1962

Global Revolution:

Global Revolution would bring about a great leap forward in our humane evolution as the dominant species of life on Earth. It must be planned, coordinated and based upon concrete analyses of concrete conditions in a given situation. We need to be practical, realistic and responsible.

Today the major enemy of humanity on the world stage is the Amerikan Empire. However, there are many other repressive regimes that need to be confronted and challenged one at a time by the masses of people in those particular countries. As an endangered species, all of us are on the same planet together. It is imperative that we seek total liberation for all of us together as one family of humanity.

At the same time we need to aware of the enemies within, that is, our own internal character defects. Character defects and other shortcomings block or handicap our capacity to create new humane relationships among all peoples of all lands based upon pure love, mutual respect and common understanding. These character defects include the arrogance of false pride, selfish greed, lazy sloth, insecure jealousy, obese gluttony, sexist lust and hateful wrath. The ideal here is that we must seek inner liberation as humane beings, heal ourselves within, cure our character defects and work together to create an outer liberation in the world. Seek balance and harmony.
The world today is in great turmoil in different regions around the globe. We cannot pretend to be blind, deaf and dumb to what is going on. There are great stirrings in the global mass consciousness that advocate for Global Revolution as a long-range general solution for our collective global ills. We now live in a global society. We are all connected by our common survival interests, advanced technology and global communication systems.

A central question is what kind of a Global Revolution should we strive for together? Humane beings need to understand that mere surface reforms of corrupt systems of government and dysfunctional economic systems will not suffice. We should continue to strive for realistic reforms, the fascist authoritarian system can correct itself to a set point, but ultimately the entire power system now ‘in power and secure’ inside the USA and throughout the world must be radically transformed. It does not matter who is POTUS (President Of The United States) when those who are really ‘in power and secure’ are still the ruling class of corporate capitalist elites. Fascism uses economic reform, mass marketing psychology and timely false promises to keep itself ‘in power and secure’. It constantly attempts to defuse, divide and distract the natural strivings of the people for significant social change via revolution.

Other comrades in other countries may be confronted with completely different settings unique to their situation than our own particular situation. I am here now inside the USA typing. There is no magical single template for revolution to cover all situations. Revolutions cannot simply be copied or imported. The roots of revolution must spring up out of the basic survival interests, common dreams and collective goals of the people in a given situation. Thus, we need to comprehend the conscious concentration on the coordination of global communications as essential for there to be Global Revolution.

Each of us must operate from our own immediate present situation. Each of us must deal with our own local or regional situation with a global overview. We can and should learn from other comrades elsewhere, but no one is going to go where were are on an existential level and do the basic local community education and mass mobilization that we must do ourselves in communion with the local population.

Relevant Revolution:

History has taught us that a relevant revolution requires a general strategy that emphasizes the seizure of state power by the people’s armed vanguard elements with various specific tactics depending on the immediate situation. Tactics are the means to an end strategy.

Many folks confuse a revolt with an actual revolution. Look at Egypt! The same evil forces before the revolt are still ‘in power and secure’. There has been no revolution in Egypt, though the basic groundwork has been done, especially in the courageous consciousness of the Egyptian masses and their magnificent capacity to overcome their fear of the repressors.

A basic requirement of revolution is a total transformation of property relations between the 1% of the ‘haves’ and the 99% of the ‘have-nots’. Property rights must be reversed between the 1% and the 99% in favor of the overwhelming majority of the people who compose the 99%. The people must have ownership and control of the land and all the viable social institutions thereon. If there is no substantial transformation of property relations there is no real revolution.

In the past, feudalism was revolutionary when it overthrew the rule of ancient barbarism. Capitalism was revolutionary when it overthrew feudalism. A genuine people’s democratic socialism will be revolutionary when it overthrows or transforms corporate capitalism. We are still in a class society where we still have classes at war. The two main social-economic classes are still the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. Those of us here now inside the USA still endure under a corporate capitalist economic system whose ruling elites are in control of the most advanced form of authoritarian fascism with the strongest military machine in all of human history to date.

Only the masses of people can make or ‘manufacture’ the revolution, not vanguard elements alone. On a level of mass consciousness the people must come to know through their own direct experience the practical necessity and logical possibility of a relevant revolution. Ideally we want to bring about a Peaceful Revolution, yet we must keep in mind that connected reality does not always conform to our ideas and ideals. We must always uphold our basic sacred right to self-defense by any means necessary. We shall not allow ourselves to be carted away into new high-tech concentration camps or just be slaughtered without retaliation in the streets. We will not allow ourselves to be killed by armed fascists in the misguided name of non-violent passive resistance. Will you allow your family to be killed? All of us are of the huge family of humanity.

We cannot ignore the urgings of some for violent revolution, but neither do we want to lead people into a bloodbath in their own blood. Many confused comrades are unstable fanatics who need more revolutionary education. We have seen violent revolutions in the past establish new regimes, yet they tend to become evil and corrupt. Look at the former Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea! The so-called model socialist societies supported by the old Left-wing vanguard have become brutal totalitarian regimes. Clearly past analyses by dead heroes have been grossly defective and much has gone awry in the revolutionary processes of certain countries.

Revolution Is A Process:

We can now see that revolution is an extremely complex process. It is not a simple matter of vanguard elements shooting their way into state power, the seizure of the state and the fair social redistribution of the material wealth in society. Remember Companero Salvador Allende of Chile! Revolution is not all cut-and-dry. Revolution is a dynamic living process, not a fixed set of frozen conclusions. It is important to understand how a given revolution comes to power after a protracted war. What kind of seeds of counter-revolution are actually planted when there is a social revolution? How does revolutionary vanguard leadership prevent any future counter-revolution?

When violence is used to achieve success in a revolutionary process many lives are taken, people in the thousands can be killed, critical mistakes are made on violent battlefields and future lifelong resentments are embedded into the psyche. These embedded resentments can grow and fester in the memories of people who feel that the successful revolutionary forces have wronged them or their blood families. Resentments are powerful psycho-social factors that breed in the psyche. We either learn to let go of our past resentments or we will try to get even one way or the other against those who have wronged us. It is our human nature. Of course, a violent revolution is a bloody messy phenomena. Imagine all the resentments of Cubans whose family members were killed by Che Guevara and other militants after the Cuban revolution in the name of revengeful retribution? Look at how Brother Nelson Mandela had the genius to call for reconciliation in South Africa. There is no pure revolution. It is the nature of the beast that revolutions, no matter how idealistic, create deep long-term resentments. Thus, we need to patiently educate and convince the people about the goals and aspirations of Global Revolution in order to prevent a reactionary counter-revolution.

Only a fool or a fanatic would propose and openly avow any kind of violent revolution in the world without taking into full consideration ‘concrete analyses of concrete conditions’, then designing the appropriate general strategy and tactics applicable to the given general situation before us.

Vanguard Leadership:

We need vanguard leadership. Naturally, the whole concept of a leaderless revolution must be viewed objectively as utterly insane, idealistic and a trick of psycho-social manipulation. Many past leaders have proven themselves to be mis-leaders or even agent-provocateurs sent in by dark forces to sow discord and internal division among progressive peoples. We do need leaders and we need followers who can become leaders. Ideally each of us should be a leader. Leadership must develop and train cadres to provide new fresh leadership. We will do well when we coordinate our activities closely with others working together in true solidarity.
We need to examine the whole concept of participatory democracy, register people to vote and utilize the U.S. electoral system as another important tactical tool in our toolbox. No tactic can be discounted. A lot of us just need to use our imagination, learn better how to utilize Internet Power and promote universal literacy wherever we are.

Conclusion:

On an personal level, as a humane being, I would prefer to help bring about social change and ultimately global transformation of the established order via peaceful methods of struggle. We need to exhaust all peaceful methods of struggle and not slip into Left-wing adventurism. Each of us must figure out life for our own self, unite with natural allies and seek a Unity of Purpose to help create a new brave world.

We need to create a new brave world, create a culture of liberation and not forget to conscientiously work on our own spiritual enlightenment as humane beings who have care, concern and compassion for all living beings.

Venceremos Unidos! We Will Win United!
Che Peta AKA Peter S. Lopez AKA @Peta_de_Aztlan ;->
Sacramento, California, Aztlan
P.S. There will be many Ches!

Relevant Links:
http://www.deadlysins.com/sins/

Message to the Tricontinental ~Dr. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara ~
First Published: Havana, April 16, 1967.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm
http://occupywallst.org/ @OccupyWallStNYC
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Tijuana Journal - A Cultural Clash Over the Bad Old Days - NYTimes.com

2012-02-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

Tijuana Journal - A Cultural Clash Over the Bad Old Days - NYTimes.com

A prostitute waiting for customers in Tijuana.

An empty lot that was once the site of the infamous La Ocho prison.
By DAMIEN CAVE

TIJUANA, Mexico — Men and women, young and old, all walk slowly now by the empty lot at Eighth and Constitución. Everyone stares. Some stop. Many point or shake their heads with surprise.

“It’s really gone, wow, La Ocho,” they say, referring to the old, wretched jail where drunk Americans and hardened Mexican criminals huddled behind bars amid the stench of vomit and corruption. But was the demolition, which took place last month, good or bad for Tijuana?

Few cities would even ask, in the face of such civic filth. La Ocho, after all, was a holding pen where American teenagers who were caught with a joint or had too much to drink often had to pay a $2,000 bribe for freedom. It was prison on prime downtown property, where gang leaders roamed free on the top floor as peons suffered below in tiny cells with useless toilets.

Mayor Carlos Bustamante is unapologetic about the decision to tear it down, insisting that La Ocho represented “the darkest side of Tijuana history.” But here in a city without the ancient roots found throughout much of Mexico, history of any kind holds its value.

Many longtime residents are fuming about the prison’s demise. After several failed protests, some have even sued to compel the city to rebuild the complex — which included police and fire stations — exactly as it was, arguing that it was illegally demolished.

“We don’t have too many historical references that can fortify our identity as Tijuanenses,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, a human rights advocate and lifelong resident. “Maybe in terms of architecture, they’re not extraordinary, but they represent the history of the city.”

Preservation disputes are rarely about bricks or design alone, and in the case of La Ocho the argument has become a proxy for this city’s larger struggle over identity, and how much of Tijuana’s sordid past should shape its future. Now, perhaps more than ever, this sprawling border city of 1.6 million people is at a turning point.

Illegal emigration to the United States is down and the tsunami of American tourists that defined Tijuana, starting with Prohibition in the 1920s, has receded as fears of crime and dread over the time it takes to cross the border back into California have increased. Many of the bars that once catered to American students coming here to party are now closed with steel gates. Some say it will be a decade before the flow of young Americans returns.

In the meantime, Tijuana is safer than it has been in years — even drug-related killings are down — and new restaurants, clubs and cafes catering to Mexicans and sophisticated visitors are popping up all over the city. Residents describe this as a moment of energy and rekindled pride, which can be felt among the crowds that gather at popular taco trucks and in clubs playing Latin music, not rock ’n’ roll.

Nearly everyone here seems to agree that this shift should continue — that Tijuana needs to repackage itself and present a new, more upscale image to the world. But the question is how.

Mr. Bustamante, who is also a real estate developer, has said that Tijuana needs to modernize and become more like San Diego. This is an old idea; it got a lot of airtime under former Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon, who like Mr. Bustamante, is a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed Mexico with a corrupt, heavy hand for 71 years.

In this case, Mr. Bustamante wants to finance a downtown redevelopment zone with money from the sale of the Ocho land. He says it will be a catalyst for broader change.

And some business owners agree. Those with a view of the prison site are especially open to new construction. “We need to renovate,” said Ana Lilia Quintero, 34, who owns Ana’s Salon on Eighth Street. “This could bring new jobs, and new businesses. That’s what we’re hoping.”

To others, however, the demolition reflects shortsighted leadership. A new building? The look of San Diego? These, the critics say, are boring ideas that ignore how Tijuana’s history could become a big, lucrative part of its future appeal.

This was a city where Hollywood stars came to frolic and gamble — like Las Vegas and Havana. Many Tijuanenses who have been trying to revive their hometown by promoting its art, music and food say the prison (which had not been used since 2002) should have been turned into a museum that captured Tijuana’s history of vice. Or a community center for nonprofits or arts groups that could show off the city’s creative side.

“I wanted to have an event in there,” said Javier Plascencia, a renowned chef who owns several popular restaurants in Tijuana. At the time, during an interview last month, he was sitting at Caesar’s, one of his restaurants, where the Caesar salad was said to have been invented in the 1920s. Mr. Plascencia renovated the restaurant a few years ago, fearing that it would be torn down, and he said its regular clientele proved that using the past to move forward could work.

Even a stinking prison, Mr. Plascencia said, deserved a second chance.

“It was ugly,” he said. “But it was ours.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/world/americas/a-cultural-clash-over-the-bad-old-days-in-tijuana.html?_r=1&ref=americas
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DailyOM - Sitting with Feelings

2012-02-08T15:24:00.000-08:00

DailyOM - Sitting with Feelings

February 8, 2012
As the Earth Allows the Rain
Sitting with Feelings

Taking the time now to sit with your feelings and acknowledge them will save you much distress down the road.

It can take great courage to really sit with our feelings, allowing ourselves to surrender to their powerful energies. All too often we set our feelings aside, thinking we will deal with them later. If we don’t deal with them, we end up storing them in our minds and bodies and this is when anxiety and other health issues can arise. Denying what our bodies want to feel can lead to trouble now or down the line, which is why being in the thick of our feelings, no matter how scary it seems, is really the best thing we can do for ourselves.

One of the reasons we tend to hide or push aside our feelings is that we live in a culture that has not traditionally supported emotional awareness. However, as the connection between mind and body--our emotions and our physical health-- becomes clearer, awareness of the importance of feeling our feelings has grown. There are many books, classes, workshops and retreats that can help us on our way to emotional intelligence. We can also trust in our own ability to process what comes up when it comes up. If sadness arises, we can notice its presence and welcome it, noting where in our bodies we feel it, and allowing ourselves to express it through tears or a quiet turning inward.

When we simply allow ourselves to fully feel our feelings as they come, we tend to let them go easily. This is all we are required to do; our feelings simply want to be felt. We often complicate the situation by applying mental energy in the form of analysis, when all we really need is to allow, as the earth allows the rain to fall upon it. As the rain falls, the earth responds in a multitude of ways, sometimes emptying out to form a great canyon, sometimes soaking it up to nourish an infinitude of plants. In the same way, the deeper purpose of our feelings is to transform the terrain of our inner world, sometimes creating space for more feelings to flow, sometimes providing sustenance for growth. All we need to do is allow the process by relaxing, opening, and receiving the bounty of our emotions.
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The Shadowlands: Atlantis: The Lost Continent

2012-02-08T15:19:00.001-08:00

bit.ly/xT6L3M

Contents The Legend of Atlantis
Atlantis, The Lost City
Images of Atlantis

The Location of Atlantis new 2-1-05

Links to other websites

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A map of Atlantis based on Plato's writings.

Atlantis's location based on Ignatius Donnelly's book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.

An artist rendition of the Royal Banquet Hall.

The Legend of Atlantis
The legend of Atlantis has to be one of the oldest and most spellbinding of all the world's mysteries. It has puzzled both skeptics and believers alike. Where exactly was Atlantis and where is it now? What caused its destruction? Exactly how advanced were the Atlanteans? I hope someday everyone will know the answers to those questions.
Plato, a Greek philosopher, gave us the first known account of Atlantis. Plato was said to have lived from about 428 to 348 B.C. He was a student of Socrates. After studying with Socrates, Plato opened up his own philosophy school. There he began to write his philosophies in a play-type form. These dialogues always featured Socrates as the main character. In the dialogues Timaeus and Critias, he wrote about an amazing place called Atlantis. In Critias, Plato wrote of Atlantis' architecture, engineering, and ceremonies in great detail. Many people, even Plato's own students, thought this place
was Plato's own creation, but he argued that Atlantis was real, and filled with more splendors than anyone could imagine.
All races share the story of a great flood that destroyed an entire civilization. The name Atlantis appears in various forms throughout the world. The Canary Islands have a legend involving Atalaya. The Basques of Northern Spain have Atlaintica. The Vikings told the tale of Atli. Northern Africa called it Attala. The Aztecs have Aztlán, and the North American Indians called theirs Azatlán.
Plato said Atlantis was a large island in the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere west of the Pillars of Hercules (the Rock of Gibraltar). This description has lead to many people believing that Atlantis could have been the Aegean Island of Thera (Santorini) which suddenly blew up. Atlantis was also identified as part of an ancient series of land bridges that stretched across the Atlantic and even out into the Pacific as far as New Zealand. Others say that the Canary Islands are the tops of Atlantis' tallest mountains. Some say that the Bermuda Triangle is the result of Atlantis sinking. The discovery of
blue eyes and blondness among some of Africa's Berbers soon led some people
to place Atlantis in the Atlas Mountians of modern Morocco and Tunisia. Still others claim that Atlantis was not even on this planet.
According to the continental drift theory, all the continents fit together, like a jigsaw puzzle. If you look at a map, you will see that the continents really do fit together- with the exception of the USA in North America and Western Europe. Could Atlantis be the missing piece?
According to Plato, one of the best splendors of Atlantis was the palace compound located in the heart of its capital. It was ringed by three canals. Plato remarked, "As each king received it [the palace] from his predecessor, he added to its adornment and did all he could to surpass the king before him, until finally they made of it an abode amazing to behold for the magnitude and beauty of its workmanship. The visitors passed through a wall of brass, a wall of tin, and a wall of copper. White and black and red stone quarried from the native rock." He also wrote that the wealth they possessed
was so immense that the like had never been seen before in any royal house, nor will ever easily be seen again. This, of course, lead to Atlantis' destruction.
He stated that the Atlanteans appeared to be superlatively fair and blessed, yet they were filled with lawless ambition and power. The Atlanteans started valuing material wealth above goodness-that's where they went wrong. Plato said, "The portion of divinity within them was now becoming faint and weak through being oftentimes blended with a large measure of mortality." The Atlanteans were unable to bear the burden of their possessions. So, "There occurred portentous earthquakes and floods, and one grievous day and night befell them, when...the island of Atlantis...was swallowed up by the sea and vanished." Plato doubted that any sign of the lost land would ever be found. "The ocean at that spot, has now become impassable and unsearchable." This
contributes to the Bermuda Triangle theory above.
Even though it seems that no one could survive such a tragedy, it is believed that many Atlanteans escaped. One example of this is Edgar Cayce. In April of 1939, he fell into a trance and spoke about Atlantis. "In Atlantis, when there was the breaking up of the land came to what was called the Mayan Land or the what is now Yucatan-entity was the first to cross the water in the plane or air machine of that period." In support of the escape, Atlantis has been hailed for spawning civilizations such as Hellenic Greece, the Mayas & Incas of the New World, and ancient Egypt.
Atlantis has had an impact on every culture. In 1675, Olof Rudbeck, a Swedish scholar, used Homeric sailing directions to Ogygia and located Atlantis in Sweden. English poet William Blake, believed that the Atlantean King, Albion lead the last of his subjects to Britain, where they became Druids. Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a French scholar, translated a Mayan manuscript in 1864, that described the story of an ancient land that had sunk into the ocean after a great catastrophe. In 1882, Philadelphian politician, and avid reader, Ignatius Loyola Donnelly published his book Atlantis: The Antedefuvian World. The world's reception of his writings was so great,
Donnelly was elected to membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The most important thought that is on everyone's mind is not where, what, or
how, but will. Will Atlantis ever resurface?? - by TisavadeT@aol.com

Atlantis, The Lost City
Atlantis, the Lost City everyone is talking about. Where is it, is it real? Why are there rumors if it's not true? Here we will explore the myths and realities of the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Sit back, relax and take a wonderful ride!
The city of Atlantis, if you hear about it, one would think that it would be located in the Atlantic Ocean, hence the name. But researchers have been looking for this continent for years. The continent was mentioned in many religions and folklores, that it became a possibility that it truly does exist. But if it does, where is it and has it been found by scientists yet, or have they think they have found the Lost City or Continent of Atlantis?
The great philosopher, Plato, wrote in his Critias, that he believed that a great continent was extremely technologically advanced, and that this continent had been destroyed and lost by a rush of ocean covering the evidence to us to this day. Plato had believed that Atlantis was located in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere. In fact, the reason why the Atlantic Ocean is called such today, is because of the Atlantean theory. Plato believed that Atlantis was a sunken continent approximately the size of Libya and Asia put
together. That would be about 5 to 10 million square kilometers hidden below a large oceanic surface!
Monoliths, similar to the monoliths in Easter Island, supposedly are a "signature" of the Atlantean culture. Some believe this culture survived on to Islands and lands such as Easter Island and other various areas still leaving scientists and archeologists befuddled. Pyramids, such like those found in Egypt and other ancient sites, are also a supposed "signature" of the Atlanteans.
Plato believed that Atlantis had a great army, probably of around 1.2 million armed men. He also believed that the army had a vast number of chariots. Horses were definitely used. This was the theory that had caused many to believe that the horse that evolved from Asia became domesticated in Atlantis. This remains a striking detail, because scientists and archeologists cannot determine precisely when the domestication of the horse occurred.
Elephants are supposedly also a very big part of the Atlantean culture. Plato even writes himself:
"There were a great number of elephants in the island, for there was ample provision of food for all sorts of animals...including for the animal which is the largest and the most voracious of all."
The strange part about the elephants, is that the epoch in when the continent of Atlantis was supposedly alive and flourishing, mastodons and mammoths were abundant, and the elephant did not come about until approximately the supposed time when the continent of Atlantis was believed to have "fallen" into the ocean, the same time when mastodons and mammoths became extinct.
It must be remembered, that Plato had written Critias in 360 BCE. This was where it all started, with Plato's words:
"Let me begin by observing first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Hercules and all who dwelt within them; this war I am going to describe. Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean. The progress of the history will unfold the various nations of barbarians and families of Hellenes which then existed, as they successively appear on the scene; but I must describe first of all Athenians of that day, and their enemies who fought with them, and then the respective powers and governments of the two kingdoms. Let us give the precedence to Athens."
Where did Plato's revelation of the continent of Atlantis come from? Plato's revelation was told to him by a man named Solon, who in turn received the information about Atlantis from the ancient Egyptians. If it's just a story, it is one heck of an intriguing one! A thrilling reality to this wonderful piece of writing, is that the end of the transcript has been lost. What was at the end of the transcript...we will never know. He talked of Gods and spirits that made the islanders what they were. An ancient influence that could have come from anywhere. Could it have come from the stars? And is it just plain mythology, or is there a glimpse of truth in the evidence?
What is interesting, is that what Plato described is also described in the Bible as the "Great Flood". Could the continent of Atlantis be the true "Garden of Eden?"
Some scientists believe that the sinking of Atlantis was caused by a great "Ice Age." Pillars are abundant on the oceanic floors, but are these pillars naturally made or manmade?

The "Sleeping Prophet", also known as Edgar Cayce, had believed he was an Atlantean himself. He was a prophet that believed that spirits spoke to him in his dreams. The dreams revealed revelations of great extent for his own life and many others. His prophetic visions attracted many people, which in turn made many seek out his help in life through his "seeing eye." Cayce believed that he was being told his clairvoyances from Atlantean gods and spirits.

One prophecy that Edgar Cayce had made, did not come to pass, this was regarding the lost continent of Atlantis. Cayce prophesized that the lost island of Atlantis would emerge from the ocean in 1968 or 1969. Cayce also suggested that the island was located near the Bermuda island of Bimini.

The lost continent to this day, has many possibilities of where it could "be," however, no scientific evidence that is strong enough to prove Atlantis had existed has been yet found. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist!
by Shawna Ranae Bandow (bandowshawna@qwest.net)
(Weird Research) http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/Cheetah/index.html

The Location of Atlantis

The story of this lost city has been around since 355 B.C. Plato wrote about this lost land in two dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. Plato believed that this land was near the Straits of Gibraltar until its destruction 10,000 years prior.

Atlantis was explained to be in the shape of a bullseye. Alternating rings of land seperated by the Atlantic. Plato used his dialogues (Timaeus and Critias) to express his thoughts.

In these dialogues a powerful empire was said to be located to the west of the Straits of Gibraltar (or what was then noted as the Pillars of Hercules). This Empire was founded by the God of the Sea, Poseidon. Poseidon had 5 children on this island. Atlas, the first born, had the continent and the surrounding ocean named after him. The land was then divided into ten sections to be ruled by each of his sons, and their heirs.

The capital of Atlantis was the best of engineering and architecture. This city was made up of walls and canals. In the very center was a hill, and on top of this hill was a temple to the God of the Sea.Inside of the temple was a gold statue of Poseidon driving six winged horses.

If you dare to assume that Atlantis exists then the only place that it could be found (my opinion, may differ from other researchers) is near the Azores Island which is just west of the Straight of Gibraltar. However a survey has been conducted in this area showing a blanket of sediment that would have taken millions of years to accumulate. Even though there is no scientific sign of the sunken continent....it's there.

Ocassionally someone will try to convince someone interested in Atlantis that it is near New Zealand or Switzerland?.If you find yourself in a situation where a person presents this idea..briskly walk in the opposite direction.

If you've done your research on Atlantis you should know the name K.T. Frost. Frost was the first to present the idea that Atlantis may be to the east rather than the west of Straits of Gibraltar. Frost also believed that the destruction of Atlantis came only 900 years before the birth of Plato.

So...where...is...Atlantis? If your not confused yet you should be. Ready for the 360 degree turn into a brick wall? Everyone knows the Island of Crete. If you don't...it's a modern part of Greece that lies just a bit south of Athens. If you don't know where Athens is...well...your a lost cause.

If we take a trip back in time to about 1500 B.C. you would see the Island of Crete as the seat of the Minoan Empire. I know...I know, I lost you again. During this time period the Minoans were all over the eastern Mediterranean. Minoan Crete was the most sophisticated cultures of this period. Then without warning the Minoans disappeared...like dinosaurs after (insert your preferred theory here).

Ten miles north of Crete is Santorina. Many scientists, including myself, believe that a disaster occured here capable of destroyiing the Minoans. Twenty-five hundred years prior to this Santorina was just an island with a volcano, which erupted around 1500 B.C. The eruption was four times as powerful as Krakatoa. Imagine a 400 feet high tsunami, and now picture it landing in your backyard. Hey....wheres your house? Ash would have blackened the sky for 12 days.

That tsunami hit Crete and destroyed everything including the Minoans. No castastrophe matches Plato's account of Atlantis than the one I just gave you. Do you accept this theory? Do you have one that puts this one to shame? Do you have more questions?

Frank Miller
The only theorist with the guts to give you this - frank@theshadowlands.net

(I try my best to respond to all questions within a timely fashion. However
please use the easy index codes to help sort my e-mail. In your subject line
include your reference:

(C) = Comment - I read each one, but do to the volumes I can not respond to each one.
(Q) = Questions - I respond to each one within days.
(H) = Hate mail - Auto deleted (but...thanks)
(T) = Theory - Quick response, and the most appreciated.

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The Shadowlands: Atlantis: The Lost Continent

Link Source:
http://theshadowlands.net/atlantis/
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Message from Leonard Peltier - Anniversary of Incarceration - NativeNewsNetwork

2012-02-07T17:25:00.000-08:00

Message from Leonard Peltier - Anniversary of Incarceration - NativeNewsNetwork

Leonard Peltier in Native Challenges. Discussion »

COLEMAN FEDERAL PENTITENARY - Greetings to my relations, my friends, and to my many supporters the world over.

Leonard Peltier

It is that time again. Another year has passed, and on February 6th I will be marking 36 years since my arrest. During all this time, my family and allies have discovered just how far the government will go to wrongfully convict and imprison someone they know is innocent. They do this as a message - first to Indians, and further to anyone who might stand up to injustice - as if to say, "We will do as we please".

From the day of my arrest until now, through you my supporters, I have been honored with many activist and humanitarian awards. I thank you for keeping awareness of me and my case alive. Your commitment has really been a special experience for me.

In addition many celebrities, political figures, and organizations have called for my release, including 55 members of Congress. This last November, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) passed a permanent resolution calling for my release. Well let's hope its not that permanent. The NCAI has committed to being directly involved with my case so that the message from Washington to Indian people does not remain, "We will do as we please".

Still, despite all this attention and with all the leaders and people of conscience calling for my release, I have been kept in this iron cage. They have even kept me longer than their own laws say they can. With evidence corroborating that I did not receive a fair trial, with proof of government misconduct, with admissions by government officials that they do not know who killed those two agents that day at the Jumping Bull property, here I sit. "We will do as we please."

Recently, as many of you know, an act was passed and signed into law that allows for indefinite detention of American citizens without charge or trial. This is perhaps the final straw, the final nail in the coffin of American freedom, the end of habeas corpus and due process. "We will do as we please."

We Indians said it for generations: If they can kill us indiscriminately, they will do it to anyone. If they can take our land, they will do it to anyone. If they can kidnap our children and take them to prison schools, they will do it to anyone. If they can starve us and lie to us, they will do it to anyone. If they can wrongfully imprison us, they will do it to anyone. Now, sadly, this is another Indian prophecy fulfilled. "We will do as we please."

Our ancestors and tribal people all over the world prophesized a time of upheaval and great change. I believe that time is fast approaching. I believe a part of this is the government's ongoing overreach of its authority - until the people rise up and tell Washington, "You will NOT do as you please! We are NOT your slaves! We will NOT be subjugated! We will NOT be ruled by an iron fist! We will NOT allow you to steal our liberty or our justice!"

My friends, my relatives, my supporters - Be a part of this latest, perhaps the last "Indian uprising". Make your voice heard! Be a part of the brave Movement to come, the Movement that will change the course of human history. Make change and hope and peace and justice a part of your personal legacy. Be the change that you envision and know in your heart must take place.

Do this, and on the day you take your last breath and prepare to meet Creator, you will know your life on this Earth was well spent. Close your eyes knowing you used your breath and energy to Creator's good purpose. Smile as you cross over knowing you changed the world so that the next seven generations can know a good life. Do these things and know that I am with you. I will embrace you as my relations - in this life or the next.

Mitakuye Oyasin.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
Leonard Peltier
posted February 7, 2012 6:00 am est

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Edward_S._Curtis_Geronimo_Apache_cp01002v.jpg (JPEG Image, 597 × 872 pixels)

2012-02-05T13:27:00.000-08:00

Edward_S._Curtis_Geronimo_Apache_cp01002v.jpg (JPEG Image, 597 × 872 pixels)

Geronimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geronimo ~For what it is worth ~Peta

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lmnop.: The Revolution will be Strategized via @lmnopieevolution

2012-02-04T16:30:00.000-08:00

lmnop.: The Revolution will be Strategized bit.ly/zKOXKR via @lmnopieevolution will be Strategized

Saturday, February 4, 2012

The Revolution will be Strategized

Everyone these days around the Occupy Movement seems to be talking about diversity of tactics. Activists have heated debates late into the night about violent vs non-violent tactics, about a black bloc versus Kingian approach to Revolution. The thing that is not being discussed enough is what our goals are. This lack of real strategy makes the talk of diversity of tactics irrelevant if we don't have clarity yet on a clear set of goals.

The State, who we all can agree is no longer run by the people but rather by the "Ruling Elite", has a clear set of goals. If the Ruling Elite knows anything, they how to strategize. How else does one conclude that they've been so successful in taking over every aspect of society running it like a giant machine that benefits the Ruling Elites at the expense of the rest of us. It is because they know how to run a machine, they know what their end game is. Profit by any means necessary. Crush dissent. Imprison those that attempt to obstruct their goals to perpetuate their strangle hold and monopoly on perceived power in this country and across the globe.

If OWS thinks that the Ruling Elite will give up that strangle hold without one hell of a fight, on every level, by any means necessary, we are in denial. They will fight us with every tool they have. If this is to be the revolution that many of us feel the time has come for, we have to adopt a militaristic mindset to fight them with. When I say "militaristic" I do not mean violence, I mean strategy. This is where the thinking person will see clearly that if we hope to win, we have to utilize a completely different approach to this war with the dominant paradigm. We have to think outside their box using strategic planning.

When discussing tactics to achieve these ends, we must first know what these ends that we want to achieve are. If we get caught up in the discussion of what tactics are the most successful before we know what ends (or beginnings) we are trying to achieve with said tactics, we are putting the cart before the proverbial horse.
Framing this pre-cart discussion in terms of violent vs. non-violent tactics is not exactly productive. What is more called for is for us to begin to frame tactics not in terms of violent & nonviolent but in terms of effectiveness. What is the most effective way to achieve the desired outcome? But first, What is our desired outcome or outcomes?

The Government works for the Ruling Elite.The government is, essentially, one of the arms of the Ruling Elite. Picture the Ruling Elite as a Giant Man whose sustenance depends upon the functionality of all of it's systems working in harmony to keep it alive. The appendages work in both offensive and defensive roles. For example, the Government creates laws that support the freedom of the body as a whole to maintain it's dominant role.

An awareness that the Ruling Elite are meeting in back rooms with senators and congresspeople to strategize how to put down all that threaten their position needs to be gained. They likely begin any strategy session with the desired End Game. So, for example, if their end game is to stop any form of dissent in this country, they could decide the best case scenario would be to lock up all who question their power in indefinite detention. Voila! NDAA. With this act, they have essentially established their End Game. They simply have to define anyone who disagrees with them as terrorists and then they can lock them away without official charges for as long as they see fit.

They can't jump from point A to point Z, however, and have the support of the public. They must establish a narrative to convince the American People that occupiers are actually violent terrorists threatening public safety and not what we actually are, concerned citizens who have many serious grievances against the corporate oligarchy. To do so successfully, without creating martyrs and stirring up the rest of the populace to rise up against them in solidarity, they must frame us as the thing the American People fear the most: Terrorists. They must use this fear to their advantage, to win this war against dissent and therefore maintain and perpetuate their current status as rulers of the world. This is a intricate narrative they are creating which requires a skillful and coordinated effort to achieve.

How do they write this narrative?

They use the corporate controlled media, who is essentially another arm of the body of the Giant Man who is the Ruling Elite. This man is no ordinary man, however, but a monstrosity with many arms and legs.

The corporate media, or the media industrial complex is an affective offensive arm which waves around like a conductor leading an orchestra. The media industrial complex conducts the hearts and minds of the American People much as a symphony might be conducted in the Metropolitan Opera House.

They are experts at molding and forming public opinion. They are the conductor that accelerates the cadences that bring us to the end of the march. They can take underlying fears and stoke those embers into a wildfire of fear. This propaganda arm works in concert with the rest of the mutant man to sustain itself at the cost of truth and the freedom of the press. (we must have a better propaganda arm than they do. We must use their tactics like an akido master that uses the force of their opponent to topple itself).

How do they manipulate us to participate in this narrative? That's where the next significant arm of the Mutant Man comes in. The Police Departments in cities across our great nation are just one of the military arms of the man. It's job is to distract and enrage us by continually poking at us until we give in finally to the violent impulse which is part of the human psyche to not only defend ourselves and others against attack but to strike back violently. The Federal Government with the help of the FBI, coordinated the national crackdown on occupations across the country. This coordinated effort was designed to censor dissent and prevent citizens from exercising their freedom to peaceably assemble. Another objective, one that is not being discussed enough, is to enrage and distract the occupy movement into channeling our energy into a major push back towards the police at the expense of working towards achieving ultimate goals which will strike directly to the heart of the system and bypass their pawns.

The Police brutality that has been well documented in the independent media while being suppressed in the media industrial complex, tells the narrative well. Cops wantonly beat, abuse, pepper spray, shoot, humiliate and torture innocent and peaceful activists every chance they get. (case in point: Oakland Activists tortured)

This added to the decades of police brutality being perpetrated on people of color and poor people everywhere, creates intense hatred and enormous righteous anger within the communities most effected by this brutality. Many middle class activists are confronting this for the first time in their lives. Many people's eyes are being opened to what has been a matter of course for millions of Americans for as long as they can remember. Welcome to our world, those of us already living there say to the rest who have recently arrived. Welcome to our reality.

I submit to you, dear reader, that this brutality is done for a multiplicity of reasons. The one reason I would like to draw our attention to presently for this discussion, is the intent to infuriate us to the point of retaliation. The cleverness of this intentional egging on of a violent reaction is diabolical at the very least.

I see it as diabolical because they are using human nature to work against ourselves. Hear me out.
They have charted a course for us to run. They have set up the narrative for us to fall into. Because they assume we will react with violence and they wish for us to react with violence so that we can fall into the narrative they are already generating for us. They are literally banking on us being their puppets.

The narrative that they are creating for us, the roles in the screenplay they are writing, use a casting call where the most violent and undisciplined of us, get cast into the roles of the "violent activist/terrorist" by acting out this righteous rage by destroying property and throwing broken bottles and rocks at police. It is one of the symptoms of a diseased system that people value property higher than human life. The Ruling Elite knows this. They themselves value property over humans. They also dangle the promise known as the American Dream over the mainstream public's heads. "You too one day could join the Ruling Elite. You too could one day be fabulously wealthy" When these actors who have unbeknownst to themselves, been cast into these roles to support the Ruling Elite's narrative, that the media industrial complex duly spits out for the American People to digest, decide to vent their righteous anger by smashing the windows at local businesses, they are cooperating with the system to bring about the eventual end game which the Ruling Elite have waiting for us, a little ways down the road.

This fight with the police ties up much of our energy battling with a symptom rather than the cause.It keeps us far away from the actual disease we wish to eradicate.

We've seen internal conflicts of this nature led by disruptors with dubious intentions who tie up incalculable amounts of energy in resolving during our meetings. We do not know who the provocateurs are but it is clear to many of us what their intentions are: To clog up and disrupt our meetings so we can't get anything accomplished. They too are a drain on our collective energy at the expense of our larger goals. They too get us caught up with battling the symptoms rather than the causes. When considering that we all have been conditioned by the system to think within classist, racist, sexist, and other ism frameworks, it is not surprising that before we get any real work done we have to confront this elephant in the room and get to the root of the problem and eradicate our own disease which we have been infected with by the very system we are rejecting.

But I digress.

I was talking about the one of the military arms of the Ruling Elite otherwise known as the Police Department in your City. One of their main purposes is ensuring our participation in establishing their story line that is then fed to the media arm to disseminate to the waiting hearts and minds of the public in order to justify to our fellow citizens our eventual indefinite detention in work camps across the country and therefore destroying our chances of actually achieving this new beginning we all are committed to creating.

By Participating in their narrative, we are cooperating with our own eventual downfall. It will end badly if we allow ourselves to be sucked into increasingly violent confrontations with the police. It will end with activists, including activists who are committed to the underlying principle of non-violence, being imprisoned without recourse for a trial. Those of us who are using marches, rallies and actions as a place to vent our frustration and righteous indignation over the obviously brutally violent crackdown on ows coupled with a history of violence towards people might well better train our anger into more effective means to bring about the complete down fall of the system that is perpetuating this violence in order to maintain it's control over us.

When we fall prey to their continued provocations, we join with them in their goal of crushing our movement before we gain enough momentum to overthrow their control over us.

This concerted and coordinated national campaign to crush our movement depends upon our cooperation with them to allow it to play out to their desired endgame.

Their efforts will increase in intensity until they get the desired outcome. They will increase the use of force and brutality until our resolve to maintain our principle of combating them in this very real war using non-violent tactics is dissolved. They are counting on us to rise up violently. They are placing bets as you read this on how long it will be before the more radical and reactionary comrades among us give in to this human reflex of fight or flight. They also manipulate us using the macho tactics of a schoolyard bully, taunting us with accusations that we are weak if we do not retaliate in kind.

Will we cooperate with the state by reacting violently? Or will we examine more effective tactics that will truly bring about the change we all desire.

Comrades. We cannot retaliate in kind without arming ourselves with an equal arsenal of weaponry that they have at their disposal. To do so is beyond the scope of what we can amass even if we spent our entire general fund on AK47's. We cannot win a violent war against the system that invented war. To even entertain the notion is folly. Not to mention goes against everything we stand for as a movement. Do we want a bloody war? Do we want to kill and be killed? Be realistic and do not hide behind words what the actuality of war is. We in this country are privileged to not have known war intimately. Those who shout for it, least of all, no doubt because those who have experienced war first hand would never advocate for it. Don't be fooled that we can be "just a little bit" violent and win against the military industrial complex. Throwing bottles and breaking glass may be hella therapeutic for us, but it aint going to make the other side back down. No, it will only help to increase their retaliation resulting in actual casualties. Are you prepared to die? More importantly, are you prepared to kill? (i am not talking about a mother protecting her kids from thugs. some of us would kill in self defense or in defense of another's life. this is not the conversation. that is meta. I am talking about the BIG PICTURE)

One might also caution activists from being unduly influenced towards such meditations by people they do not know well. These people, presenting themselves as radicals who constantly advocate for increasing the use violent tactics, may be infiltrators. They also might simply be misguided and short sighted. Question who these people are and what their motives might be. Question what they themselves seek to gain by the use of such violence. Is it to gain notoriety? Is it to appear more revolutionary than others. Is it to impress potential lovers? Is it to simply dominate the message to the world with their anger? Do they not have a good understanding of the whole picture? Might you be able to help them to see the folly of their suggestions instead of allowing them to play on your own feelings of injustice and built up rage against the machine. Question what end result such tactics produce. Look at the larger picture. Utilize other means of expression to vent built up anger at the violent crackdown on occupy and the history of state sanctioned violence. Do not vent anger by smashing windows, throwing bottles and screaming obscenities at the police. Vent it by other means.

(for the record, I do not adhere to the view that to be non-violent in actions precludes the use of devices such as shields or protective gear. by all means, we are soldiers waging war, even if it is waging peace, and we must protect ourselves as best we can. I do not adhere to the viewpoint that destruction of property is not warranted. Even the discussion of what destruction of property means can get tricky. Street art and graffiti, for example, may be considered by the mainstream as vandalism. I, obviously, do not agree. The main point is that if people are going to participate in ows actions, that they do not destroy property when to do so will unduly endanger fellow activists who did not consense on joining in this activity but whose mere proximity may result in their arrest or beating.)

I will state here, as well, that those of us who believe that by marching peacefully, waving banners and carrying placards will bring down the ruling elite, are also not seeing the full picture nor embracing the true scope of how a successful non-violent war is won. When we speak of diversity of tactics, marching is but one avenue. For it to have any kind of cumulative and lasting affect, we must also utilize other tactics in concert such as boycotting, general strikes, creating alternative economies, skill sharing, building community and turning our backs on the Ruling Elite in every way possible. If people tell you that a strong commitment to non-violence is weak ask them to define power. True power is not gained by coercion but rather by consent.

I propose, that in order for OWS to succeed in this revolution, that is, a shift in values and power in this country and the world, a 180 degree revolution away from it's current paradigm, we must emulate the Ruling Elite's intensive strategizing. We must strategize ways to occupy their narrative with our narrative and so turn the tide of public opinion to our favor. This battle is to win the hearts and minds of the 99%. This battle is a fight to present our narrative as superseding their narrative. This fight requires us to be smarter to be more creative than they are. This fight requires all of us to unite against this giant mutant man beast that is the Ruling Elite.

To do so effectively, we must study their tactics. We must make each other aware of their diversity of tactics. We need to share information freely across occupations to become unified in our narrative.

A really strong narrative will require all of our resources combined. We must first arrive at a common goal. Knowing the movement from the inside, I am aware that there are many goals. If we can narrow them down to ten goals we can all agree on, we can then establish our End Game. What does our end game look like? Is it truly a beginning game? What if, instead of succumbing to their End Game we imagine our Beginning Game and put all of our efforts into achieving that instead of fighting their battles? What if we refuse to fight on their terms. The home team has an advantage, they know the turf. If we draw them into our turf, they will be lost. If we allow them to draw us onto their turf, we are lost.

What would such a list of goals look like? Is it framed in a negative or positive context? What is our Beginning Game? What do we want the world to look like for the Seventh Generation to follow us?

1. Ensure the Inalienable Freedoms that are the birthright of every human on the planet are maintained and allowed to exist.
2. Building and inhabiting infrastructures that support a New Paradigm based on equality
3. Ensure the rights of humans to live freely on the land in sustainable ways
4. End the Oppression of people by Corporations by refusing to participate or buy in with our labor, finances, social capital and material goods
5. Honor Native People's rights to sovereignty
6. Create an autonomous and sovereign nation where all people are treated equally and where all the resources are distributed equally (aka everybody move to Vermont)
7.Establish that no person shall be able to exploit another person's labor for their own gain
8. Establish that environmental stewardship is prioritized above profit
9. Establish that people's safety and liberty to pursuit happiness is a priority over profit
10. Establish restorative justice practices

I am sure that there are many of you reading this that may write 10 entirely different goals. This one is just off the top of my head, presented as one possible list of achievable goals. Please, add yours to the mix. Hopefully we can arrive at some common ground and then move forward as a unified voice.

What I want to do is shift the conversation from diversity of tactics to achievable goals. The civil rights movement could never have achieved what they did without boycotts, civil disobedience direct actions and marches. Their narrative was clear. Currently it seems our marches and actions are all over the place, poorly strategized and conceived of without utilizing the brains of all of us who bring to the table many skill sets and types of resources. It seems, from my perspective, that the majority, not all, but the majority of the actions we have been engaging in are not clearly planned out with everyone's participation. So, the end result are actions which have us running all over the city, with no clear narrative and no clear message and no obtainable goals. Please correct me with examples if you feel I am wrong here. But I invite you to not allow your own ego cloud your vision. We must be warriors. We must be impeccable. We must be humble. We must learn how to actively listen to each other.

Our narrative must be clear in order to win over the hearts and minds of the 99%

So, how will we tell our story? Where do we want to be a little further down the road. Do we want to be in internment camps working for the Ruling Elite or do we want to be living in this other world we all know is possible.

What does another world look like to you?

Posted by lmnop at 11:02 AM
The Revolution will be Strategized bit.ly/zKOXKR via @lmnopie
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Fleur-de-lis Designs - Insights Plaques: Desiderata

2012-02-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

Fleur-de-lis Designs - Insights Plaques: Desiderata

-- written by Max Ehrmann in the 1920s --
Not "Found in Old St. Paul's Church"! -- see below

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Insights...
Grasping the inner nature of things intuitively.

Would you like to have a 9" x 12" wood plaque with the text of
"Desiderata" to hang on your wall or to give as a gift?

Note: Orders placed by Dec. 18th are expected to ship in time for delivery
before Christmas to destinations in the continental U.S.

The Confused History of "Desiderata"

In the Public Domain or Copyrighted?

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How the government manufactures low unemployment numbers — RT

2012-02-03T13:55:00.000-08:00

bit.ly/y7HjDR ~VIA @RT_America

REUTERS / Jason Reed)

TAGS: USA, Employment, Economy
Published: 03 February, 2012, 21:27

Figures released Friday by the US Labor Department declare that the unemployment rate has dropped to 8.3 percent. While economists applaud the latest news, the reality is improvement comes only after 3 million jobless Americans are unaccounted for.

While job creation exceeded expectations for January, those experiencing long-term unemployment — those jobless for longer than six months, that is — remains at a record high.

In a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts, it’s revealed that those suffering the longest from the unemployment epidemic exceed any monthly statistic dating back to the Second World War. The Labor Department figures that 5.5 million would-be workers have been without employment for 27 weeks or longer, accounting for around 42.9 percent of the total tally of unemployed Americans.

The consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies based out of Washington estimates that as many as 3 million additional unemployed workers have been without jobs for just as long but are not taken into consideration by the US government. For those unfortunate many, the Department of Labor simply stops including them in statistics once they are determined to have simply “given up” on the job hunt. They add in their study, however, that even if bettering economic conditions prompt those considered to have given up to reevaluate the job hunt, the government’s “official” unemployment rate may once again surge to unfavorable numbers as the country’s still staggering economy would not be able to create work for them.

Additionally, the government has identified around 2.8 million Americans “marginally attached” to the job market in January. Per their own definition, that accounts for those who want to work and have looked for working during the last year but have not concentrated their efforts on the job hunt during the last month. They are also not accounted for in the Labor Department’s unemployment figure.

Speaking on Thursday before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Budget, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke addressed the issue. He admitted that the US economy “has been gradually recovering from the recent deep recession,” but called long-term unemployment figures still “particularly troubling.”

“More than 40 percent of the unemployed have been jobless for more than six months, roughly double the fraction during the economic expansion of the previous decade,” explained Bernanke. “We still have a long way to go before the labor market can be said to be operating normally.”

Gus Faucher, a senior economist at PNC Financial Services, adds to the Washington Post, “We’ve dug a big hole, and though we’ve been filling it in, we’ve still got a lot more to go.”

How the government manufactures low unemployment numbers — RT
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Bolivarian Revolution Celebrates 13 Years of Achievements (English & Spanish) | World News |Axisoflogic.com

2012-02-03T12:35:00.000-08:00

Bolivarian Revolution Celebrates 13 Years of Achievements (English & Spanish) | World News |Axisoflogic.com

By YVKE Mundial

Prensa-Embajada venezolana en EE UU

Friday, Feb 3, 2012

Thirteen years ago yesterday, Hugo Chávez was sworn in as President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. With a socialist-oriented program for the country, the president continues to maintain popular support with an approval rating of over 60 percent, according to recent polls.

On December 6, 1998, Venezuela experienced one of the most transcendental changes in its contemporary history, when Hugo Chávez was elected with 56.24 percent of the popular vote.

On February 2nd, 1999, President Chávez assumed office and addressed the Venezuelan people for the first time in his inaugural speech in Caracas.

“Today, February second, 1999, the time for the people of Venezuela has arrived! … The resurrection of Simón Bolívar’s land has arrived… Let’s celebrate the birth of the free Venezuela, the Bolivarian Venezuela that we have always dreamed of,” Chávez declared.

In a national referendum in 1999, the Venezuelan people approved a new constitution for the republic. Another presidential election was held shortly after, on July 30, 2000, and Chávez’s political project became a reality as he was reelected with 59.5 percent of the popular vote. Subsequently, on December 3, 2006, the Venezuelan president was again reelected with over 60 percent of the vote, confirming to the world his position as one of the most paradigmatic characters of late 20th century and early 21st century.

When the Venezuelan president was sworn in at the National Assembly he said: “I swear before God, I swear before the homeland, I swear before my people that under this moribund constitution I will boost the needed democratic transformations so the new Republic can have a great charter suitable for the new times. I swear it.” The revolution, with Chávez at the helm, has given participation and power for the people, deepening social change and benefits for all.

Although he has faced attacks by right-wing sectors in Venezuela and internationally, including a 2002 coup d’état and a persistent media campaign to discredit his government, President Chávez has remained victorious through several electoral processes.

Since 1998, Venezuelan citizens have gone to the polls 16 times to vote in local, regional and national elections, all of which have been verified as free and fair by international observers and accompaniers from institutions including the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Carter Center.

Click here to read about some of the achievements of the government of President Hugo Chávez.

YVKE Mundial / Press Office – Venezuelan Embassy to the U.S. / February 3, 2012

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13 años de logros de la Revolución Bolivariana

El presidente de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, cumplió ayer, 2 de febrero, 13 años al frente de la primera magistratura. Con un programa de país orientado hacia el socialismo, el Presidente continúa manteniendo una aprobación popular por encima de 60%, según revelan recientes encuestas.

El 6 de diciembre de 1998, Venezuela vivió uno de los cambios más trascendentales en su historia contemporánea, cuando Hugo Chávez, con 56, 24% de los votos del pueblo, alcanzó la presidencia de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela.

Fue el 2 de febrero de 1999, cuando el presidente Chávez tomó posesión del poder y realizó su primer discurso ante el pueblo de Venezuela en Caracas: “Hoy, 2 de febrero de 1999 ¡llegó la hora del pueblo de Venezuela! Hoy, 2 de febrero de 1999, llegó la hora de la resurrección de la patria de Simón Bolívar (…) Celebramos el nacimiento de la Venezuela libre, de la Venezuela bolivariana que siempre hemos soñado”, dijo el recién electo Presidente.

En 1999 el pueblo aprueba en Referéndum Popular una nueva Constitución para la República. Con las elecciones del 30 de julio de 2000, Hugo Chávez Frías cristalizó el proyecto político constituyente y se relegitimó como presidente de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela con 59,5% de los votos del pueblo venezolano. Posteriormente, el 3 de diciembre de 2006, el primer mandatario nacional es reelecto en su cargo con más de 60% de los votos, confirmando ante el mundo su posición como uno de los personajes más paradigmáticos de fines del siglo XX y principios del siglo XXI.

El día en que el presidente electo tomó juramento en la Asamblea Nacional dijo: “Juro delante de Dios, juro delante de la patria, juro delante de mi pueblo que sobre esta moribunda Constitución impulsaré las transformaciones democráticas necesarias para que la República nueva tenga una Constitución adecuada a los nuevos tiempos. Lo juro”. La revolución, con Chávez al frente, ha dado participación y poder al pueblo, profundizando en cambios sociales en beneficios para el colectivo.

Aunque su mandato ha enfrentado ataques de la derecha venezolana e internacional, que van desde un golpe de Estado en 2002 hasta una férrea y persistente campaña mediática de descrédito nacional e internacional, el presidente Chávez ha salido victorioso en diversos procesos electorales, entre referendos, elecciones regionales y generales.

Desde 1998, en Venezuela se han realizado 16 procesos electorales a nivel nacional, regional y local, todos verificados por observadores y acompañantes internacionales, incluyendo de la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA) y el Centro Carter.

Lea aquí algunos de los logros alcanzados durante el gobierno del presidente Chávez

YVKE Mundial/ Prensa-Embajada venezolana en EE UU/ 3 de febrero de 2012

Source: Received at Axis of Logic via Email

Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
1099 30th Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20007
(202) 342-2214

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_64296.shtml
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Come Together with Neptune in Pisces by Stacey Nicholas:

2012-02-02T15:39:00.000-08:00

http://bit.ly/wqQ6VN
Neptune in Pisces supports compassion and connectivity far and wide

by Stacey Nicholas ~VIA @dailyscopes

Dreamy Neptune finally returns to its home sign of Pisces, on Friday, February 3, 2012, after traveling through the rest of the zodiac for the past 149 years. This will be all-new energy for each and every one of us because Neptune and Pisces haven't synced up since back in 1862 (except for a brief retrograde stint in April) -- and this Neptune in Pisces energy couldn't be coming at a better time.

Throughout the world, we humans so often define ourselves by our differences -- in religion, sexuality, gender roles, politics, language, income, values; the list goes on and on. And it's these differences of belief that are spawning horrible hate crimes, wars and tragedy worldwide.

But breathe deeply -- change is breezing in. Neptune in Pisces represents the exact opposite of what we see playing out in the world right now. It's about unity; it's about oneness, as Neptune compels our ideals and wishes, and Pisces supports compassion, spirituality and togetherness. But it's really about acting with compassion now, not just musing about it.

We got a brief glimpse of this calm and caring energy when Neptune was retrograde in Pisces for four months between April and August of 2011, and now this refreshing influence is back for 13 solid years.
Neptune in Pisces is a time to cross those long-existing boundaries between individuals, nations and ideals and meld into one inclusive force. It's about recognizing how similar we are as humans, rather than fixating on our minor differences.

Neptune and Pisces each bring spirituality to the forefront -- that inner feeling of connectedness that reminds us of all that is greater than us in this world. For the past 14 years, Neptune has been trekking through the tech-savvy, worldly sign of Aquarius, breaking down our sense of structured community and connecting people through advancements like email, mobile devices, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. So now, as Neptune sashays into spiritual and connected Pisces, we're ready. The physical walls have been removed so we can now flow freely amongst the rest of the humanity and connect on a far deeper level.
This is time to reach out to the people and environment that surround us. It's time for us to build a unified foundation so that the future can be filled with more peace and hope than we've felt in a very long time.

http://www.dailyhoroscope.com/horoscope-headlines/neptune-in-pisces
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Essential Elements of Successful Housing First & Rapid Re-Housing Programs – Part 1 & 2:

2012-02-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

http://bit.ly/wG0j8B

Essential Elements of Successful Housing First & Rapid Re-Housing Programs – Part 1: bit.ly/wab3dY VIA @naehomelessness on Twitter

Essential Elements Of Successful Housing First & Rapid Re-Housing Programs – Part 2: bit.ly/wubCwv VIA @naehomelessness

Posted Online by NAEH: January 10th of 2012

written by naehblog

This is the first of a two-part series guest written by Iain De Jong.

What makes a housing program good? What is the difference between good housing programs and great housing programs? Which types of housing approaches work best for which populations? Throughout my career I have been investigating these questions, putting them in practice and sharing with others what I have learned – and can prove. I am an evidence-informed practitioner with a penchant for being a skeptical empiricist and I do not embrace hunches and anecdotes. I have come to understand that there are 10 essential elements for a successful rapid re-housing or Housing First program

I love seeing the profound change in people when they make the transition from being homeless to having sustainable housing and life stability. For the past couple of years I have been working with communities around the world to help them establish, evaluate, and tweak their housing programs to achieve better long-term success, use their resources effectively, and never lose sight of their mission (which is to end homelessness, in case you are wondering). Prior to that I spent five years starting and growing a highly successful and very large housing program – and we evaluated and researched what we were doing, learning why certain practices seemed to work and others did not. (I should also point out that I am a nerd to the nth degree and hold a faculty position in the Graduate Planning Programme at York University.) Without further adieu, here are the first 5 of the 10 essential elements for a successful rapid re-housing or Housing First program.

1. Know the population you aim to serve

Housing programs should never attempt to be all things to all people. From explaining your program’s intent to prospective clients, to hiring the best people to provide housing access and support services, it is necessary for you to know who you are intending to serve and why. It is important to make the right program available to the right person at the right time if you want to see your homeless service system optimized (which you can read more about here). Some advice:

* Do NOT have a first come, first served approach to housing services.

* Have a centralized intake process or standardized process across your community (great examples can be found in Columbus and Dayton, Ohio).

* Measure acuity of presenting issues (the Vulnerability Assessment Tool, Vulnerability Index and Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool are all good options) and facilitate access to the right housing program to meet their needs.

* Remember that homelessness for most people is a once-in-a-lifetime event for a very short period of time. Most of those folks will end their own homelessness and aren’t going to need intensive services from your organization. Do not do anything that will prolong their homelessness (for example, employment programs that require people to be homeless in order to participate).

* Rapid re-housing is a specific type of housing intervention. It isn’t just about getting people into housing quickly. It is about supporting individuals or families with a few complex issues in accessing housing and providing the supports necessary for them to integrate into the community and, ultimately, no longer need your supports.

* Housing First is also a specific type of housing intervention. While it is housing first, it is not housing only. This type of housing intervention is for persons who have experienced chronic homelessness and have multiple complex issues. Both Intensive Case Management and Assertive Community Treatment approaches have proven to be effective in support delivery, and require fidelity to the intervention to be successful longer term.

2. Have the right service orientation

The key to having the right service orientation is to meet people where they are at – rather than expecting our clients to conform to our programs. To truly be client-centered we need to check, double-check, and even triple check that we aren’t system-centered or client-directed. If you want to make sure you have the right service orientation:

* Allow clients to make choices – from the type of housing they move into, to the type, frequency, duration and intensity of services;
* Provide supports in vivo – in the client’s natural settings and their home rather than expecting them to come to an office or trying to deliver supports through text messages, phone calls, or email;
* Ensure the service plan is individualized as opposed to “cookie cutter”;
* Remember to avoid coercion and judgment;

* De-link the housing support functions from the tenancy (if they lose their housing they don’t lose their supports);

* Appreciate that neither sobriety nor treatment participation nor medication compliance are preconditions for housing success;

* Exercise harm reduction;

* Help people integrate into their community;

* Teach, model, and support people instead of creating unrealistic expectations or being punitive;

* Appreciate your role is to support housing stability, not to “fix” people;

* Remember that your goal is to be professional, not charitable.

3. There are five sequential and essential components

Delivering your housing program in the right order with the right focus of attention is critically important. The order for maximum success is as follows:

1. Focus on Housing Before Anything Else

2. Create an Individualized Service Plan – After the Person has been Housed

3. Increase Self Awareness

4. Support Achievements in Self Management

5. Allow the Client to Reframe/Rebuild One’s Life and Future

4. Structure and staff the housing team properly

Successful housing programs have comparable team structures and roles:

Team Leader – supervise housing case managers and is dedicated to ensuring fidelity to the program, measuring output and outcomes, and coaching for success

Housing Case Managers – can support clients in various phases of housing stability, and use proactive, objective-based discussions with clients to facilitate change and better housing and life stability.

Housing Locator – specializes in working with landlords and gaining access to housing stock. The best ones understand how rental markets and the business of being a landlord works.

5. Work well with landlords & understand their business

If you are working with landlords in the private market, you first need to appreciate that renting housing is a business. Engage with landlords from a business perspective and demonstrate how your approach can help them make more money. If you go into the discussion looking for landlords with big hearts you may find a few, but you likely won’t get as many units long term or be as successful than if you go into it from a business perspective.

Stay tuned for Part Two of the 10 Essential Elements of Successful Housing First and Rapid Re-Housing programs, which looks at items 6-10 in the list.

Iain De Jong is the President & CEO of OrgCode Consulting, Inc. He has been working with many communities to help them improve their housing programs in advance of HEARTH. He is a frequent and popular speaker at Alliance Conferences. You can see him at the Conference in February in Los Angeles. Iain is also the chief blogger, tweeter and FaceBook persona for OrgCode. Take a look at www.orgcode.com or @orgcode or www.facebook.com/orgcode
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This is the second of a two-part series guest written by Iain De Jong. The first part can be found here.

Iain DeJong

This is second half of a two-part blog series on the essential elements of successful Housing First and rapid re-housing programs. In Part One of this two-part blog, I examined the populations to be served, the service orientation, how to work with landlords, the structure of the housing team, and the sequential and essential components of successful housing programs. I conclude with a look at data, home visits, professionalizing the work, support phases, and the things you can anticipate going wrong in the delivery of your housing program.

Without further adieu, essential elements 6 through 10:

6. Use data to drive program improvements

Yes “data” is a four letter word, but that doesn’t make it obscene. It is necessary for performance measurement, which is key to ending homelessness. To make data effective:

* Collect only the information necessary to make informed suggestions on how best to meet the client’s housing needs at the initial intake and assessment. You don’t need every detail about the person’s life. Other salient details will be collected during the delivery of support services.

* Ask yourself “so what?” This requires looking at your data to see what measurable difference your program is really making. Focus on quality of service, not quantity of people served.

* Ask everyone involved in delivering the housing program what data they feel is necessary to collect and analyze.

* Remember that your HMIS is a tool to help you with data, but it is not your performance management system.

* Use the data you collect in many different places: website, newsletters, staff meetings, client reception, hiring practices, etc. to make it worth the time and effort to collect and to make transparent and defensible program improvements based upon data.

* Set aside time in the day for frontline staff to input their data; don’t reinforce the idea that data collection and entry is something that happens when the “real work” is done.

* Have a meaningful data analysis plan set up in advance.

* Guide the work through a coherent logic model, where everyone within the organization understands inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes.

* Set meaningful goals to gauge progress towards the mission. Targets should not be an aspiration – they should be operationally possible.

* Increase knowledge about the importance of data within your organization. (Click any of these to read more about data and performance measurement 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

7. Use objective-based home visits to facilitate change and improve community integration

The service plan is centered on the individual and customized to their needs. It is their plan, not the support workers.

However, it remains the job of the case manager to help facilitate greater housing and life stability. The key is to have three pre-determined objectives for each interaction with clients that are focused on existing goals within the individualized service plan (aka case plan) and the projected outcomes of the service plan. These are established during a weekly case review where there is a briefing on the progress being achieved with each consumer of your housing program. These pre-determined objectives for each home visit will continue to drive the interaction towards positive change.

Emphasis should be placed on objectives that help create opportunities for the clients to engage in meaningful daily activities. This decreases social isolation. It also creates an environment where they can better integrate into the broader community (not just with other economically poor or formerly homeless folks) and experience greater fulfillment emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, socially, recreationally, etc.

8. Plan for success through support phases

Once people exit homelessness into housing – regardless of whether it is a rapid re-housing or Housing First intervention – we must appreciate the progression of the client in working towards greater housing and life stability. For many, from a psychological perspective, they have adapted to their state of homelessness such that it has become “normal” and while having housing is seen as desirable by the individual, the experience of being housed is, in fact, “abnormal” after years of homelessness, institutional living, incarceration, etc.

In the Formative Phase, it is reasonable to expect greater unpredictability from the client, a range of emotions, an eagerness to be successful matched with a range of questions and adaptations to having a place. How the client is supported in this phase sets the expectations for the other phases.

In the Normative Phase, we see greater progression in articulating and achieving goals in the individualized service plan, greater awareness and adaptation to the community at large, increased participation in activities outside of the home, and increased social awareness. Supporting the client in this phase is contingent upon a range of case management skill sets, and a strong focus on brokering and advocating for access to additional resources to meet needs and increase community integration.

In the Integrative Phase, the client is able to demonstrate considerably increased independence. Some clients will always need some degree of support. However, as clients get to this stage, they have demonstrated mastery of a range of skills and activities that are fully within their life domain and do not require support or intervention on the part of the case manager. Supporting the client in this phase is positively reinforcing all that has been achieved; in some instances, even exit planning after community integration has proven to be successful.

9. It is professional work

Success isn’t an accident with housing programs. Professionally-trained staff yields professional results and better outcomes. It is critical that organizations value training, create a training agenda, create time for staff to develop professionally, and employ trainers who share the values of the organization and its vision to end homelessness.

We also need to pay staff who deliver successful housing programs professional wages. How we remunerate people says quite a bit about how much we value their expertise and the outcomes they are able to achieve in working effectively with people.

10. Things will go wrong…it’s how you respond that matters

I have never seen or created a perfect housing program. I have seen some amazing ones and I share promising practices whenever I have the chance. But the truth is there will be some things that just go wrong despite our best efforts. I think it is more important to measure our response to these issues than assume that the absence of them occurring is success. These are some of the most frequent things that go wrong that I think we need to pay close attention to:

* Guests/partying – consider encouraging the client to create their own guest policy and put it within the context of how they see themselves being a responsible tenant.

* Payment of rent on time and in full – whenever possible, encourage the client to have third party payment of rent so that rent isn’t even a consideration in the budgeting process, much like how many people pay their mortgages through automatic withdrawal.

* Maintaining professional boundaries – as part of training and re-training, ensure that staff know the limits of their involvement with clients.

* Pests – have clients keep an eye out for pests – which are common in multi-unit residential living – and teach them how to inform the landlord when pests are detected.
* Pets – help clients understand lease requirements or local laws related to the number of pets permitted and requirements for care.

* Hoarding – home visits allow for early detection when collecting or hoarding is beginning prior to it increasing to an exceptional size.

* Interpersonal conflict – the client has to understand the role of the support worker, and the support worker has to be prepared to help resolve conflicts.

* Damages – home visits are again the key to early detection of damages, and clients can learn to take responsibility for damages.

Those, in a nutshell, are the 10 essential elements of successful housing programs. Based upon years of practice, research and evaluation, attention to these 10 essential elements will improve the long-term outcomes of your Housing First or rapid re-housing program. Obviously there are other considerations in delivering a housing program, but starting with these 10 and doing them as well as possible will most definitely improve your practice.

Iain De Jong is the President & CEO of OrgCode Consulting, Inc. He has been working with many communities to help them improve their housing programs in advance of HEARTH. He is a frequent and popular speaker at Alliance Conferences. You can see him at the Conference in February in Los Angeles. Iain is also the chief blogger, tweeter and FaceBook persona for OrgCode. Take a look at www.orgcode.com or @orgcode or www.facebook.com/orgcode

http://blog.endhomelessness.org/essential-elements-of-successful-housing-first-and-rapid-re-housing-programs/

Note: Anyone interested in help to create a relevant proposal for what I term a Sanctuary for homeless refugees please feel free to contact me via Email at peter.aztlan@gmail.com ~Che Peta
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The Ongoing War on Iran » Counterpunch: by PATRICK COCKBURN

2012-01-31T15:34:00.000-08:00

bit.ly/AuT8Fi ~

JANUARY 31, 2012

“Long embargoes kill more people than brief wars”

The Ongoing War on Iran

by PATRICK COCKBURN

The way in which the growing confrontation with Iran is being sold by the US, Israel and West European leaders is deeply dishonest. The manipulation of the media and public opinion through systematic threat exaggeration is similar to the drum beat of propaganda and disinformation about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction that preceded the invasion in 2003.

The supposed aim of imposing sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and central bank, measures officially joined by the EU, is to force Iran to abandon its nuclear program before it reaches the point where it could theoretically build a nuclear bomb. Even Israel now agrees that Iran has not yet decided to do so, but the Iranian nuclear program is still being presented as a danger to Israel and the rest of the world.

There are two other menacing parallels between the run-up to the Iraq war and what is happening now. The purported issue is the future of the Iranian nuclear program, but, for part of the coalition mustering against Iran, the real purpose is the overthrow of the Iranian government. The origin of the present crisis was the moves last November and December by the neoconservatives in the US, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the Israel lobby in Washington to impose sanctions on Iranian oil exports and Iran’s central bank. These are very much the same people who targeted Iraq in the 1990s. They have been able to force the White House to adopt their program and it is now, in turn, being implemented by a European Union that naively sees sanctions as an alternative to military conflict.

In reality, sanctions are likely to intensify the crisis, impoverish ordinary Iranians and psychologically prepare the ground for war because of the demonization of Iran. The problem is that Israel and its right-wing American allies are more interested in regime change than Tehran’s nuclear program. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz succinctly stated the differences between the Israeli government and Washington. It said that “while the Americans are actively seeking a way to start a dialogue, Israel is preaching confrontation and the toppling of the government in Tehran”.

It is this latter policy that has triumphed. Israel, its congressional allies and the neoconservatives have successfully bamboozled the Obama administration into a set of policies that make sense only if the aim is overthrow of the regime in Tehran. The Iranian government has been given no diplomatic way to climb down without humiliation. Its nuclear program has been turned into a symbol of resistance to foreign diktats. This makes it impossible for anybody in the fractious Iranian leadership to compromise without being denounced as a traitor by political opponents.

Whatever the intentions of Barack Obama when he was elected, the covert offensive initiated by President Bush against Iran has continued. He signed a secret “presidential finding” in 2008 [as Andrew Cockburn reported on the CounterPunch website in a world exclusive on May 2, 20008] under which $400m was allocated to fund Iranian government opponents. The US’s new allies included unsavoury groups such as the Sunni sectarian killers of Jundullah operating in Iranian Baluchistan. The US may have intended to limit the degree of co-operation but, according to Foreign Policy magazine, Mossad agents simply posed as CIA members in dealing with Jundullah. What was the point of these pinprick attacks? A few bombs in Iranian Baluchistan are not going to pose much of a threat to the Iranian leadership in Tehran. The motive was most probably to provoke the Iranians into retaliation against the US which would bring a US-Iranian military conflict closer.

The same may well be true of the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. A little-noticed aspect of these is that the scientists were easy to kill because they were driving themselves around Tehran in their own cars. But any country that has evidence its top scientists are at risk provides them with security. The lack of the simplest security measures argues that these scientists were never at the centre of Iran’s nuclear program. A more likely explanation for the attacks, assuming that Israel was behind them, was to provoke Iran into a retaliation against the US or Israel that would be a casus belli.

It is difficult not to admire the skill with which Netanyahu has maneuvered the White House and European leaders into the very confrontation with Iran they wanted to avoid. He has been helped by the Iranian President’s anti-Semitic outbursts and the apparent fixing of the 2009 presidential election. But Netanyahu’s most effective weapon has been the threat that Israel would unilaterally launch air strikes unless the White House did something. This has always been less likely than it looked. Israel has seldom gone to war without a “green light” from the US.

A more rational explanation of Israeli threats to act alone is that they were wholly designed to scare the White House and its European allies. The Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, made blood-curdling speeches about the imminence of the Iranian threat leaving Israel with no option but to launch a pre-emptive strike (until he quite recently said the opposite). The former head of Mossad gave credibility to unilateral Israeli action by warning that it would be a self-inflicted disaster for his country.

These maneuvers succeeded. Serious sanctions are being imposed. Iran will have difficulty selling its oil. Its status as a regional power in the Middle East is weakening as the long-term survival of Bashar al-Assad, its most important ally, looks dubious.

Here again there is an uncomfortable parallel with Iraq. Sanctions against Iraq from 1990 to 2003 impoverished Iraqis and criminalized much of its administration. Unicef said half a million children died because of sanctions. To the White House and European leaders, sanctions may appear preferable to armed conflict. Unfortunately, history shows that long embargoes kill more people than brief wars.

PATRICK COCKBURN is the author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.

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Opinion: 1-28-12 ~ A terrifying menu 4 Syria’s endgame By Rami G. Khouri:

2012-01-28T15:50:00.000-08:00

http://bit.ly/y0tIBK ~

January 28, 2012 01:15 AM
By Rami G. Khouri
The Daily Star

Now that the Arab League has decided to ask the United Nations Security Council to back its plan to resolve the crisis in Syria, the prospects of international involvement in Syria inches forward just a bit more. This adds a new dimension to the already fertile debate on how the mounting violence and expanding political crisis will end.

In the last few months, I have heard dozens of scenarios for how things might play out in Syria. Some are plausible, others are fantastic, but all are suggested seriously by usually knowledgeable observers and analysts. They go something like this.

The most common scenario I hear is that tensions and violence will continue to the point in the coming year where economic collapse causes some influential figures in regime of President Bashar Assad to carry out a coup, after despairing that Assad can find a political solution to the crisis. Such a coup would be led by Alawite and Sunni military officers who would recognize the need to make a deal with the demonstrators and send Syria onto a path of serious political democratization, while sparing Alawites widespread retribution after the fall of the House of Assad. A variation of this sees an inside plot to assassinate the top leaders, and bring an immediate end to the crisis.

Another common scenario is that the Russians will recognize that Assad’s approach is doomed to fail and will shift away from their current course of using a veto to prevent Security Council moves to pressure Damascus. In this script, Russia convinces Assad to step down and leave the country with his extended family and their riches.

A variation on this sees a combination of Alawite leaders, military officers and top businessmen collectively deciding that they are all doomed if the current trends persist, and working together to do one of two things: either to engineer a coup and force Assad’s exit, or to sit him down and make clear that they – his pillars of support – see only doom, so that he must turn over power to a democratic transitional leadership before total collapse ruins the country.

A more dramatic possibility in some people’s view is for regional and global powers to impose no-fly zones and safe havens along Syria’s northern and southern borders. This would speed up the regime’s abandonment by tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, speeding up its collapse from within. This process would be hastened by further economic deterioration impacting on all sectors of society, as tighter international sanctions – including bans on aviation and banking links with Syria – lead to shortages of basic goods and runaway inflation that make it impossible for most Syrians to live a normal life. This would also spark massive anti-regime demonstrations in Damascus and Aleppo, the death knell of the Assads.

A more drastic possibility is that the polarization of Syrian society along ethnic lines and full civil war will reach a point where the unified state collapses, and the Alawites retreat into their mountains to form their own state in their northwestern heartland. Some suggest this has been the aim of the crisis all along, with “outsiders” provoking civil strife to the point where Syria breaks up into statelets, including Alawite, Druze, Kurdish and Sunni entities.

This would occur at the same time as Iraq faces similar disintegration as a unified country and leaves behind Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish entities of some sort. Culprits behind this scenario it is said, of course, is Israel and America, whose desire for hegemony over the Middle East would be made much easier by the presence of weaker ethnic statelets rather than larger, stronger Arab states. In such a scenario, Israel would quickly come to the aid of some of these ethnic statelets – as it tried to do with some Lebanese groups in the 1980s – and thus cement both the fragmentation of the Levant and its dominance of it.

The most terrible scenario sees the deterioration in Syria leading the Assad regime to implement the Sampson Option. It would seek to instigate strife and chaos across the region, in order to plunge the Levant into a regional conflagration. This option would be based on the Assads’ assumption that if they cannot rule over a unified Syria, then nobody in the neighborhood should be able to live in peace and security either. Such a scenario would involve attacking or fomenting strife in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, perhaps resulting in the desperate use of chemical or even nuclear weapons.

These are only the most plausible scenarios that are widely circulated in the region these days. The more outrageous ones we will leave for another day to ponder.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly by THE DAILY STAR

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 28, 2012, on page 7.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2012/Jan-28/161336-a-terrifying-menu-for-syrias-endgame.ashx#axzz1knTC5mB6
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Children’s A.D.D. Drugs Don’t Work Long-Term - NYTimes.com

2012-01-28T13:08:00.000-08:00

Children’s A.D.D. Drugs Don’t Work Long-Term - NYTimes.com


	Laguna Design/Getty Images

January 28, 2012
By L. ALAN SROUFE

THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.

But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?

In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.

As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.

Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.

Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs.

What gets publicized are short-term results and studies on brain differences among children. Indeed, there are a number of incontrovertible facts that seem at first glance to support medication. It is because of this partial foundation in reality that the problem with the current approach to treating children has been so difficult to see.

Back in the 1960s I, like most psychologists, believed that children with difficulty concentrating were suffering from a brain problem of genetic or otherwise inborn origin. Just as Type I diabetics need insulin to correct problems with their inborn biochemistry, these children were believed to require attention-deficit drugs to correct theirs. It turns out, however, that there is little to no evidence to support this theory.

In 1973, I reviewed the literature on drug treatment of children for The New England Journal of Medicine. Dozens of well-controlled studies showed that these drugs immediately improved children’s performance on repetitive tasks requiring concentration and diligence. I had conducted one of these studies myself. Teachers and parents also reported improved behavior in almost every short-term study. This spurred an increase in drug treatment and led many to conclude that the “brain deficit” hypothesis had been confirmed.

But questions continued to be raised, especially concerning the drugs’ mechanism of action and the durability of effects. Ritalin and Adderall, a combination of dextroamphetamine and amphetamine, are stimulants. So why do they appear to calm children down? Some experts argued that because the brains of children with attention problems were different, the drugs had a mysterious paradoxical effect on them.

However, there really was no paradox. Versions of these drugs had been given to World War II radar operators to help them stay awake and focus on boring, repetitive tasks. And when we reviewed the literature on attention-deficit drugs again in 1990 we found that all children, whether they had attention problems or not, responded to stimulant drugs the same way. Moreover, while the drugs helped children settle down in class, they actually increased activity in the playground. Stimulants generally have the same effects for all children and adults. They enhance the ability to concentrate, especially on tasks that are not inherently interesting or when one is fatigued or bored, but they don’t improve broader learning abilities.

And just as in the many dieters who have used and abandoned similar drugs to lose weight, the effects of stimulants on children with attention problems fade after prolonged use. Some experts have argued that children with A.D.D. wouldn’t develop such tolerance because their brains were somehow different. But in fact, the loss of appetite and sleeplessness in children first prescribed attention-deficit drugs do fade, and, as we now know, so do the effects on behavior. They apparently develop a tolerance to the drug, and thus its efficacy disappears. Many parents who take their children off the drugs find that behavior worsens, which most likely confirms their belief that the drugs work. But the behavior worsens because the children’s bodies have become adapted to the drug. Adults may have similar reactions if they suddenly cut back on coffee, or stop smoking.

TO date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems, the very things we would most want to improve. Until recently, most studies of these drugs had not been properly randomized, and some of them had other methodological flaws.

But in 2009, findings were published from a well-controlled study that had been going on for more than a decade, and the results were very clear. The study randomly assigned almost 600 children with attention problems to four treatment conditions. Some received medication alone, some cognitive-behavior therapy alone, some medication plus therapy, and some were in a community-care control group that received no systematic treatment. At first this study suggested that medication, or medication plus therapy, produced the best results. However, after three years, these effects had faded, and by eight years there was no evidence that medication produced any academic or behavioral benefits.

Indeed, all of the treatment successes faded over time, although the study is continuing. Clearly, these children need a broader base of support than was offered in this medication study, support that begins earlier and lasts longer.

Nevertheless, findings in neuroscience are being used to prop up the argument for drugs to treat the hypothesized “inborn defect.” These studies show that children who receive an A.D.D. diagnosis have different patterns of neurotransmitters in their brains and other anomalies. While the technological sophistication of these studies may impress parents and nonprofessionals, they can be misleading. Of course the brains of children with behavior problems will show anomalies on brain scans. It could not be otherwise. Behavior and the brain are intertwined. Depression also waxes and wanes in many people, and as it does so, parallel changes in brain functioning occur, regardless of medication.

Many of the brain studies of children with A.D.D. involve examining participants while they are engaged in an attention task. If these children are not paying attention because of lack of motivation or an underdeveloped capacity to regulate their behavior, their brain scans are certain to be anomalous.

However brain functioning is measured, these studies tell us nothing about whether the observed anomalies were present at birth or whether they resulted from trauma, chronic stress or other early-childhood experiences. One of the most profound findings in behavioral neuroscience in recent years has been the clear evidence that the developing brain is shaped by experience.

It is certainly true that large numbers of children have problems with attention, self-regulation and behavior. But are these problems because of some aspect present at birth? Or are they caused by experiences in early childhood? These questions can be answered only by studying children and their surroundings from before birth through childhood and adolescence, as my colleagues at the University of Minnesota and I have been doing for decades.

Since 1975, we have followed 200 children who were born into poverty and were therefore more vulnerable to behavior problems. We enrolled their mothers during pregnancy, and over the course of their lives, we studied their relationships with their caregivers, teachers and peers. We followed their progress through school and their experiences in early adulthood. At regular intervals we measured their health, behavior, performance on intelligence tests and other characteristics.

By late adolescence, 50 percent of our sample qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis. Almost half displayed behavior problems at school on at least one occasion, and 24 percent dropped out by 12th grade; 14 percent met criteria for A.D.D. in either first or sixth grade.

Other large-scale epidemiological studies confirm such trends in the general population of disadvantaged children. Among all children, including all socioeconomic groups, the incidence of A.D.D. is estimated at 8 percent. What we found was that the environment of the child predicted development of A.D.D. problems. In stark contrast, measures of neurological anomalies at birth, I.Q. and infant temperament — including infant activity level — did not predict A.D.D.

Plenty of affluent children are also diagnosed with A.D.D. Behavior problems in children have many possible sources. Among them are family stresses like domestic violence, lack of social support from friends or relatives, chaotic living situations, including frequent moves, and, especially, patterns of parental intrusiveness that involve stimulation for which the baby is not prepared. For example, a 6-month-old baby is playing, and the parent picks it up quickly from behind and plunges it in the bath. Or a 3-year-old is becoming frustrated in solving a problem, and a parent taunts or ridicules. Such practices excessively stimulate and also compromise the child’s developing capacity for self-regulation.

Putting children on drugs does nothing to change the conditions that derail their development in the first place. Yet those conditions are receiving scant attention. Policy makers are so convinced that children with attention deficits have an organic disease that they have all but called off the search for a comprehensive understanding of the condition. The National Institute of Mental Health finances research aimed largely at physiological and brain components of A.D.D. While there is some research on other treatment approaches, very little is studied regarding the role of experience. Scientists, aware of this orientation, tend to submit only grants aimed at elucidating the biochemistry.

Thus, only one question is asked: are there aspects of brain functioning associated with childhood attention problems? The answer is always yes. Overlooked is the very real possibility that both the brain anomalies and the A.D.D. result from experience.

Our present course poses numerous risks. First, there will never be a single solution for all children with learning and behavior problems. While some smaller number may benefit from short-term drug treatment, large-scale, long-term treatment for millions of children is not the answer.

Second, the large-scale medication of children feeds into a societal view that all of life’s problems can be solved with a pill and gives millions of children the impression that there is something inherently defective in them.

Finally, the illusion that children’s behavior problems can be cured with drugs prevents us as a society from seeking the more complex solutions that will be necessary. Drugs get everyone — politicians, scientists, teachers and parents — off the hook. Everyone except the children, that is.

If drugs, which studies show work for four to eight weeks, are not the answer, what is? Many of these children have anxiety or depression; others are showing family stresses. We need to treat them as individuals.

As for shortages, they will continue to wax and wane. Because these drugs are habit forming, Congress decides how much can be produced. The number approved doesn’t keep pace with the tidal wave of prescriptions. By the end of this year, there will in all likelihood be another shortage, as we continue to rely on drugs that are not doing what so many well-meaning parents, therapists and teachers believe they are doing.

L. Alan Sroufe is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/childrens-add-drugs-dont-work-long-term.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212&pagewanted=all
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Remembering Howard Zinn By Noam Chomsky, Al Jazeera ~27 January 12: http://bit.ly/A4ZsJR ~

2012-01-27T13:12:00.000-08:00

http://bit.ly/A4ZsJR

Noam Chomsky was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. (photo: Ben Rusk/flickr)

Remembering Howard Zinn
By Noam Chomsky, Al Jazeera
27 January 12

Editor's note: Today, January 27, is the second anniversary of the death of Howard Zinn. An active participant in the Civil Rights movement, he was dismissed in 1963 from his position as a tenured professor at Spelman College in Atlanta after siding with black women students in the struggle against segregation. In 1967, he wrote one of the first, and most influential, books calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. A veteran of the US Army Air Force, he edited The Pentagon Papers, leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and was later designated a "high security risk" by the FBI.

His best-selling A People's History of the United States spawned a new field of historical study: People's Histories. This approach countered the traditional triumphalist examination of "history as written by the victors", instead concentrating on the poor and seemingly powerless; those who resisted imperial, cultural and corporate hegemony. Zinn was an award-winning social activist, writer and historian - and so who better to share his memory than his close friend and fellow intellectual giant, Noam Chomsky?

t is not easy for me to write a few words about Howard Zinn, the great American activist and historian. He was a very close friend for 45 years. The families were very close too. His wife Roz, who died of cancer not long before, was also a marvellous person and close friend. Also sombre is the realisation that a whole generation seems to be disappearing, including several other old friends: Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed and others, who were not only astute and productive scholars, but also dedicated and courageous militants, always on call when needed - which was constant. A combination that is essential if there is to be hope of decent survival.

Howard's remarkable life and work are summarised best in his own words. His primary concern, he explained, was "the countless small actions of unknown people" that lie at the roots of "those great moments" that enter the historical record - a record that will be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if it is torn from these roots as it passes through the filters of doctrine and dogma. His life was always closely intertwined with his writings and innumerable talks and interviews. It was devoted, selflessly, to empowerment of the unknown people who brought about great moments. That was true when he was an industrial worker and labour activist, and from the days, 50 years ago, when he was teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, a black college that was open mostly to the small black elite.

While teaching at Spelman, Howard supported the students who were at the cutting edge of the civil rights movement in its early and most dangerous days, many of whom became quite well-known in later years - Alice Walker, Julian Bond and others - and who loved and revered him, as did everyone who knew him well. And as always, he did not just support them, which was rare enough, but also participated directly with them in their most hazardous efforts - no easy undertaking at that time, before there was any organised popular movement and in the face of government hostility that lasted for some years. Finally, popular support was ignited, in large part by the courageous actions of the young people who were sitting in at lunch counters, riding freedom buses, organising demonstrations, facing bitter racism and brutality, sometimes death.

By the early 1960s, a mass popular movement was taking shape, by then with Martin Luther King in a leadership role - and the government had to respond. As a reward for his courage and honesty, Howard was soon expelled from the college where he taught. A few years later, he wrote the standard work on SNCC (the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), the major organisation of those "unknown people" whose "countless small actions" played such an important part in creating the groundswell that enabled King to gain significant influence - as I am sure he would have been the first to say - and to bring the country to honour the constitutional amendments of a century earlier that had theoretically granted elementary civil rights to former slaves - at least to do so partially; no need to stress that there remains a long way to go.

A Civilising Influence

On a personal note, I came to know Howard well when we went together to a civil rights demonstration in Jackson Mississippi in (I think) 1964, even at that late date, a scene of violent public antagonism, police brutality and indifference - or even co-operation - with state security forces on the part of federal authorities, sometimes in ways that were quite shocking.

After being expelled from the Atlanta college where he taught, Howard came to Boston, and spent the rest of his academic career at Boston University, where he was, I am sure, the most admired and loved faculty member on campus, and the target of bitter antagonism and petty cruelty on the part of the administration. In later years, however, after his retirement, he gained the public honour and respect that was always overwhelming among students, staff, much of the faculty, and the general community. While there, Howard wrote the books that brought him well-deserved fame. His book Logic of Withdrawal, in 1967, was the first to express clearly and powerfully what many were then beginning barely to contemplate: that the US had no right even to call for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, leaving Washington with power and substantial control in the country it had invaded and by then already largely destroyed.

Rather, the US should do what any aggressor should: withdraw, allow the population to somehow reconstruct as they could from the wreckage, and if minimal honesty could be attained, pay massive reparations for the crimes that the invading armies had committed, vast crimes in this case. The book had wide influence among the public, although to this day, its message can barely even be comprehended in elite educated circles, an indication of how much necessary work lies ahead.

Significantly, among the general public by the war's end, 70 per cent regarded the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral", not "a mistake," a remarkable figure, considering the fact that scarcely a hint of such a thought was expressible in mainstream opinion. Howard's writings - and, as always, his prominent presence in protest and direct resistance - were a major factor in civilising much of the country.

In those same years, Howard also became one of the most prominent supporters of the resistance movement that was then developing. He was one of the early signers of the Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority and was so close to the activities of Resist that he was practically one of the organisers. He also took part at once in the sanctuary actions that had a remarkable impact in galvanising anti-war protest. Whatever was needed - talks, participation in civil disobedience, support for resisters, testimony at trials - Howard was always there.

'History From Below'

Even more influential in the long run than Howard's anti-war writings and actions was his enduring masterpiece, A People's History of the United States, a book that literally changed the consciousness of a generation. Here he developed with care, lucidity and comprehensive sweep his fundamental message about the crucial role of the people who remain unknown in carrying forward the endless struggle for peace and justice, and about the victims of the systems of power that create their own versions of history and seek to impose it. Later, his "Voices" from the People's History, now an acclaimed theatrical and television production, has brought to many the actual words of those forgotten or ignored people who have played such a valuable role in creating a better world.

Howard's unique success in drawing the actions and voices of unknown people from the depths to which they had largely been consigned has spawned extensive historical research following a similar path, focusing on critical periods of US history, and turning to the record in other countries as well, a very welcome development. It is not entirely novel - there had been scholarly inquiries of particular topics before - but nothing to compare with Howard's broad and incisive evocation of "history from below", compensating for critical omissions in how US history had been interpreted and conveyed.

Howard's dedicated activism continued, literally without a break, until the very end, even in his last years, when he was suffering from severe infirmity and personal loss - though one would hardly know it when meeting him or watching him speaking tirelessly to captivated audiences all over the country. Whenever there was a struggle for peace and justice, Howard was there, on the front lines, unflagging in his enthusiasm, and inspiring in his integrity, engagement, eloquence and insight; a light touch of humour in the face of adversity, and dedication to non-violence and sheer decency. It is hard even to imagine how many young people's lives were touched, and how deeply, by his achievements, both in his work and his life.

There are places where Howard's life and work should have particular resonance. One, which should be much better known, is Turkey. I know of no other country where leading writers, artists, journalists, academics and other intellectuals have compiled such an impressive record of bravery and integrity in condemning crimes of the state, and going beyond to engage in civil disobedience to try to bring oppression and violence to an end, facing and sometimes enduring severe repression, and then returning to the task.

It is an honourable record, unique to my knowledge, a record of which the country should be proud. And one that should be a model for others, just as Howard Zinn's life and work are an unforgettable model, sure to leave a permanent stamp on how history is understood and how a decent and honourable life should be lived.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous bestselling political works, including 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (Seven Stories Press), an updated version of his classic account, just being published this week with a major new essay - from which this post was adapted - considering the ten years since the 9/11 attacks.

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Tahrir 12 months down -Opinion-Ahram Online

2012-01-25T14:22:00.000-08:00

bit.ly/zX4u2C via @ahramonline

A year into the revolution, much has changed, but more hasn’t — at least yet
Seif Abdul Shahid , Wednesday 25 Jan 2012

A year on from the outbreak of protests that eventually toppled a reviled dictator, his wife, sons and cronies, an oppressive regime that had dragged near every Egyptian into the dirt of depression and impoverishment, has the revolution been won, and if not can it still be won?

Much has changed, but more remains the same. Perhaps it was inevitable that this, the saddest lesson, would be played out: loss of hope from such a high of euphoria, borne of the unprecedented collective consciousness that appeared to grab the masses from nowhere — those beautiful 18 days in which no mistakes were made.

What a contrast to the catalogue of mistakes made in the days and months — indeed hours — that followed the departure of Mubarak. That is, as soon as the leaderless revolution needed leaders.

Many perhaps regret the indulgent celebrations held in Tahrir Square for weeks following 11 February, including handshakes and baby photo-ops with military soldiers who soon would be clearing the square by force, torturing artists with zeal, and subjecting the women of the revolution to virginity tests. And this was just the beginning. Some, too, might regret the lost time, and sense of buoyant surety, that led to the constitutional amendments defeat — the first and final (in that there was no revival) defeat of the revolution so soon after its supposed success.

It was in the wake of this defeat that calls gathered for a “second revolution”. The calls alone were acknowledgement of the failure of the first revolution. But even at this time most of the focus was on the “regime.” Few have been ready to understand that the problem is in the state. In this context, three incidents stand out on the sad path Egypt has taken in the last year; three incidents that perhaps cannot be outweighed by the positive changes that have survived, among which is a level of liberty of discourse unprecedented in Egypt’s modern history, prisoners of conscience of the revolution — first among which is Maikel Nabil — notwithstanding. These incidents increase in intensity and reveal something dark about the state that has survived as the former regime fell.

The first incident occurred on the first day of Ramadan. The plan to have a communal iftar in Tahrir Square was aborted as the Central Security Forces drove people out with sticks. To be sure, the stick generally is not an implement of fatal force. But there is something in the stick that is worse to the honest eye than the gun. Something representative about how the old regime thought of the people, and so gives its reappearance a particular significance. It was not 50 sticks, but 300. Some 300 sticks that had to be found, gathered from their place of storage, transported and handed out man by man, with instructions on what was coming next. It was on this day that the Muslim Brotherhood fell into line with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, for as a force they could not bring together Tahrir and Islam.

The second incident was the runaway vehicle near Maspero that literally drove over Egyptians, flattening them and killing them. Several vehicles were doing the same, but the APC that did so was several tons in weight and at no point in the video footage did it appear that it would stop. Rather, this was crowd control. The mask fell that night, 9 October. What was seen on the Corniche in the capital was really how the military regarded the Egyptian people: like sheep to be rounded up, and if necessary swept up. How heartbreaking now to see again the image of the woman who that night lost her fiancé, his face bludgeoned and distorted out of all proportion as she sat wailing, holding what the army had left of him.

The third instance is something akin to a war crime or crime against humanity: the open-air gassing of crowds of people on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. If Maspero was crowd control, Mohamed Mahmoud was pest control. It was quite a feat, indeed, to get the concentration of CS gas so high in open-air space that people died, asphyxiated. But this is what the military and the Central Security Forces clearly aimed at; testament to which is how they attacked field hospitals, killing even medical personnel there to help the helpless. It didn’t get worse than this, and heaven knows how deep and wide the economic catastrophe must be that Mubarak led the country into for the people as a whole not to simply refuse to participate in Egyptian public life after witnessing these horrid and impossible scenes.

And now here we are, a parliament full of suits. Of over 500, how many in there risked and lost? How many in there fought and won? Is it five, or is it 10? Is it one or two per cent of the whole? And so it is that when Dr Essam El-Erian, a decent man no doubt, arrives, it is the police who greet him, smiling, because we have carefully and successfully transitioned from one regime to a new regime in the making, without touching the foundations of the state itself, without touching its practices, its torture, its governmental rationality. How lost were the crowds and the intellectuals of the revolution, again in November, to call for the end of SCAF. The problem is not SCAF; it is the rationality of SCAF. The problem is not who, but how. The real issue is not taking power, but defanging power. What else, indeed, do rights really mean?

Over 1000 people died, and not for glorious nothingness. The so-called intellectuals of the secular left bear a heavy burden, if they could see it. In failing to put forward an economic plan for Egypt they allowed the people to turn against the revolution, tired and hungry. In failing to form a solid and wide-ranging coalition they gave the revolution on a plate to the next best-organised political forces, including a newcomer that has nothing to do with the freedom of spirit, body and mind that was necessary to confront snipers and firebombs in January. And by failing to understand that a revolution must be led by its people, the people who constituted the revolution, not puppets of the like of ElBaradei, they sealed the fate of the revolution and the outcome of its last gasp, figuratively and literally: the zero political outcome that emerged from the heroic frontline resistance waged by football fans in Mohamed Mahmoud Street against the police that always brutalised them and means to continue doing so.

Same police force. Same sticks. Same rape by forced sodomy. Same tactics. Same governmental economic incompetence. Same one-party dominance. Same exceptional powers. Same bureaucracy. Same hall of mirrors. Same malaise. Same same same. The Arab Spring but an echo. Did we dream it?

Or perhaps something else can happen. Perhaps the people can start again to talk about freedom, and to practice freedom. Egyptians rose up for dignity. They refused torture. Real freedom is sovereignty of person; collective freedom is national sovereignty. Unless the rationality of the use of force is questioned it will not matter who exercises force, and it could even be a revolutionary. The idea of a social contract is that the people choose the cost of government; that is, the cost to their freedom of being governed. Political discourse in Egypt at present has accepted that replacing persons not structures and rationalities is the most important thing, and everyone in parliament is consciously or unconsciously complicit with this. But when the people called for the end of the nizam, the system, it meant more than persons; it was the violence of that system, and the costs of that government.

To SCAF: No more talk of foreign conspiracies. The Egyptian people are against the violence of the Egyptian state. They will oppose it regardless of what you pretend. Stop killing and beating the people.

To the people: It is time you took control of the mouthpiece. It is time for a completely free and cleansed media in Egypt. Otherwise you do not hear the truth of what happens; you hear what SCAF wants to you to hear, while people are fighting and dying still for your freedom.

To the politicians: Congratulate yourselves and pretend you are more respectable in parliament today than you were outside of it yesterday. But remember: the people are the greatest force in Egypt, and you cannot dictate — no more than Mubarak could — something as fundamental as the feeling of freedom.

The writer is a Cairo-based political analyst.

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State Of The Union Speech Text 1/24/2012

2012-01-24T21:12:00.000-08:00

State Of The Union Speech Text

First Posted: 01/24/2012 9:12 pm

As Prepared for Delivery --

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Last month, I went to Andrews Air Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq. Together, we offered a final, proud salute to the colors under which more than a million of our fellow citizens fought -- and several thousand gave their lives.

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. Most of al Qaeda's top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban's momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.

These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness, and teamwork of America's Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.

We can do this. I know we can, because we’ve done it before. At the end of World War II, when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known. My grandfather, a veteran of Patton's Army, got the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth.

The two of them shared the optimism of a Nation that had triumphed over a depression and fascism. They understood they were part of something larger; that they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share -- the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.

The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. What's at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.

Let's remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete. Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren't, and personal debt that kept piling up.

In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn't afford or understand them. Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people's money. Regulators had looked the other way, or didn't have the authority to stop the bad behavior.

It was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag. In the six months before I took office, we lost nearly four million jobs. And we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect.

Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And we've put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.

The state of our Union is getting stronger. And we've come too far to turn back now. As long as I'm President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.

No, we will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that's built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.

This blueprint begins with American manufacturing.

On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. In exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got workers and automakers to settle their differences. We got the industry to retool and restructure. Today, General Motors is back on top as the world's number one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs.

We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.

What's happening in Detroit can happen in other industries. It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh. We can't bring back every job that's left our shores. But right now, it's getting more expensive to do business in places like China. Meanwhile, America is more productive. A few weeks ago, the CEO of Master Lock told me that it now makes business sense for him to bring jobs back home. Today, for the first time in fifteen years, Master Lock’s unionized plant in Milwaukee is running at full capacity.

So we have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back. But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.

We should start with our tax code. Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it.

So let's change it. First, if you're a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn't get a tax deduction for doing it. That money should be used to cover moving expenses for companies like Master Lock that decide to bring jobs home.

Second, no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax. And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here.

Third, if you're an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you're a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making products here. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help financing a new plant, equipment, or training for new workers.

My message is simple. It's time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms, and I'll sign them right away.

We're also making it easier for American businesses to sell products all over the world. Two years ago, I set a goal of doubling U.S. exports over five years. With the bipartisan trade agreements I signed into law, we are on track to meet that goal -- ahead of schedule. Soon, there will be millions of new customers for American goods in Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. Soon, there will be new cars on the streets of Seoul imported from Detroit, and Toledo, and Chicago.

I will go anywhere in the world to open new markets for American products. And I will not stand by when our competitors don't play by the rules. We've brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration -- and it's made a difference. Over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires. But we need to do more. It's not right when another country lets our movies, music, and software be pirated. It's not fair when foreign manufacturers have a leg up on ours only because they're heavily subsidized.

Tonight, I'm announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trade practices in countries like China. There will be more inspections to prevent counterfeit or unsafe goods from crossing our borders. And this Congress should make sure that no foreign company has an advantage over American manufacturing when it comes to accessing finance or new markets like Russia. Our workers are the most productive on Earth, and if the playing field is level, I promise you -- America will always win.

I also hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the United States but can’t find workers with the right skills. Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that -- openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work.

That’s inexcusable. And we know how to fix it.

Jackie Bray is a single mom from North Carolina who was laid off from her job as a mechanic. Then Siemens opened a gas turbine factory in Charlotte, and formed a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College. The company helped the college design courses in laser and robotics training. It paid Jackie's tuition, then hired her to help operate their plant.

I want every American looking for work to have the same opportunity as Jackie did. Join me in a national commitment to train two million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job. My Administration has already lined up more companies that want to help. Model partnerships between businesses like Siemens and community colleges in places like Charlotte, Orlando, and Louisville are up and running. Now you need to give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers -- places that teach people skills that local businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing.

And I want to cut through the maze of confusing training programs, so that from now on, people like Jackie have one program, one website, and one place to go for all the information and help they need. It’s time to turn our unemployment system into a reemployment system that puts people to work.

These reforms will help people get jobs that are open today. But to prepare for the jobs of tomorrow, our commitment to skills and education has to start earlier.

For less than one percent of what our Nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every State in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning -- the first time that’s happened in a generation.

But challenges remain. And we know how to solve them.

At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced States to lay off thousands of teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies -- just to make a difference.

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn.

We also know that when students aren’t allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.

When kids do graduate, the most daunting challenge can be the cost of college. At a time when Americans owe more in tuition debt than credit card debt, this Congress needs to stop the interest rates on student loans from doubling in July. Extend the tuition tax credit we started that saves middle-class families thousands of dollars. And give more young people the chance to earn their way through college by doubling the number of work-study jobs in the next five years.

Of course, it's not enough for us to increase student aid. We can’t just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we’ll run out of money. States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down. Recently, I spoke with a group of college presidents who’ve done just that. Some schools re-design courses to help students finish more quickly. Some use better technology. The point is, it’s possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury -- it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

Let's also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.

That doesn't make sense.

I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration. That's why my Administration has put more boots on the border than ever before. That’s why there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office.

The opponents of action are out of excuses. We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now. But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.

You see, an economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country. That means women should earn equal pay for equal work. It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.

After all, innovation is what America has always been about. Most new jobs are created in start-ups and small businesses. So let’s pass an agenda that helps them succeed. Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs. Both parties agree on these ideas. So put them in a bill, and get it on my desk this year.

Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally-financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. New lightweight vests for cops and soldiers that can stop any bullet. Don’t gut these investments in our budget. Don't let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.

Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I'm directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right -- eight years. Not only that -- last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years.

But with only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, oil isn’t enough. This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy -- a strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my Administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock -- reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.

What’s true for natural gas is true for clean energy. In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world's leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries. Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled. And thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

When Bryan Ritterby was laid off from his job making furniture, he said he worried that at 55, no one would give him a second chance. But he found work at Energetx, a wind turbine manufacturer in Michigan. Before the recession, the factory only made luxury yachts. Today, it's hiring workers like Bryan, who said, "I'm proud to be working in the industry of the future."

Our experience with shale gas shows us that the payoffs on these public investments don't always come right away. Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail. But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy. I will not walk away from workers like Bryan. I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here. We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That's long enough. It's time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising. Pass clean energy tax credits and create these jobs.

We can also spur energy innovation with new incentives. The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. But there’s no reason why Congress shouldn’t at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation. So far, you haven’t acted. Well tonight, I will. I'm directing my Administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes. And I’m proud to announce that the Department of Defense, the world’s largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history -- with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year.

Of course, the easiest way to save money is to waste less energy. So here's another proposal: Help manufacturers eliminate energy waste in their factories and give businesses incentives to upgrade their buildings. Their energy bills will be $100 billion lower over the next decade, and America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, and more jobs for construction workers who need them. Send me a bill that creates these jobs.

Building this new energy future should be just one part of a broader agenda to repair America’s infrastructure. So much of America needs to be rebuilt. We’ve got crumbling roads and bridges. A power grid that wastes too much energy. An incomplete high-speed broadband network that prevents a small business owner in rural America from selling her products all over the world.

During the Great Depression, America built the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. After World War II, we connected our States with a system of highways. Democratic and Republican administrations invested in great projects that benefited everybody, from the workers who built them to the businesses that still use them today.

In the next few weeks, I will sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

There's never been a better time to build, especially since the construction industry was one of the hardest-hit when the housing bubble burst. Of course, construction workers weren't the only ones hurt. So were millions of innocent Americans who’ve seen their home values decline. And while Government can’t fix the problem on its own, responsible homeowners shouldn’t have to sit and wait for the housing market to hit bottom to get some relief.

That's why I’m sending this Congress a plan that gives every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage, by refinancing at historically low interest rates. No more red tape. No more runaround from the banks. A small fee on the largest financial institutions will ensure that it won’t add to the deficit, and will give banks that were rescued by taxpayers a chance to repay a deficit of trust.

Let's never forget: Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a Government and a financial system that do the same. It's time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.

We've all paid the price for lenders who sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them, and buyers who knew they couldn't afford them. That’s why we need smart regulations to prevent irresponsible behavior. Rules to prevent financial fraud, or toxic dumping, or faulty medical devices, don't destroy the free market. They make the free market work better.

There is no question that some regulations are outdated, unnecessary, or too costly. In fact, I’ve approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his. I’ve ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don’t make sense. We've already announced over 500 reforms, and just a fraction of them will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years. We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill -- because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.

I'm confident a farmer can contain a milk spill without a federal agency looking over his shoulder. But I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago. I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury pollution, or making sure that our food is safe and our water is clean. I will not go back to the days when health insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men.

And I will not go back to the days when Wall Street was allowed to play by its own set of rules. The new rules we passed restore what should be any financial system’s core purpose: Getting funding to entrepreneurs with the best ideas, and getting loans to responsible families who want to buy a home, start a business, or send a kid to college.

So if you're a big bank or financial institution, you are no longer allowed to make risky bets with your customers' deposits. You’re required to write out a "living will" that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail -- because the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again. And if you’re a mortgage lender or a payday lender or a credit card company, the days of signing people up for products they can't afford with confusing forms and deceptive practices are over. Today, American consumers finally have a watchdog in Richard Cordray with one job: To look out for them.

We will also establish a Financial Crimes Unit of highly trained investigators to crack down on large-scale fraud and protect people's investments. Some financial firms violate major anti-fraud laws because there’s no real penalty for being a repeat offender. That’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals who do the right thing. So pass legislation that makes the penalties for fraud count.

And tonight, I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.

A return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility will help us protect our people and our economy. But it should also guide us as we look to pay down our debt and invest in our future.

Right now, our most immediate priority is stopping a tax hike on 160 million working Americans while the recovery is still fragile. People cannot afford losing $40 out of each paycheck this year. There are plenty of ways to get this done. So let’s agree right here, right now: No side issues. No drama. Pass the payroll tax cut without delay.

When it comes to the deficit, we've already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings. But we need to do more, and that means making choices. Right now, we’re poised to spend nearly $1 trillion more on what was supposed to be a temporary tax break for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else – like education and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans? Because if we’re serious about paying down our debt, we can’t do both.

The American people know what the right choice is. So do I. As I told the Speaker this summer, I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors.

But in return, we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of Members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. And my Republican friend Tom Coburn is right: Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires. In fact, if you’re earning a million dollars a year, you shouldn’t get special tax subsidies or deductions. On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up. You’re the ones struggling with rising costs and stagnant wages. You’re the ones who need relief.

Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.

We don't begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It's because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don't need and the country can't afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference -- like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That's not right. Americans know it's not right. They know that this generation’s success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to their country’s future, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel that same sense of shared responsibility. That’s how we’ll reduce our deficit. That's an America built to last.

I recognize that people watching tonight have differing views about taxes and debt; energy and health care. But no matter what party they belong to, I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right now: Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken.

Can you blame them for feeling a little cynical?

The greatest blow to confidence in our economy last year didn’t come from events beyond our control. It came from a debate in Washington over whether the United States would pay its bills or not. Who benefited from that fiasco?

I’ve talked tonight about the deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. But the divide between this city and the rest of the country is at least as bad -- and it seems to get worse every year.

Some of this has to do with the corrosive influence of money in politics. So together, let's take some steps to fix that. Send me a bill that bans insider trading by Members of Congress, and I will sign it tomorrow. Let's limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact. Let's make sure people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress can't lobby Congress, and vice versa -- an idea that has bipartisan support, at least outside of Washington.

Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything -- even routine business -- passed through the Senate. Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days.

The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it's inefficient, outdated and remote. That's why I’ve asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our Government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people.

Finally, none of these reforms can happen unless we also lower the temperature in this town. We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas.

I'm a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States. That's why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That's why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.

On the other hand, even my Republican friends who complain the most about Government spending have supported federally-financed roads, and clean energy projects, and federal offices for the folks back home.

The point is, we should all want a smarter, more effective Government. And while we may not be able to bridge our biggest philosophical differences this year, we can make real progress. With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow. But I can do a whole lot more with your help. Because when we act together, there is nothing the United States of America can’t achieve.

That is the lesson we’ve learned from our actions abroad over the last few years.

Ending the Iraq war has allowed us to strike decisive blows against our enemies. From Pakistan to Yemen, the al Qaeda operatives who remain are scrambling, knowing that they can’t escape the reach of the United States of America.

From this position of strength, we’ve begun to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Ten thousand of our troops have come home. Twenty-three thousand more will leave by the end of this summer. This transition to Afghan lead will continue, and we will build an enduring partnership with Afghanistan, so that it is never again a source of attacks against America.

As the tide of war recedes, a wave of change has washed across the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunis to Cairo; from Sana’a to Tripoli. A year ago, Qadhafi was one of the world’s longest-serving dictators -- a murderer with American blood on his hands. Today, he is gone. And in Syria, I have no doubt that the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change can’t be reversed, and that human dignity can’t be denied.

How this incredible transformation will end remains uncertain. But we have a huge stake in the outcome. And while it is ultimately up to the people of the region to decide their fate, we will advocate for those values that have served our own country so well. We will stand against violence and intimidation. We will stand for the rights and dignity of all human beings – men and women; Christians, Muslims, and Jews. We will support policies that lead to strong and stable democracies and open markets, because tyranny is no match for liberty.

And we will safeguard America’s own security against those who threaten our citizens, our friends, and our interests. Look at Iran. Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one. The regime is more isolated than ever before; its leaders are faced with crippling sanctions, and as long as they shirk their responsibilities, this pressure will not relent. Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible, and far better, and if Iran changes course and meets its obligations, it can rejoin the community of nations.

The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe. Our oldest alliances in Europe and Asia are stronger than ever. Our ties to the Americas are deeper. Our iron-clad commitment to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history. We’ve made it clear that America is a Pacific power, and a new beginning in Burma has lit a new hope. From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies; to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back.

Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they’re talking about. That's not the message we get from leaders around the world, all of whom are eager to work with us. That's not how people feel from Tokyo to Berlin; from Cape Town to Rio; where opinions of America are higher than they’ve been in years. Yes, the world is changing; no, we can’t control every event. But America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs -- and as long as I’m President, I intend to keep it that way.

That's why, working with our military leaders, I have proposed a new defense strategy that ensures we maintain the finest military in the world, while saving nearly half a trillion dollars in our budget. To stay one step ahead of our adversaries, I have already sent this Congress legislation that will secure our country from the growing danger of cyber-threats.

Above all, our freedom endures because of the men and women in uniform who defend it. As they come home, we must serve them as well as they served us. That includes giving them the care and benefits they have earned -- which is why we’ve increased annual VA spending every year I’ve been President. And it means enlisting our veterans in the work of rebuilding our Nation.

With the bipartisan support of this Congress, we are providing new tax credits to companies that hire vets. Michelle and Jill Biden have worked with American businesses to secure a pledge of 135,000 jobs for veterans and their families. And tonight, I'm proposing a Veterans Job Corps that will help our communities hire veterans as cops and firefighters, so that America is as strong as those who defend her.

Which brings me back to where I began. Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one Nation, leaving no one behind.

One of my proudest possessions is the flag that the SEAL Team took with them on the mission to get bin Laden. On it are each of their names. Some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn’t matter. Just like it didn’t matter that day in the Situation Room, when I sat next to Bob Gates – a man who was George Bush’s defense secretary; and Hillary Clinton, a woman who ran against me for president.

All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves. One of the young men involved in the raid later told me that he didn’t deserve credit for the mission. It only succeeded, he said, because every single member of that unit did their job -- the pilot who landed the helicopter that spun out of control; the translator who kept others from entering the compound; the troops who separated the women and children from the fight; the SEALs who charged up the stairs. More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other – because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s someone behind you, watching your back.

So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I'm reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes. No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we built it together. This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we’re joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

###
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/24/state-of-the-union-speech-text_n_1229394.html
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#HELP LINK: Library of Winning Grant Proposals: ~

2012-01-24T17:38:00.000-08:00

http://bit.ly/z6uadV

HUD-99-018	Community Development Work Study Program
HUD-99-017	Community Development Work Study Program
HUD-02-003	Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Shelter Plus Care
HUD-02-002	Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Supportive Housing
HUD-02-006	Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Supportive Housing
HUD-99-002	Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance (consolidated application)
HUD-99-001	Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance (consolidated application)
HUD-99-004	Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance - Supportive Housing Program Permanent Housing for Persons with Disabilities
HUD-99-003	Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance - Supportive Housing Program Transitional Housing
HUD-99-008	Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Program - Shelter Plus Care Program Tenant-Based Rental Assistance
HUD-99-007	Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Program - Shelter Plus Care Program Tenant-Based Rental Assistance
HUD-99-020	Economic Development and Supportive Services Program Family Economic Development and Supportive Services
HUD-99-022	Economic Development and Supportive Services Program Family Economic Development and Supportive Services
HUD-99-019	Economic Development and Supportive Services Program Family Economic Development and Supportive Services
HUD-99-021	Economic Development and Supportive Services Program (Indian Tribes) Family Economic Development and Supportive Services
HUD-99-016	Fair Housing - Education and Outreach Initiative National Program Best Practices Component
HUD-99-015	Fair Housing - Education and Outreach Initiative/Regional/Local/Community-Based Program General Component
HUD-99-006	Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program
HUD-99-005	Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program
HUD-02-005	Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS
HUD-99-010	Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS Program
HUD-99-009	Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS Program
HUD-02-012	Resident Opportunity and Self Sufficiency Homeownership Supportive Services Program
HUD-02-008	Resident Opportunity and Self Sufficiency Neighborhood Networks
HUD-02-010	Resident Opportunity and Self Sufficiency Resident Service Delivery Models
HUD-02-007	Resident Opportunity and Self-Sufficiency Resident Service Delivery Models
HUD-02-009	Rural Housing and Economic Development Program
HUD-02-001	Rural Housing and Economic Development Program
HUD-99-014	Rural Housing and Economic Development Program
HUD-99-013	Rural Housing and Economic Development Program
HUD-02-011	Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly
HUD-02-013	Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly
HUD-99-011	Youthbuild
HUD-99-012	Youthbuild
HUD-02-004	Youthbuild

Copyright © 2000-2008 The Grantsmanship Center. All Rights Reserved.
P.O. Box 17220
Los Angeles, CA 90017
phone (213) 482-9860; fax (213) 482-9863
cdinfo@tgci.com

https://www.tgcigrantproposals.com/search/hud.asp
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#HELP A proposal for transitional crisis beds~~

2012-01-24T16:49:00.000-08:00

A proposal for transitional crisis beds

by Judge Sol Wachtler

This article relates to a program for transitional living and crisis beds for defendants with mental illness diverted into treatment under court supervision. The focus is the New York city metropolitan area and a large and virtually abandoned psychiatric hospital called Creedmoor. Like thousands of other very large psychiatric hospitals thoughout the nation, Creedmoor was closed in the mid 1970's. At that time, and with the advent of new medications and treatment modalities, it was thought that rather than hospitalize the mentally ill, it would be more advantageous to treat them within the communities on an outpatient basis.

No one anticipated the volume which would result, and we were all disappointed with the lack of treatment and housing resources. In recent years, the criminal justice system in New York City has been inundated with cases involving individuals with serious and persistent mental illness, including severe depression,schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other conditions. Accurate numbers are hard to come by since there is no routine screening in criminal court, but one recent study estimated that as many as three out of every ten defendants display evidence of serious mental illness. If true, this would mean that upwards of 90,000 mentally-ill individuals enter New York City's criminal courts each year.

Adding to this problem, is the current need and anticipated future demands on the criminal justice system occasioned by the discharge of veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Deployment of troops as of this date number 1.7 million, and the Department of Veteran Affairs has estimated that up to 25 percent of these veterans are, and will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

A great number of these veterans do not seek help, and the Veterans Administration is unable to treat effectively even a fraction of those who do. Many have problems readjusting to civilian life and have entered the criminal justice system for charges ranging from loitering to disorderly conduct, petit larceny and domestic violence. The co-occurring disorders of drug and alcohol abuse also drive many veterans into confrontation with the criminal justice system. Offering treatment, help and rehabilitation to return to the community is not only preferable to incarceration, but it is an obligation which the country owes to them.

Diversion programs
Criminal cases involving the mentally ill are inherently challenging. In all but a few extreme cases (the bar for competence is not high), mentally-ill individuals are found fit for trial and must proceed with their cases. Then the question becomes what to do with these individuals, the vast majority of whom appear in court on misdemeanor cases (more than 80 percent of the criminal court docket in New York City is composed of misdemeanor cases).

Many judges and attorneys have complained that their choices boil down to "brain surgery or band aids." "The options that I have are either jail or no jail," says one criminal court judge. Of course, neither of these options gets to the root of the problem or is likely to prevent a mentally-ill individual from coming back to court again as a repeat offender. As a result, a broad consensus has emerged that the cycle of arrest, prosecution, incarceration, and release is counterproductive for defendants with mental illness, especially those who have not committed serious crimes such as murder, rape, or arson.

In an attempt to forge a new response, criminal justice innovators began looking to community-based treatment programs as alternatives to incarceration. For example, in 1998, the Kings County District Attorney's Office launched a program, Treatment Alternatives for the Dually Diagnosed, offering diversion into mental health treatment for felony and misdemeanor offenders; many also had both substance abuse disorders and a serious and persistent mental illness. Soon, thereafter, specialized mental health courts opened in New York City, first in Brooklyn in 2002, then shortly thereafter in the Bronx (2002), in Queens (2005), and, most recently, in Nassau County (2008). All of these programs provide long-term community-based treatment coupled with close judicial supervision and careful case management. Their goal is both to stabilize mentally-ill individuals and to protect public safety.

While these programs are still relatively new, the early results have been promising, including reductions in re-arrest and hospitalization for participants and reduced costs for the justice system. Better results yet could be achieved if inpatient beds at local psychiatric centers could be made available to these programs for two specific purposes: first, to serve as transitional living beds for program participants who need to be in a safe and therapeutic setting while awaiting placement in long-term supportive housing; and second, to serve as crisis beds for program participants who are already either in long-term supportive housing or living at home while receiving treatment and who are also in a period of crisis and in need of stabilization, but not hospitalization or incarceration.

Transitional housing
Preliminary results from these alternative-to-incarceration initiatives have been encouraging, including mental health courts. Yet there has been a significant brake on their expansion and replication -- namely, the lack of stable and appropriate housing for participants.

To ensure minimal risk to public safety, many diversion candidates need to be placed into residential treatment facilities that can safely accommodate forensic clients. Without them, eligible candidates languish in New York City's Jail, Rikers Island, while waiting for a treatment bed. Some defendants who are eligible for supportive housing must wait in jail more than four months -- twice as long as those who have already have stable housing -- before an appropriate housing placement can be found. This is a serious problem for a program that is intended to be an alternative to incarceration.
Furthermore, several residential mental health treatment programs are reluctant to interview potential clients while they are incarcerated.

New long-term supportive housing units must be created to maximize the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of community-based diversion treatment. To meet the anticipated need among veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan Buffalo, New York, recently opened a Veterans Court devoted to those who, as a result of acts propelled by their mental health issues and/or substance abuse addiction, became involved in the criminal justice system.

With existing supportive housing resources scarce, many people turn to family members. Mental health courts and other alternative-to-incarceration programs, such as Brooklyn's program, Treatment Alternatives to Dually Diagnosed Defendants (TADD), will allow participants to live with relatives if such an arrangement does not threaten public safety. Unfortunately, too often those who are under criminal justice supervision arrive at the home of their relatives without benefits in hand. They may promptly become a disruptive factor and a drain on resources.

Even when an individual's housing situation appears to be sound, psychiatric stability is not always easy to achieve. Some people go through unstable periods if they slack off on taking their medications or relapse on illicit drugs or alcohol. And, symptoms of mental illness can worsen even when someone is adhering to a course of treatment and remaining sober.

All too often, participants in mental health courts or other programs offering alternatives to incarceration cycle in and out of hospitals or, worse still, jail. In many instances, participants in diversion programs who either have decompensated, or are on the verge of doing so, may be safely treated and stabilized without incarceration in jail or hospitalization in a secure psychiatric facility.

Crisis beds
A more coherent response to this problem would be a comprehensive housing strategy that: expands the availability of transitional, crisis, and long-term supported housing; promotes housing stability for individuals living with family members; and improves coordination between service providers and criminal justice players.

Such an undertaking cannot be realized overnight. However, as an initial step towards achieving that end, attention should be focused on the following:

Identification or creation of transitional living resources to shorten jail stays.

One transitional housing strategy could designate a small number of existing beds (perhaps a few of the transitional and crisis beds at state psychiatric centers) as resources for people who have been accepted into mental health courts or ATI programs and are awaiting placement in long-term supportive housing programs. Another would be to create a transitional housing resource coupled with specific services to address community supervision and case management for people under court supervision. One possible resource includes apartments or underutilized beds on the campus of a psychiatric center.

Improved access to crisis beds for individuals already in the community under court supervision.

Procedures to facilitate access to existing crisis beds could reduce both hospitalizations and jail remands in situations where a mentally-ill defendant has pleaded guilty and been admitted to a program but is destabilizing and requires more intensive services and supervision.

The New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH) has expressed interest in creating partnerships between the diversion programs on the one hand and a number of its psychiatric centers. These psychiatric centers could provide beds that would serve as both transitional living beds and as crisis beds for participants in mental health courts and other alternative-to-incarceration programs in New York City and adjacent suburban counties.

Pilot project
We have proposed launching a pilot program involving one of these New York State psychiatric centers, Creedmoor. Using Creedmoor as the sole site of the pilot program would allow a more careful evaluation of the program's effectiveness, and would permit the standardization of practices and the development of a complete model that could then be more efficiently replicated elsewhere in the state.

The influx of these new clients at Creedmoor would necessitate the appointment of a forensic coordinator to act as liaison with the courts, the district attorneys, participating case management organizations, and to help coordinate the transportation, placement, and treatment of these short-stay clients. The forensic coordinator will assist the New York State Judicial Institute in training judges could assist John Jay College of Criminal Justice in its efforts to similarly train police officers on how to deal with mentally ill defendants.

We have received assurances of cooperation from the various state and educational facilities and have secured private foundation funding for the hiring of the forensic coordinator. We hope to have ready all of the components of the program by the Fall of 2008.

Learn the history of Chinese New Year celebrations

2012-01-24T13:40:00.000-08:00

Learn the history of Chinese New Year celebrations

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On Being A Chicano de Aztlán @Peta_de_Aztlan

2012-01-21T12:21:00.000-08:00

http://wp.me/prH9G-36
Update: 1-21-2012
First Posted on 1-28-2011 by @Peta_de_Aztlán ~Twitter

Let us use the power of 'the Word' in order to better define and comprehend connected reality. We must learn how to make 'the Word' meaningful for us, so that is makes common sense for us, so that is serves us in our lives. It is the sacred right of the corporate slave to define himself in relation to his own liberation, not blindly accept the definitions of the corporate master.

There are different kinds of definitions for a given word: A lexical definition of a word is used in a standard dictionary or profession; a stipulative definition of a word is one we assign a novel meaning to for our own usage, local idiom or slang; and a scientific definition could be subject for various meanings.

To begin with, I am first and foremost a humane being of the dominant race of human beings, the modern life species known taxonomically as Homo sapiens. In our DNA there are no separate distinct races of Black, Brown, Yellow or White peoples. Concepts and terms around races of people are social ideas, social inventions and social constructions. Social racism is conditioned into the whole sick social system with institutional racism and further embedded by cultural racism.

For many, racism seems to be as natural as breathing. Racism is utilized by repressive ruling circles to keep the masses divided along false racial lines and conquered as colonized people. Wars have been fought and people have been killed because of being a member of one social race or another. It will take mass education and long generations to weed it out of our collective psyche. The fact remains, we are all human beings of the same humane family.

Those of us with a higher level of liberated consciousness are more highly evolved along spiritual pathways. We have become humane, that is, we have true care, concern and loving compassion for all living beings. We are not limited by superficial labels, the classification of categories or the greater or lesser concentration of melanin in our skin color. At birth we are born innocent and ignorant as humane beings. It is objective social conditions and environmental circumstances that affect our consciousness about our self-identity, cultural outlook and world view. Much of what we view as racism is actually a kind of cultural superiority complex.

In relation to my ethnic/racial identity I am a Chicano of Aztlán. Chicano was a popular term first used widely by Chicano activists in the early Chicano Movement of Aztlán in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I stipulate that a Chicano is a multi-cultural indigenous native and U.S. citizen of Mexican descent. His self-identity is neither fully Mexican nor fully American. He exists in a kaleidoscope of clashing cultures in the USA. A Chicano is of a 'lost tribe' abandoned by his Mother Country of Mexico in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo yet is still not fully accepted into White Amerikan society. In a way, he is an alienated alien who does not completely immerse himself in Mexican culture nor is he comfortable in only White American culture. It's complicated!

As a Chicano of Aztlán I think of the U.S. southwest as Aztlán in recognition of the ancient name for these lands. Some Chicanos consider all of United States as Aztlán. Many Native tribes and Native rights activists refer to North America as Turtle Island. Aztlán (from Nahuatl: pronounced [ˈastɬaːn]) is the mythical ancestral home of the Nahua peoples, one of the main cultural groups in Mesoamerica. Aztec is the Nahuatl word for "people from Aztlan".

The ideal here is that we who are of the original indigenous native peoples of these lands here in the USA and have the natural right to call these lands whatever term or terms we choose, not the European conquerors.

Keep in mind the origin of the term 'Americas'. Amerigo Vespucci (March 9, 1454 – February 22, 1512) was an Italian explorer, navigator and cartographer. The Americas are generally believed to have derived their name from the feminized Latin version of his first name.

Who has the natural and historical right to name America if not its original natives? How can descendants of original natives of Aztlán ever be considered foreign illegal aliens in their own homeland? Whether I am a U.S. citizen or not does not matter here. If my bloodline is of the original peoples of Aztlán I cannot possibly be an illegal foreigner in my homeland! It is my natural birthright to be here now!

Thus, I use the power of the word to define these lands as Aztlán, not America. I use the term 'America' instead of Aztlán in conversation so as not to confuse or lose people, especially decent Americans. Sometimes I spell America as 'Amerika' with a 'k' in remembrance of the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) mentality still in many White racists.

Be sure, White racism is still alive and well. We need to be reminded from time to time. We are not all well and wonderful. Racism is widespread inside the USA as a widespread social sickness and mental-disorder. People are denied housing, employment and are sometimes killed by racism. To different degrees social racism is still the unnatural norm in Amerika on a conscious level, a subtle semi-conscious level or remains deeply hidden on a sub-conscious level. Social racism still exists among all racial/ethnic groups in the USA and clings to no one color, no matter the color of the President!

Some non-White people because of self-hatred and an inferiority complex want to be or act like White people. They are always seeking the acceptance and approval of the great White mind. Their visions of beauty are White beauty. It is a sad form of self-hatred to want to be other than what you are by natural bloodline.

For the typical American the above is a lot to wrap the mind around. Social racism remains one of the great divisors in Amerika, along with other great divisions, especially one's economic-class status. We are still in a class society, class struggle continues, sometimes breaking out into class warfare and we do not yet have liberty and justice for all.

As a Chicano of Aztlán I can relate to the term Latinos to describe La Raza Cosmica ~ all those who consider themselves Chicanos, Mexicans, Hispanics or Native peoples of the Americas. Any social term for such a diverse and multi-faceted people is going to be vague and inadequate. It is what it is.

As humane beings we must embrace all of humanity as all of us being of the same family. At the same time we need to also embrace our cultural differences, those qualities and elements of us that make the promises for America and the world more fascinating.

Our world is changing now more than ever. Times are changing all the time. We must be receptive and welcome new creative changes in our lives and upon our global landscape. There are great changes happening all over the world. The winds of liberation are encircling the entire globe. Today there are great sandstorms for democracy and justice sweeping all across Arabia and North Africa.

No matter what we call ourselves on an individual level, let us remember that we are one family upon one planet we call Mother Earth. Always our basic survival needs must come to the forefront of our revolutionary consciousness: food, clothing, shelter, medical care and quality education. We establish governments to create a central structure and economy to help administer to our needs.

When those man-made governments no longer serve our vital interests and refuse to bring about required reforms we have a sacred right to alter or abolish those governments. In the end, a true democracy must be the sacred will of the people in power and with control over their own future destiny. Venceremos!

Research Links:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Homo+sapiens

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicano

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztlán

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_Island_(North_America)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans

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Venceremos! We Will Win!
Che Peta_de_Aztlan
Humane Liberation Party
Sacramento, California
Email: peta.aztlan@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan
http://www.facebook.com/Peta51
http://help-matrix.ning.com/
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."
~ President John F.Kennedy ~ c/s

Tarahumara People — National Geographic Magazine

2012-01-19T12:48:00.000-08:00

bit.ly/yYJYfP

Tarahumara People — National Geographic Magazine

A People Apart

Tarahumara

The Tarahumara of Mexico evaded Spanish conquerors in the sixteenth century. But can they survive the onslaught of modernity?

By Cynthia Gorney

National Geographic contributing writer

Photograph by Robb Kendrick

Each star in the night sky is a Tarahumara Indian whose souls—men have three and women have four, as they are the producers of new life—have all, finally, been extinguished. These are things anthropologists and resident priests tell you about the beliefs of the Tarahumara people, who call themselves the Rarámuri, and who live in and above the canyons of northern Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental, where they retreated five centuries ago from invading Spaniards. The Spaniards had not only firearms and horses but also disturbing beard hair; from their presence came the Rarámuri word chabochi, which to this day means anyone who is not Tarahumara. Chabochi is not an insult, exactly, just a way of dividing the world. Its literal translation, which goes a long way toward evoking the current relationship between the Tarahumara and the rest of 21st-century Mexico, is "person with spiderwebbing across the face."

The Tarahumara are reticent and private people who live long distances from each other, in small adobe or wood houses, or caves, or homes partway under outcroppings so that the rock itself provides the roofing. They brew an alcoholic beverage from corn, which they grow in small fields they plow by hand, and on celebratory occasions they gather to pass the drink from person to person, taking swigs from a hollowed half gourd, until they become voluble or dreamy or belligerent and lie down on the ground to sleep it off. They are extraordinary endurance runners, having lived for generations amid a transportation network of narrow footpaths through the canyons; Rarámuri means "foot-runner" or "he who walks well," and they've been known to irritate American ultramarathoners by beating them while wearing huarache sandals and stopping now and then for a smoke.

They regard work as necessary for survival but lacking intrinsic moral merit of its own, and secondary to spiritual obligations and other matters of the soul. Their traditional economy is conducted by means of barter, not cash; they have a word for sharing that doesn't translate directly into Spanish or English: "kórima," a Tarahumara woman may say, opening her palm for what a chabochi would call charity. There will be no thank you for the proffered coin, though, as kórima implies the obligation to distribute wealth for the benefit of everyone.

Continue »

They also eat a lot of Maruchan, the Japanese instant noodles that come in plastic-foam tubs. Foil-wrapped potato chips, too, and plastic liters of Coca-Cola, and Tecate beer in pop-top cans—you can spend six hours rattling in a four-wheel-drive pickup toward the deepest remove of a Tarahumara canyon, hairpinning around crumbling dirt roads hacked straight out of the cliffs, until the truck winds around the very last drop-off, and the sun is setting and the smoke is curling from distant chimneys and the sound of ceremonial drums is floating up from somewhere way below, and there along the footpaths are two empty soda bottles and a discarded tub of Maruchan. These are useful for holding the romantic chabochi imagination in check. By the most recent government count, 106,000 Tarahumara live in Mexico, making them one of the largest indigenous groups in North America; the majority still live in relative isolation in the area Mexico promotes as Copper Canyon, but both the place-name and the image of its inhabitants sketched by tourist outfits ("They live a simple life undisturbed by modern technologies," reads one online write-up) turn out to be fragments, understatements, misleading in the neatness of their packaging.

The Copper Canyon itself, for example, or Barranca del Cobre, is actually only one of a dozen massive canyons in this part of the Sierra Madre. Several of them are deeper than the Grand Canyon. And chabochi commerce, legal and illegal, is pushing hard into all of them. The narco industry is increasing its use of the canyons for marijuana and opium poppy cultivation, displacing Tarahumara families from their corn, bean, and squash fields. Government efforts to bring roads and schoolbooks into Tarahumara communities are also bringing cheap tequila, thugs with guns, and all the chatarra, as Mexicans call junk food, hardy enough to stack up in makeshift general stores with no electricity. Traditional Tarahumara men wear wide headbands and loin coverings that leave their legs bare even when it's freezing, but many more now wear blue jeans and cowboy hats, and pointy-toed boots in leather dyed to match their belts. Most Tarahumara women still wear multicolored head scarves and long skirts of flowery prints or deep-hued pleats or billowy pastels gathered into scallops like fancy window drapes. But some now wear blue jeans too.

The region's first commercial airport is scheduled to be built in Creel, the former logging center whose present-day economy depends on the scenic railway line that runs through town. Government planners envision a subsequent hotel boom to accommodate eventual jetloads of new tourists. Officials in Chihuahua, the Mexican state encompassing most of the Tarahumara territory, are courting private investors for a proposed canyon-rim complex—bungee jumps, a chasm-spanning gondola, more hotels, and an "Indian village" for the permanent display of "rituals, ceremonies, and clothes"—to be built farther west on the railway route, along what's now a tourist overlook crowded with Tarahumara vendors. The vendors are nearly all women and children, offering the baskets and weavings they have learned tourists like. Girls not yet old enough for school, or old enough but nonetheless spending their days hawking souvenirs, hold up fistfuls of braided bracelets while repeating the first Spanish they ever learned: "¿Compra?—Want to buy?"

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/tarahumara-people/gorney-text
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Mexico Drug War Update | StoptheDrugWar.org

2012-01-18T21:30:00.000-08:00

http://bit.ly/x4qHFB

by Phillip Smith, January 18, 2012, 09:30pm, (Issue #717)

Posted in:

by Bernd Debusmann Jr.

Mexican drug trafficking organizations make billions each year smuggling drugs into the United States, profiting enormously from the prohibitionist drug policies of the US government. Since Mexican president Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 and called the armed forces into the fight against the so-called cartels, prohibition-related violence has killed more than 45,000 people, including more than 15,000 in 2010 and approximately 12,000 last year. The increasing militarization of the drug war and the arrests or killings of dozens of high-profile drug traffickers have failed to stem the flow of drugs -- or the violence -- whatsoever. The Merida initiative, which provides $1.4 billion over three years for the US to assist the Mexican government with training, equipment and intelligence, has so far failed to make a difference. Here are a few of the latest developments in Mexico's drug war:

Thursday, January 12

In Nuevo Leon, military personnel captured a high-ranking Zeta boss. Jesus Sarabia Luis Ramos, "El Pepito," was considered by authorities to be the fourth most important leader in the organization. He was known to operate in Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas.

Sunday, January 15

In Culiacan, a Canadian national was gunned down. Salih Adabulazizz Sahbaz, 35, was apparently of Iranian or Iraqi origin and was carrying a large amount of cash on his person when he was murdered. The motive remains unknown. He is the third Canadian known to have been killed in Mexico so far this year.

Monday, January 16

In Cuernavaca, seven gunmen were killed in a fire fight with federal police. One officer was wounded in the clash. The gunmen were traveling in three stolen vehicles when police intercepted them.

In Zacapetec, Morelos, the local police chief was shot and killed by three men on motorcycles while he was at a gas station. He survived the initial shooting but later died in a local hospital.

Tuesday, January 17

In Little Rock, Arkansas, authorities indicted 22 individuals on trafficking charges for being part in a meth operation with links to Mexican cartels. Seventeen of those are now in custody. Police also seized 13.3 pounds of "ice" meth and seven vehicles, five weapons and $163,590.

In Ciudad Juarez, gunmen stormed a home and killed four individuals inside. Three of the dead were found in a bathroom where they had attempted to hide. Local media reported that at least some of the men had been released from prison six months ago.

In Nayarit, police arrested a local cartel boss. Benigno Ibarra Valle, 30, "El Guero Pelocho," was the head of the "Pelochos," a local branch of the Sinaloa Cartel. He is suspected in the deaths of at least five police officers in recent weeks. Nine other individuals were also taken into custody.

In Lazaro Cardenas, authorities seized 194 tons of meth precursor chemicals on a ship from China. The containers were all headed for Guatemala or Nicaragua.

[Editor's Note: We are no longer going to keep a running tally of the death toll; the figures are too unreliable. The latest figures below were released by the Mexican government in January.]

Total Body Count for 2007 (approx.): 4,300

Total Body Count for 2008 (approx.): 5,400

Total Body Count for 2009 (approx.): 9,600

Total Body Count for 2010 (official): 15,273

Partial Body Count for 2011 (official): 12,093*

Total Body Count (official): 47,705*

* Official figures through September 30, 2011. Unofficial estimates put the entire year's death toll at around 16,000, meaning more than 50,000 people have been killed.

Mexico

Pedro Pardo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A man with a relative's body found last year in Acapulco, now Mexico's second most violent city.

(AP Photo/Felix Marquez) (AP2011)

Related Article:
#Mexico Drug War Bloodies Areas Thought Safe: http://nyti.ms/zqfuNj ~

Mexico Drug War Update | StoptheDrugWar.org
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Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview | Politics News | Rolling Stone

2012-01-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

Blogspot Link: http://bit.ly/AiV4Y9

Link RS 1st Part: http://bit.ly/yvRrPj
By Michael Hastings January 18, 2012 8:00 AM

Assange poses for a portrait at his undisclosed location in the English countryside.
Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
Page 1 of 7

It's a few days before Christmas, and Julian Assange has just finished moving to a new hide-out deep in the English countryside. The two-bedroom house, on loan from a WikiLeaks supporter, is comfortable enough, with a big stone fireplace and a porch out back, but it's not as grand as the country estate where he spent the past 363 days under house arrest, waiting for a British court to decide whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face allegations that he sexually molested two women he was briefly involved with in August 2010.

Assange sits on a tattered couch, wearing a wool sweater, dark pants and an electronic manacle around his right ankle, visible only when he crosses his legs. At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He's become better at handling the media – more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews – but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western "intelligence source," and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? "He told me I was fucked," Assange says.

"Are you fucked?" I ask.
Assange pauses and looks out the window. The house is surrounded by rolling fields and quiet woods, but they offer him little in the way of escape. The British Supreme Court will hear his extradition appeal on February 1st – but even if he wins, he will likely still remain a wanted man. Interpol has issued a so-called "red notice" for his arrest on behalf of Swedish authorities for questioning in "connection with a number of sexual offenses" – Qaddafi, accused of war crimes, earned only an "orange notice" – and the U.S. government has branded him a "high-tech terrorist," unleashing a massive and unprecedented investigation designed to depict Assange's journalism as a form of international espionage. Ever since November 2010, when WikiLeaks embarrassed and infuriated the world's governments with the release of what became known as Cablegate, some 250,000 classified diplomatic cables from more than 150 countries, the group's supporters have found themselves detained at airports, subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, and ordered to turn over their Twitter accounts and e-mails to authorities.

Assange was always deeply engaged with the world – and always getting into trouble. Born in a small town in Queensland, he spent much of his youth traveling around Australia with his mother and stepfather, who ran a theater company. As a teenager, he discovered computers – his first was a Commodore 64 – and became one of the world's foremost hackers, going by the name Mendax, Latin for "nobly untruthful." After breaking into systems at NASA and the Pentagon when he was 16, he was busted on 25 counts of hacking, which prodded him to go straight. But as he traveled the world, working as a tech consultant through much of the 1990s, he continued putting his computer skills to use ensuring freedom of information – a necessary condition, he believes, for democratic self-rule.

"From the glory days of American radicalism, which was the American Revolution, I think that Madison's view on government is still unequaled," he tells me during the three days I spend with him as he settles into his new location in England. "That people determined to be in a democracy, to be their own governments, must have the power that knowledge will bring – because knowledge will always rule ignorance. You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you. The question is, where has the United States betrayed Madison and Jefferson, betrayed these basic values on how you keep a democracy? I think that the U.S. military-industrial complex and the majority of politicians in Congress have betrayed those values."

In 2006, Assange founded WikiLeaks, a group of hackers and activists that has been dubbed the first "stateless news organization." The goal, from the start, was to operate beyond the reach of the law, get their hands on vital documents being censored by governments and corporations, and make them available to the public. After a series of initial successes – publishing leaks about Iceland, Kenya and even a Pentagon document warning of WikiLeaks – Assange rocked the U.S. military in April 2010 with the release of "Collateral Murder," a video that revealed an American helicopter in Iraq opening fire on unarmed civilians, killing two journalists and several others. He quickly followed up with the release of hundreds of thousands of classified files related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, creating an international firestorm. But soon after he began releasing the diplomatic cables, which were widely credited with helping to spark the Arab Spring, he was detained and imprisoned after spending a week with two female supporters in Stockholm, entangling him in a yearlong legal battle to win his own freedom.

Assange agreed to a lengthy interview at his new home, on the condition that the location be kept secret, along with the identities of the core WikiLeaks staffers who have stuck by him since he ran into trouble in Sweden. Though he continues to run the group from captivity, working on what he calls a new set of scoops concerning the private-surveillance industry, the media furor over his personal life has turned him into a pariah among many former supporters, making it difficult for WikiLeaks to raise money. He's been called a rapist, an enemy combatant, and an agent of both Mossad and the CIA. His two most prominent collaborators – The New York Times and The Guardian – have repeatedly tarred him as a sexual deviant with bad personal hygiene, while continuing to happily sell books and movie rights about his exploits. His own personality has also proved divisive: He's charming, brilliant and uncompromising, but he has inspired intense hatred among former colleagues, who portray him as a megalomaniac whose ego has undermined the cause.

When I arrive for my last day with Assange, I'm 45 minutes early. Most of his staff have gone home for the holidays, and he's alone in the house with only his personal assistant to keep him company. Assange is huddled over a laptop in the dining room he has turned into his office, monitoring what has become his sole focus over the past few days: the trial of Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private alleged to have provided the diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Assange has two lawyers representing him in the Maryland courtroom, and his name has been mentioned virtually every day during the initial hearing. The government's strategy, it has become clear, is to pressure Manning to implicate Assange in espionage – to present his work at WikiLeaks as the act of a spy, not a journalist.

When Assange comes into the living room and sits on the couch, a small Jack Russell terrier jumps up onto his lap and remains there for most of the next five hours. "You use two recorders," Assange says, looking at the digital recorders I've put down on the small coffee table. "I usually use three." But as soon as we start the interview, the phone rings. It's Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, who had attended the Manning trial with Assange's lawyers. Ellsberg is in a car driving back to Washington, D.C. "I can hear you," Assange shouts, ducking into the dining room. "Can you hear me?"

Five minutes later he returns, energized by his talk with America's most famous whistle-blower. "Where were we?" he says. His assistant brings in two cups of coffee, and the interview begins.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
Page 2 of 7

Why is WikiLeaks so focused on defending Bradley Manning?
Manning is alleged to be one of our sources, regardless of whether those allegations are true or not. He has now sat in various U.S. military prisons for the past 600 days as a result of what we published. So we feel that we owe him a duty of care. I have heard from people close to his defense that it is their view that the abuse of him was in order to get him to testify against us.

I understand that you believe the Justice Department has been attending the hearing, to see how it impacts their investigation into WikiLeaks.
There are three gray-faced men who always show up. They're so furtive: They refuse to identify themselves, or to even make eye contact with our lawyers. They go into the classified hearings when everyone else is kicked out. One of them, we have discovered, is a prosecutor for the Department of Justice on the WikiLeaks investigation. I believe they are there to make sure that the government, in presenting its case against Manning, did not reveal information that was critical to its investigation into us.

In diplomatic cables, the investigation into WikiLeaks by the U.S. government has been called "unprecedented both in its scale and nature." How much do you know about it?
Since last September, a secret grand jury was empaneled in Alexandria, Virginia. There is no defense counsel. There are four prosecutors, according to witnesses who have been forced to testify before the grand jury. The jury itself is taken from the local area, and Alexandria has the highest density of government and military contractors anywhere in the United States. It is a place where the U.S. government chooses to conduct all national-security grand juries and trials because of that makeup of the jury pool.

The investigation has involved most of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the FBI, the State Department, the United States Army. It has subpoenaed the records of most of my U.S. friends or acquaintances. Under what are called Patriot Act production orders, the government has also asked for their Twitter records, Google accounts and individual ISPs. The laws which they're working toward an indictment on are the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.

And they're going after Manning, who is facing a life sentence, to get him to say that you're a spy?
To be another chess piece on the board in the attack on us. The U.S. government is trying to redefine what have been long-accepted journalistic methods. If the Pentagon is to have its way, it will be the end of national-security journalism in the United States.

How so?
They're trying to interpret the Espionage Act to say that any two-way communication with a source is a collaboration with a source, and is therefore a conspiracy to commit espionage where classified information is involved. The Pentagon, in fact, issued a public demand to us that we not only destroy everything we had ever published or were ever going to publish in relation to the U.S. government, but that we also stop "soliciting" information from U.S. government employees. The Espionage Act itself does not mention solicitation, but they're trying to create a new legal precedent that includes a journalist simply asking a source to communicate information. A few years ago, for example, the CIA destroyed its waterboarding interrogation videos. In the Manning hearing, prosecutors described how we had a most-wanted list, which included those interrogation videos if they still existed.

The WikiLeaks site had a "most-wanted" list of stories you were eager to get?
This list was not put together by us. We asked for nominations from human rights activists and journalists from around the world of the information they most wanted, and we put that on a list. The prosecution in the Manning hearing has been attempting to use that list as evidence of our solicitation of information that is likely to be classified, and therefore our complicity in espionage, if we received such information.

From a journalist's perspective, a list like that would be the equivalent of a normal editorial meeting where you list the crown jewels of stories you'd love to get.
Exactly.

So if you're going to jail, then Bob Woodward's going to jail.
Individuals like Sy Hersh and Dana Priest and Bob Woodward constantly say to their sources, "Hey, what about this, have you heard anything about it? I heard that there's been an airstrike in Afghanistan that's killed a bunch of civilians – do you have any more details, and can you prove them with paper?" And all those would be defined as conspiracy to commit espionage under the Pentagon's interpretation.

Given the broader implications, it's surprising that you haven't received much support from what you call the "Anglo-American press." In fact, The New York Times and The Guardian, both of which collaborated with you on releasing some of the documents, have done their best to distance themselves from you.
The Times ran in the face of fire; it abandoned us once the heat started from the U.S. administration. In doing so, it also abandoned itself, and it abandoned all journalists working on national-security journalism in the United States.

What the Times was concerned about is being swept up in the government's investigation. If Bradley Manning or another U.S. government employee had collaborated with us to provide us with classified information, and we, in turn, collaborated with the Times to provide it to the world, then the argument would run that the Times had been involved in a conspiracy with us to commit espionage. This is something that the Times was deeply concerned about. It said to us that we should never refer to the Times as a partner – that was their legal advice.

Bill Keller, the former editor of the Times, wrote a widely read and lengthy piece that attacked you personally. In it, he says four or five times that "WikiLeaks is a source, they are not a partner."
Keller was trying to save his own skin from the espionage investigation in two ways. First, on a legal technicality, by claiming that there was no collaboration, only a passive relationship between journalist and source. And second, by distancing themselves from us by attacking me personally, using all the standard tabloid character-assassination attacks. Many journalists at the Times have approached me to say how embarrassed they were at the lowering of the tone by doing that. Keller also came out and said how pleased the White House was with them that they had not run WikiLeaks material the White House had asked them not to. It is one thing to do that, and it's another thing to proudly proclaim it. Why did Keller feel the need to tell the world how pleased the White House was with him? For the same reason he felt the need to describe how dirty my socks were. It is not to convey the facts – rather, it is to convey a political alignment. You heard this explicitly: Keller said, "Julian Assange may or may not be a journalist, but he's not my kind of journalist." My immediate reaction is, "Thank God I'm not Bill Keller's type of journalist."

The publishing mindset at WikiLeaks, it's fair to say, is radically different than that of the mainstream press. Where a newspaper that received 500,000 documents might release 20, you released all of them.
Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times. The Times released just over 100 cables. There are over 251,000 cables in Cablegate. So our approach is quite different to that of the Times. The Times in its security arrangements was only concerned with preventing The Washington Post from finding out what it was doing. But it told the U.S. government every single cable that it wanted to publish.

And in return, the Times has basically portrayed you as a pariah, despite being responsible for getting them all this incredible material, as well as setting up an innovative organization to gather and process all the leaked data.
Absolutely no honor or gratitude. I don't wish to make light of the difficulties the Times faces in working in the United States, but I do think it could have managed those difficulties in a more honorable way.

After the Afghan war diaries came out, the Times ran a hostile profile of Bradley Manning that psychologized him into being a sad, mad fag, and can only be described as a tabloid piece. Then, when we published the Iraq War logs, we discovered details about the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians, and details of the torture of more than 1,000 people. Every other paper ran the story. The United Nations and a number of countries investigated the allegations, and even the U.S. military's own internal documents referred to the abuses as torture. Yet the Times refused to use the word "torture" at all. Instead, they ran a sleazy hit piece against me on the front page that was factually inaccurate. It said, for instance, that I had been charged with sexual abuse when I had not, and that 12 people had defected from our organization when we had suspended one. I don't mind taking a hit, but it must be factually accurate. For the Times to descend into a tabloid hit piece on the front page when we had just exposed the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians was not commensurate.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
Page 3 of 7

"Collateral Murder" – the video you released in April 2010 showing a U.S. helicopter gunship firing on a group of Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists and two children – was the first scoop that got you major media attention. You learned that The Washington Post actually had the video and had been sitting on it.
A Post reporter named David Finkel had the video. We had sources who explained that he had even shown them the video in his home. Yet he concealed it.

Finkel's response was, "There were a lot of bad days in Iraq."
He had been embedded with ground troops in that area for some nine months on the ground. He had clearly developed too close an affinity for the people he was embedded with and came out essentially campaigning on their behalf after the release of the video.

Were those kinds of failings by the mainstream media what inspired you to start WikiLeaks?
The things that informed me most were my experiences in fighting for freedom of the press, freedom to communicate knowledge – which, in the end, is freedom from ignorance. Secondly, my experiences in understanding how the military-intelligence complex works at a practical level. I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.

You first registered the domain name for leaks.org back in 1999, when you were working on encryption technology for dissidents and human rights workers. That was before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon enabled the government to dramatically expand its power to keep information secret and spy on its own citizens.
Yes. On September 11th, I was on the phone with a friend, discussing encryption algorithms. Very quickly, within an hour, I saw what the counter-reaction would be, and that all the proposals that the military-industrial complex had to spy on everyone, to remove probable cause, to increase its funding, would be rushed forward again. That's precisely what happened.

Then, two years later, the U.S. invaded Iraq.
The creation of WikiLeaks was, in part, a response to Iraq. There were a number of whistle-blowers who came out in relation to Iraq, and it was clear to me that what the world was missing in the days of Iraq propaganda was a way for inside sources who knew what was really going on to communicate that information to the public. Quite a few who did ended up in very dire circumstances, including David Kelly, the British scientist who either committed suicide or was murdered over his revelations about weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.

Before the scoops that centered on the U.S. government – the logs and cables regarding Afghanistan and Iraq – your focus was on other countries.
Initially we thought that our greatest role would be in China and some former Soviet states and in Africa. We did have early successes in Africa. I lived in Kenya in 2007, and we were able to source a document that exposed billions of dollars of corruption by the former president Daniel arap Moi and his cronies. The evidence ended up swinging the vote by 10 percent and changing the Kenyan election. But Moi's corruption didn't exist in Kenya alone. The money looted from Kenya was deposited into London banks, properties and businesses, into New York properties. There is no large-scale corruption in the developing world without Western corruption. That was an important lesson to me.

Another important lesson was that, very quickly, we started receiving information from what we presumed to be disaffected U.S. government employees about the actions of the U.S. military. The United States has historically been a relatively open society. But within the United States, there is a shadow state, and that is the U.S. military, which, as of September, held 4.3 million security clearances. That is equal to the population of New Zealand. That is a closed, totalitarian society that gathers and stores more information than any other society in the world.

WikiLeaks has been credited, even by its critics, with fueling the Arab Spring, and even Occupy Wall Street. Was this your plan? Did you imagine you could have this kind of impact?
We planned for most of what has occurred over the past 12 months. It is fair to say we're unexpectedly delighted that those plans came to fruition.

In relation to the Arab Spring, the way I looked at this back in October of 2010 is that the power structures in the Middle East are interdependent, they support each other. If we could release enough information fast enough about many of these powerful individuals and organizations, their ability to support each other would be diminished. They'd have to fight their own local battles – they'd have to turn inward to deal with the domestic political fallout from the information. And therefore they would not have the resources to prop up surrounding countries.

Would you like to see those regimes fall? What's the end result you're looking for?
When you shake something up, you have a chance to rebuild. But we're not interested in shaking something up just for the hell of it. I believe that if we look at what makes a civilization civilized, it is people understanding what is really going on. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, the end result was that people who knew something of what was going on could convey that information to others. And as a result of the Internet, we are now living in a time where it's a lot easier to convey what we know about our corner of the world and share it with others.

Do you think governments should be allowed to keep some secrets?
This is a question that is much more interesting than the answer. In some cases – tracking down organized crime, say – government officials have an obligation to keep their investigations secret at the moment that they are performing them. Similarly, a doctor has an obligation to keep information about your medical records secret under most circumstances. This is a question about obligations. It is absurd to suggest that simply because a police officer may have the obligation to keep secret certain information relating to an investigation, that the entire world also must be subject to a coercive force.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
Page 4 of 7

When people talk about your childhood, the two main words used to describe you are "nomadic" and "hacker." You first got into trouble when you were 17 for hacking into Pentagon networks, as well as several Australian sites. It seems in some ways that you've been engaged in a lifelong campaign against authority.
I haven't had a lifelong campaign against authority. Legitimate authority is important. All human systems require authority, but authority must be granted as a result of the informed consent of the governed. Presently, the consent, if there is any, is not informed, and therefore it's not legitimate. To communicate knowledge, we must protect people's privacy – and so I have been, for 20 years, developing systems and policy and ideals to protect people's rights to communicate privately without government interference, without government surveillance. The right to communicate without government surveillance is important, because surveillance is another form of censorship. When people are frightened that what they are saying may be overheard by a power that has the ability to lock people up, then they adjust what they're saying. They start to self-censor.

Growing up in Australia, what were the experiences that made you who you are? Was it getting into trouble as a hacker?
I lived a Tom Sawyer boyhood, which I think is a good childhood. Very physically adventurous on different islands and in the Outback and tropical regions, having small gangs of other boys, riding my horse, going into bat caves, exploring drainage systems and forests, hunting tropical fish.

I suppose the distinctive moments you have growing up, other than physical moments, are moral moments, so I designed and built a complex raft once. My plan at age 12 was to spend the night on the raft on the Richmond River, which is known to have bronze whaler sharks in it. All my friends said it was a great idea. So we went to do it, but all but one of them chickened out when it actually came to spending the night in the dark on the river.

A week later, the raft was stolen, and I managed to track down the people who took it. They were boys a couple of years older. We ran a mission at night to hijack it back, cut it loose, and let it drift downstream. The raft drifted out into the middle of the river. We paced along and the river got wider and wider, and I realized I'd have to dive in to get it, there in the middle of the night, with no one else. Thoughts of bronze whaler sharks started entering my head. I instructed my body to jump, but it refused to do so under those conditions. So even I have had that moment where I was a coward, but I think the situation called for it.

Did you like high school?
I went to many schools because I was touring with my parents' theater company. Some I did like, some I did not. I experienced a great variety of different types of people and educational systems, and it was hard to preserve some long-term childhood friendships, although I did develop some. It gave me a sense of perspective, which I think ultimately became important.

Did you go through a drug phase at university? Pot, or anything like that?
I was a bit of a stereotyped intellectual, other than being physically adventurous as a teenager. I'd do experiments on all my friends and write up the results, but I'd never take any myself.

So you never tried...
As for what happened subsequently, I think under the circumstances I'll just be quiet about my adult private life. There is something, actually. While not being a Calvinist, if you're striving to change the world in an important way, then it is beholden on you to, if you're opposing the actions of companies like Philip Morris, to not actually buy their products.

Let's talk about some of the attacks on you. Even many of those closest to you say you're difficult to work with. Are you?
I think the question is very interesting.

Spoken like someone who's difficult to work with.
I think your question is very interesting, and where does it come from? Well, when The Guardian broke their Cablegate contract with us, when we told The New York Times to piss off because of them sucking up to the White House, then these two groups tried to say that the reason we told them to piss off is simply a matter of my character as opposed to a fundamental institutional incompatibility. We say The Guardian broke its contract, the Times engaged in shoddy, tabloid journalism, fearful, uncourageous journalism, and so to defend themselves against that, they say, "Oh, no, it's because Mr. Assange's socks were dirty," or, "He's an extremely difficult person to work with."

But some who have worked with you over the years also paint you in an unfavorable light. You wouldn't be the only person in the media to suffer from a massive ego.
I don't think I have a massive ego. I just am firm at saying no. No, we will not destroy everything we've already published. No, we will continue to publish what we have promised to publish. No, we will not stop dealing with U.S. military leaks. For some people, that comes across as a big ego, when it's just sticking to your ideals.

There has been something of a mini boom industry attacking WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
There are actually about 100 books so far, but a good 80 of those are opportunistic books that have absolutely no real writing – they're just sort of collations of things. If you're talking proper books, books someone has actually written every word from scratch, there's over a dozen. One of the funniest is a Russian book, which accuses us of being in league to defame Putin.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
Page 5 of 7

One of the more interesting books is from Heather Brooke, a writer for The Guardian. She sounds almost like a scorned lover – she says she "swooned madly" when you first looked at her, then later concluded that you're an asshole. That seems to be a recurring narrative of these stories about you.
[Long pause] I don't think Heather Brooke is particularly interesting. The general phenomenon is interesting. Someone has an involvement to some extent in our work, which they then overstate tremendously to gain authority. They get something from the involvement – a reputation by proximity, information we've collected or some other item of value. Then we're not able to continue the relationship with them at the same degree of involvement, so they feel rejected. When you become a celebrity – at various times, within the English language, I have been the most famous person being discussed in the news – people's behavior shifts. What they lose through the lack of an ongoing relationship seems to be so incredibly valuable to them, so their desire to keep it, or their feeling of loss when they are not able to preserve the interaction, is so extreme that it drives them to do things you would not normally expect people to do. I always thought that A-level celebrities and their complaints about the difficulties of being a celebrity were rather self-indulgent.

But now, being a celebrity yourself, you feel differently?
I've subsequently changed my opinion. Brad Pitt doesn't have a superpower at his back. He just has some crazed fans and paparazzi. But now, having had all three, I must say, I'm not terribly impressed with the experience.

There were stalkers at your previous location. That must have frightened you.
Yes, despite the remoteness of the location – being three hours out of London by fast train, plus another 40 minutes in a car through country roads, and then through a long private driveway into the country house. We had many people try to turn up at the front door or to ambush me at the police station. It coincided with many U.S. politicians, such as Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, calling for my assassination or kidnapping. Fortunately, nearly everyone who attempted to ambush me was supportive in one way or another. They were mostly women who thought they were my fiancee.

Women wanting to marry you? How many over the past year?
Hundreds.

Hundreds of women would show up?
Sometimes also men. We had one, Captain Morgan, who claimed to work for Intel, and was a sea captain. He sold his boat to turn up at the front door, saying we were the only organization on Earth worth working for. One woman from Catalonia took a black cab from London and turned up at our house on the edge of the estate with a £450 taxi bill, which she'd convinced the driver I would pay once our romantic dispute was sorted out. She and the taxi driver convinced one of the neighbors to let them stay the night – the taxi driver refused to leave until he got his money.

There have been groupies. No, I won't call them groupies. Young women who have flown from Norway and Sweden and turned up at the front door. When I was in prison, absurdly, the only people to get any mail through in the first week were six women who wanted to give me cakes and blankets, which I rejected. But apparently there are women who try and visit any famous prisoner of a certain age, and know how to get through the system. Whereas not a single journalist from around the world was able to do so.

Have you been in any serious or significant relationships over the past year?
For security reasons, I can't talk about my intimate private life. I want to make that clear. My children have received death threats and are in hiding. Many people I am close to in a familial way, I have to be extremely cautious about exposing.

What happened in Sweden with the two women who have accused you?
It's before the court, so I can't discuss the case. It is very difficult, being in the position where you can't tell your version of events. It's clear that the matter is absurd, and you can read all about what the prosecution says its case is on the Internet.

By calling it absurd, aren't you implying that these women are making it up?
That's not what I said. I've never criticized the women. I'm saying the allegations are absurd. People can read the allegations for themselves. They're not correct, but even as stated, they are absurd. What the prosecution successfully managed to do is use the word "rape." Although I've not been charged – and technically what they are investigating is called "minor rape," a Swedish concept – that hasn't stopped our opponents from constantly referring to "rape charges," which is false. Back when we last did a survey, in February, there were a total of 33 million references on the Internet to the word "rape" in any context, from Helen of Troy to the Congo. If you search for "rape" and my name, there were just over 20 million. In other words, perceptively, two-thirds of all rapes that have ever happened anywhere in the world, ever, have something to do with me.

So why not say, "Look, I did nothing wrong, but I'm sorry if I upset these people. These are very serious things, and I'm taking it seriously, and I'll come to Sweden and face these allegations." People who support you wonder why you haven't done that.
I have no faith in the Swedish justice system being just. The International Prison Chaplains Association says that Swedish prisons are the worst prisons in Europe. That covers even Romania, Estonia and so on. That's because in 47 percent of cases, prisoners in Sweden are held incommunicado. So to the degree that my ability to act would be severely if not completely eliminated by entering into a Swedish prison, I am concerned about it. In addition, if you criticize matters, such as that Swedes have the worst prison system in all of Europe, then it would be the worse for you, because the Swedish justice system will take its revenge.

If you knew that governments were looking to find a way to pull dirty tricks on you, didn't you feel like you were putting yourself at risk in Sweden when you were with the women? Weren't you pushing the envelope?
It's been falsely reported that I have said that the Swedish allegations are a result of a CIA trap. That's false. What I have said is that the case was instantly politicized by opportunists – instantly, within hours. That day, we did receive, from an intelligence source, a list of priorities that the U.S. government had in relation to me. Those included finding out what information we had, what we were going to publish, evidence in relation to the prosecution of Bradley Manning. It also included a view that the U.S. would find the legal case against me very difficult, and that therefore I should be very cautious about extralegal means. Those extralegal means not being assassination, but rather the planting of drugs, child pornography or being otherwise embroiled in disgraceful conduct. So it was on my mind and everyone else's mind when the allegations arose.

Do you wish you'd done anything different?
In general? Of course. Many. I can't stand these people who say they would never do anything different. That simply means that they have not learned a single thing from their experiences.

I mean specifically, in terms of dealing with the two women.
I had never gone through a sex scandal before. There are certain ways, depending on culture, which one should handle a politicized sex scandal. I also didn't take it very seriously to begin with. I thought that it would disappear immediately.

Why didn't you hire a PR guy?
We tried. We hired someone in the U.K. to cope with the volume of media inquiries. He accepted at a very substantially reduced rate because we're activists, a cause célèbre. His largest clients were Virgin and Sony. After one week, it was clear that it was either us or them. His board, according to him, insisted that we be dropped, so we were. There have been about a dozen similar instances of pressure being applied to companies who we've been working with. When people say, "Why didn't Julian do this, why didn't Julian do that, why didn't WikiLeaks do this," in many cases we have actually tried. It's not so easy when you're fighting a superpower.

What forms has the pressure taken?
My personal bank account was shut down, and some of our people have also had their personal bank accounts closed. Many people have lost their jobs – even those who were quite indirectly connected. The person who registered our Swiss domain name lost their job when Bloomberg reported their name on the record. One of the board members of the German charity that collects donations for us lost their security contract with the Swiss stock exchange. The stock exchange even put in writing that the cause was his affiliation with us. The Tor Project, which protects people around the world from being spied on or censored, lost some $600,000 to the U.S. government, as a result of one of their people, Jacob Appelbaum, having filled in for me once at a conference in New York. This type of indirect pressure has been applied to a great many people.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
Page 6 of 7

What happened when you were thrown in jail in England?
I had 10 days in solitary. I think everyone should have 10 days in solitary, especially politicians. I broke the back of solitary. It is a sensory-deprivation experience. So I have a lot of sympathy with Bradley Manning and other prisoners who are similarly contained.

When you heard that door shut, were you worried that it might be 10 months or 10 years?
I had no idea how long it was going to be.

Was it terrifying?
No, I was rather excited and looking forward to the challenge of adapting to the new environment. I knew it would be helpful to our cause, politically, and it was. I told my lawyers, "Don't get me out too quickly." They disagreed.

So you saw yourself as a martyr to the cause.
There's been an observation of how the rest of the world was choosing to make my myth, positively and negatively. That process has been fascinating, horrifying and comical all at the same time. It's caused many laughs from the people who know me well, a subject of great mirth in the team. We're dealing with a situation where we're engaged in a historic endeavor that has very serious consequences for people's lives and political systems. It's extremely important, the consequences for everything from revolutions to individuals' jobs, and the gravity of that task is so great that I don't have time to consider how this celebritization affects me personally. The concern is always simply, is it helpful or harmful in being able to survive as an institution? Or will the character assassination wipe a million dollars off our budget or change political moods enough to cause us to lose a court case? Or will lionization mean that we have enough political support to survive?

How expensive has the legal battle been?
We have many legal cases. This personal case, the Swedish extradition case, I have to pay for myself. I don't think that is right. Actually, I think the organization should pay for it.

Why?
It is unquestionable that the case has been politicized as a result of my role in the organization. However, to avoid the attack that the funding would be spent on this case, which is effectively used by our opponents to assassinate my character, it's completely separate. Which means that I'm now completely bankrupt as a result.

Completely bankrupt?
Yeah. There have been all sorts of strange complications, such as that the previous lawyers managed to get hold of all my book advances and keep them. So I have not received a cent from any publicity that I've done.

There's a rumor that you have £3.3 million in your bank account that you're keeping.
Yeah, sure. Our opponents like to spread these rumors to deny us our donations.

So that's not true?
It's absolute nonsense. They spread rumors that I'm living in a mansion, they spread rumors that I'm homeless. Two years ago, fabricated documents were spread saying that I traveled first class and lived in a castle in South Africa, and I've never even been to South Africa. If you want to attack an organization, how do you attack it? You attack the cash flow and leadership. The character assassinations are dangerous, but taken as a whole, they're absurdly comical. We have, on the one hand, some 700,000 references to me being an anti-Semite, and on the other hand, some 2.5 million references to me being a member of the Mossad. I'm accused of everything from being a cat torturer to being a rapist to being overly concerned about my hair to being too rich to being so poor that my socks are dirty. The only ones I have left now to look forward to are some kind of combination of bestiality and pedophilia.

From a legal standpoint, it seems that you're in a no-win situation. If you lose your appeal on February 1st, you will be extradited to Sweden to face questioning, and the United States can ask to extradite you from there. But even if you win your appeal, there's the possibility that the U.S. could just come in and extradite you from England.
Yeah. And the ability to resist extradition here in England is not good.

The conventional wisdom – both in Sweden and the U.S. – is that you won't be extradited. Why are you convinced you will?
Extradition is a political matter. The extradition treaties – those from the U.K. to the U.S. and from Sweden to the U.S. – are both very dangerous for me. Every day that I remain in England, it is dangerous, and if I am in Sweden, it will be at least as dangerous as it is here, and very probably more so. The Swedish foreign minister responsible for extradition, Carl Bildt, became a U.S. Embassy informant in 1973 when he was 24 years old. He shipped his personal effects to Washington, to lead a conservative leadership program, where he met Karl Rove. They became old friends and would go to conferences together and so on.

Karl Rove? How do you know this?
Cables. Although I have not been charged with anything, there is an active allegation against me of rape and sexual molestation against Swedish women. So the political environment in Sweden to defend me against extradition to the United States is quite adverse. Some people have said, "Look, both the United Kingdom and Sweden and many countries say that there is not to be extradition for political offenses." But the United States government is not trying to indict me for a "political" offense – it is trying to indict me for espionage, or conspiracy to commit espionage, and computer hacking. The U.S. grand jury is looking at indicting us for charges which are not, on their face, political. But of course, the reasons are political, and that is a different matter.

So you think the government is going to try to lay the groundwork by saying you're a spy, claiming you're putting soldiers at risk, and then nabbing you after the Swedish allegations are resolved?
These are people used to laying the political ground and laying the media ground. I imagine what they would do is say that this material we published had adversely affected the United Kingdom or adversely affected Sweden. Perhaps they could introduce or leak to the press, under the surface, false speculations that we had killed Swedish soldiers in Afghanistan, or that we had sold information to the Iranians.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
Page 7 of 7

What has the low point been for you in all this? Were there any mornings you woke up saying, "What have I got myself into?"
I understood that the significance of what we were doing was greater than WikiLeaks as an institution and greater than our personal lives. In November, I told our people, perhaps to their surprise, that what we were doing was more significant than the life of any one of us. To that degree, the battles that we've had, the severity of the battles that we've had, is not something I have found to be difficult to deal with. Their severity is a reflection of the quality and importance of our work. That said, the betrayals are hard to take. This confrontation that we have had with the Western national-security state – it's not quite right to call it the U.S. national-security state, because it's a transnational phenomenon – has brought out the best and worst in people. It has brought out opportunism, weakness, other negative qualities. It's brought out greed and cowardice, but it has also brought out strength and loyalty in people. We have lost friends and colleagues, but we have also made very loyal friends, and we have seen the strength of old friends revealed. There's an old military saying: It's not the length of the war but the depth of the trench. For the past year, we have been in a very deep trench, and so the friendships have become deep.

Who has been your most critical public supporter?
John Pilger, the Australian journalist, has been the most impressive. And the other is Dan Ellsberg. It's the amount of time I've spent with him, both in front of and behind the scenes. When people are working in front of the scenes, in public, it is often because it is helpful to them. One never really knows what the true allegiance is. But when someone puts it on the line both publicly and privately, that's a sign of true character. Ron Paul did come out and make an impassioned and rational speech. It has not been the soft liberal left, the pseudo left that has defended us. In fact, they have run a mile. It has been strong activists who have a long record of fighting for what they believe in, both on the libertarian right and on the left.

What do you make of Anonymous? They've supported you.
We were involved with Anonymous from 2008. They were providing us with material related to our investigations into abuses by the Church of Scientology. It was a young pranksterish Internet culture, not something at all to be taken seriously. What's wonderful about what has happened over the last few years is that through engaging with forces much larger than themselves, starting with the Church of Scientology, they have been educated about how the world actually works. Then, reading information we've released and also seeing the attacks on us, they've been further educated. Now they have become politicized, they've come to understand some of where the big powers are. This was a very apolitical group that had absolutely no understanding about the military-industrial complex whatsoever, and no understanding about international finance. As a result of joining our battle and trying to protect themselves, they have come to see that the threats related to Internet freedom come from the military-industrial complex, the banking system and the media. The media is the third big power group, because when you're involved in something like this, it becomes newsworthy.

What advice do you have for journalists, based on your experience?
I have a lot of sympathy for journalists who are trying to protect their sources. It's very hard now. Unless you're an electronic-surveillance expert or you have frequent contact with one, you must stay off the Net and mobile phones. You really have to just use the old techniques, paper and whispering in people's ears. Leave your mobile phones behind. Don't turn them off, but tell your source to leave electronic devices in their offices. We are now in a situation where countries are recording billions of hours of conversations, and proudly proclaiming that you don't have to select which telephone call you're intercepting, because you intercept every telephone call.

So what's the future of WikiLeaks? Is the organization going to survive?
This week, I think we'll make it. We'll see what happens next week.

Where do you want to end up, when all the legal battles are over?
I don't want to end up anywhere. I want to do what I was doing before. I lived in Egypt when we had important things that needed to be done, or in Kenya or the United States or Australia or Sweden or Germany. When we have opportunities, then that's where I am.

When do you think you'll be able to regain that freedom to do that?
In relation to the United States, we'll have to wait for the revolution.

Michael Hastings is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and the author, most recently, of The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan.

This story is from the February 2, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

#WikiLeaks' Greatest Hits Pictures - Introduction | Rolling Stone:
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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-interview-20120118

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Homelessness down but seen rising anew: report | Reuters

2012-01-18T11:19:00.000-08:00

http://reut.rs/ycv0yH

Steve ''Pockets'' gathers firewood to heat the inside of his tent, that is part of a homeless community near Lakewood, New Jersey January 9, 2012.12.

Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson

By Ian Simpson

WASHINGTON | Wed Jan 18, 2012 1:59pm EST

(Reuters) - U.S. homelessness slipped 1 percent from 2009 to 2011, but the sluggish economy left more poor people struggling to pay for housing and just a step away from shelters, an advocacy group warned in a new study on Wednesday.

The drop to 636,017 homeless people last year could prove short-lived, since it was likely due to $1.5 billion in federal aid that will run out this year, the National Alliance to End Homelessness said in its report.

"The fact that homelessness dropped in the middle of a downturn is counter-intuitive," Nan Roman, the Alliance's president and chief executive, told a news conference.

The federal aid, part of an economic stimulus package, "seems to have worked," she said.

The Alliance, which groups public, private and non-profit organizations, said the biggest decrease in homelessness was among veterans, with the number falling 11 percent to 67,495 in 2011.

The overall decline in homelessness -- however small -- may not last long. Current trends point to the number of homeless people rising about 5 percent through 2013, Peter Witte, a researcher who compiled the study, told reporters.

In one indicator of possible trouble, the number of poor households that spent more than half their incomes on rent -- defined as "severely housing cost burdened" -- rose 6 percent to 6.2 million, the report said.

The number of people living "doubled up" with friends, relatives or others jumped 13 percent to 6.8 million. "Doubling up" is the usual step before people move into shelters, Witte said.

Although the homeless population fell nationally, it rose in 24 states and the District of Columbia, which had a homeless rate of 108 for each 10,000 people.

The metropolitan area with the highest rate of homelessness was Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida, at 57 per 10,000 people. Among the states with the highest rate were Oregon and Hawaii, at 45 per 10,000 people.

The national rate was 21 per 10,000 people.

The figures are based on data from U.S. agencies, including the Housing and Urban Development Department, and RealtyTrac, a real estate research group.

(Reporting By Ian Simpson; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Paul Thomasch)

Homelessness down but seen rising anew: report | Reuters

Related News

Another face of the U.S. recession: homeless children
Fri, Dec 23 2011

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/18/us-homelessness-idUSTRE80H19I20120118

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On the Relevancy of Electoral Politics Today Inside Amerika via @Peta_de_Aztlan

2012-01-17T15:27:00.000-08:00

http://bit.ly/y6hI1s

Posted 1-17-2012

Definition of RELEVANT rel·e·vant adj \ˈre-lə-vənt\
1 a: having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand b: affording evidence tending to prove or disprove the matter at issue or under discussion c: having social relevance.

Our long-term grand strategy should be to help bring about Global Revolution. It will take the majority of humankind to transform the world, not one people or movement can do it alone. Global Revolution does not mean a national event because we now live in a global society. There are no longer any independent free nations under the boot of the Amerikan Empire.

We need to be able to educate, convince and raise mass global consciousness worldwide, not only in the USA. We must unite with the liberation struggles of the masses of the people worldwide.

On a hemispheric level, America must mean all of the Americas, not only the Amerika of the United States. Despite any false claim to exceptionalism, Amerika is not the center of the cosmos. The USA is part of the whole world and needs to be integrated with the world on all levels, not allow itself to be isolated from the rest of the world.

Demand #3 of the Humane-Liberation-Party's (HELP) 5-Point Survival Platform is:
#3. We demand worldwide socialist democracy with proportional representation: wherein the majority rules, protects minorities and cares for all based upon 'one human being, one legitimate vote' in fair, free and open monitored elections.
http://bit.ly/spM1bB

We need to understand the relevancy of electoral politics today inside the USA. In the past, people have died for the right to vote. Are you registered to vote? We need to register to vote and allow all citizens to vote, including those in the US prison system ~ our modern day concentration camps. Today many people do not bother to vote and take the vote for granted as if it is irrelevant. Unfortunately, many people mistrust politics, politicians and like good sheep do not express any interest in politics. Many people do not vote because they feel their one vote does not really matter or make any real difference in the outcome of a given election.

Present day electoral politics inside the USA is controlled by the super-rich Amerikan corporate ruling class of the 1%. It is dominated by a two-party system, a two-headed monster known as the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. There are some other political parties, but third parties do not run the two-party system, though they have played important roles in Amerikan history. As times go by, non-aligned independent voters are gaining more and more collective voting power and potential. We need to have a variety of choices for political parties, not be limited to the lesser of two evils.

As a rule, one has to be filthy super-rich or have super-rich connections to even seriously consider running for political office on a 'national' level. Most folks know that politicians usually buy their way into office. POTUS Obama had about three-quarters of a billion dollars when he ran for the Presidency. Traditional politics are corrupt and rotten to the core. Understand that the bulk of the U.S. Congress is made up of millionaires. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that it was the eligible voters who elected them, along with the non-voters who failed to vote and thus indirectly enabled them to gain political office.

As progressive humane beings we need to understand electoral politics as another vital arena and tactical tool for us to have a real impact on mass collective consciousness. We can utilize political campaigns, run for political office, participate in political elections and need to stay involved in electoral politics in order to mount progressive humane platforms for our ideas and ideals. We must continually reach out, educate and enlighten all the people.

The Maoist maxim remains: Politics is war without bloodshed, war is politics with bloodshed. We are impacted by electoral politics, by politicians, by political lobbyists and by the decisions made by politicians whether we are in the political game of not. We cannot win if we do not play the game. For us to fail to participate in electoral politics leaves the doors to official power wide open for any fascist with money to buy his way into office and be uncontested by progressive humane beings.

All along the way we must combat all foul forms of fascism. We must remember that the ultimate aim of totalitarian fascism is to destroy, defuse or distract all valid relevant revolutionary consciousness. Fascists are interested in winning the hearts and minds of the people to gain their obedience and make their staying in power more secure. Fascists need to have an apathetic, obedient and passive general population to get away with their gross misdeeds and ruthless murders. Fascists need to keep the glamorous veil of the prestige of power up to hide behind and legitimize their right to usurp power.

At present, I am an independent voter with No Party Preference. Most of my life I have been a registered Democrat. When Ralph Nader ran for President I switched to being a Green Party Member and Voted for him in the infamous Presidential Election of 2000 when Fuhrer Bush won over Al Gore, though Gore won the popular vote. I thought Gore would win by a landslide. Afterwards, I went back to being a Democrat, then when Obama escalated US Military involvement in Afghan I quit the Democratic Party again. On the other hand, my blood father has been a consistent lifelong Democrat. Old family traditions are hard to break and sons often join the political party of their fathers.

Now we are into the 2012 Presidential Elections. POTUS Obama will be the uncontested Democratic Party Candidate. He will face one rabid Republican or another. Fascism needs the Amerikan people to buy into the circus of Presidential Elections and keep them thinking that all we need is a better President when what we really need is a fundamental transformation of the government and property relations between the 1% of the 'haves' and the 99% if the 'have-nots'.

The United States Presidential Election, 2012 - via Wikipedia: bit.ly/tVZp6K ~ is to be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. Electors actually 'elect' the President and the Vice President on December 17, 2012. The 2012 presidential election will coincide with the United States Senate elections where 33 races will be occurring as well as the U.S. House of Representatives elections to elect the members for the 113th Congress. The election will also encompass 11 gubernatorial races as well as many state legislature races.

Each of us needs to obey the dictates of our own conscience, not be locked into the dictates of any political party. I for one am NOT voting for Obama again. He betrayed my initial trust in him. I refuse to choose the lessor of two evils in any political equation, again. To choose the lessor of two evils is still to choose evil. I now see Obama as yet another puppet of the corporate ruling class, he is of the 1% of the 'haves'. I am of the 99% of the 'have-nots'!

To be fair, after seeing the idiot Fuhrer Bush in the Presidency, Barack Obama seemed like a dream candidate with assets. Many of us believed he was going to make a substantial difference in favor of the poor and oppressed in terms of present-day class society, though he was not a secret socialist. Alas, as a rule, POTUS Obama has failed to make domestic and foreign policy decisions in favor of the masses and is another CIA front man. He is a pawn in a larger global chess game. Yes, he inherited a tough situation but he can no longer just blame Bush for what is going wrong. He bailed out Wall Street, not Main Street.

Many liberal activists are going to vote for Obama again, despite reservations. Fascism will try to keep the masses engaged in the circus of the Presidential Elections. We are now in 2012, not 2008. Fortunately, the whole Occupy Wall Street Movement has helped us to wake up to what is really going on in the world, wake up to the evil greed of the corporate banks and wake us up to the call for Global Revolution. We need to transform all corrupt governments into a true People's Global Government based upon humane democratic socialist principles and for the 99% of the masses worldwide!

We need to study a lot more about politics, economics and about other pertinent subjects in our Liberation Struggles for a better world. We must oppose all forms of negativism, such as racism, sexism, nationalism and other core elements that keep us divided, confused and fighting each other instead of our common enemies. We must unite together and fight back against the dark evil forces that endanger all of humankind as a species.

No one has all the answers, but we will not get the answers we need if we do not ask the right questions. We can learn from the revolutionary struggles of other peoples of other lands, but we cannot import templates from other situations that do not apply to our general situation here in the USA. Liberty Square in New York City is not Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt. Work on the eastern seaboard of the United States may not necessarily work on the West Coast or in Arizona. We need to be practical, realistic and in harmony with the connected reality of a given situation.

I myself am just a homeless refugee typing at the local Public Library on my old laptop and blessed to be sleeping on a Christian Sister's couch at night. I am involved in an SSI Appeal ordeal behind my mental and physical health issues. I am an awakener who wants to help wake up Amerika!

As we share general values and general principles we must constantly engage in a concrete analyses of concrete conditions in a given situation. We can utilize ideology as a system of analysis, such as dialectical materialism, but we must not let ourselves be enslaved by any ideology or philosophy. I want to be free! I want to live in total liberation!

Each of us must think for ourselves as a humane being. Be ready, prepared for a long, hard and monumental historical struggle. Be assured that we will win as long as we never give up. Let us all evolve into being truly humane beings who have care, concern and compassion for all living beings. Let us work in solidarity together for Global Revolution in our lifetime!

Venceremos Unidos! We Will Win United!
Senor Peter S. Lopez AKA @Peta_de_Aztlan
Humane Liberation Party
Sacramento, California, Aztlan, Planet Earth
1-17-2012

Relevant Links:
Occupy Wall Street Home Page:
http://occupywallst.org/ @OccupyWallSt

Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement -- Voting Rights History:
http://bit.ly/zDa24r ~

Timeline: Voting Rights Act | American Civil Liberties Union:
http://bit.ly/wQvqCs ~

2008 Final Fundraising Figure: Obama's $750M - ABC News:
http://abcn.ws/waF8UP ~

c/s

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