Show Notes for Episode #45, including stuff I didn't get to.

New Details Emerge on NYPD Spy Unit. Democracy Now.org

The Associated Press has provided new details on how ethnic groups were targeted by secretive intelligence cooperation between the CIA and the New York City Police Department in the years following the 9/11 attacks.

According to the AP, the NYPD’s so-called "Demographics Unit" dispatched plainclothes officers into ethnic communities throughout New York City. The officers have reportedly used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even without evidence of wrongdoing. The NYPD has also scrutinized imams, taxi cab drivers, food cart vendors and other jobs often done by Muslims. The report claimed an unprecedented level of CIA cooperation made the surveillance possible.

The NYPD has denied the unit’s existence. But on Wednesday the AP released another article citing a memo from the unit’s supervisor and a PowerPoint presentation which described the unit in detail and repeatedly featured the department’s logo. According to the documents, the Demographics Unit is comprised of 16 officers speaking at least five languages and is the only squad of its kind known to be operating in the country. In addition to New York City, the unit has also mapped neighborhoods in Connecticut and New Jersey. The squad has maintained a long list of "ancestries of interest" and received daily reports on life in Muslim neighborhoods.

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Lawsuit accuses security guard of handcuffing first-graders for talking in class. Chicago Tribune.

The attorney for a family suing Chicago Public Schools over the alleged handcuffing of a first-grader in 2010 said  that the boy was among several 6- and 7-year-olds who were detained and handcuffed for hours for talking in class.

In an email to the Tribune, attorney Michael Carin said school officials at Carver Primary School on the Far South Side authorized the on-campus security guard in March 2010 to discipline some first-graders who were being disruptive.

Giving details not disclosed in the lawsuit filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, Carin said the school's security officer removed the students from class and held them in another office on campus where there were no other adults present. Carin said the students were handcuffed for hours and told that "they were going to prison and would never see their parents again."

"There appears to be no reason for an officer to isolate 6- and 7-year-old children, place them in handcuffs and threaten them for hours during a school day, or any other day," Carin wrote.

Carin said the Chicago Board of Education had ignored attempts to resolve this case outside the courtroom.

"Unfortunately, we had to file a lawsuit because the Chicago Board of Education ignored my client on the day of the imprisonment and every day thereafter," Carin wrote. "We hope the Chicago Board of Education acknowledges its responsibility and resolves the matter quickly."

In the complaint, the boy's mother, LaShanda Smith, describes the guard's action as "reckless" and said her son suffered injuries both "permanent" and "personal" during the incident. Smith, who is seeking more than $100,000 in damages, accuses the officer of acting "in conscious disregard" of her son's safety.

CPS, along with the Board of Education, are defendants in the case. Neither the security officer nor school administrators are named as defendants.

CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said again Tuesday that school officials have not yet seen the complaint and need to review it before commenting. Calls to Carver Primary School were not returned.
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A new study reveals that 25 of the nation’s largest corporations paid more money to their CEOs last year than they did to the federal government in income taxes. Democracy Now

Often using overseas tax havens, many of the corporations managed to make billions in profits but paid little to nothing in federal taxes. In many cases the companies received large tax rebates. The list includes some of the country’s best-known companies, such as Ford, Coca-Cola, Verizon, General Electric and eBay. The same study found that the ratio of CEO pay to that of the average worker in the United States jumped to 325-to-1 last year.

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Looks Like Obama Intends To Propose A Jobs Program That Gets People To Work For Free
By Susie Madrak. Crooks and Liars.com

When are we going to stop pretending that the only way out of this economic crisis is to passively wait for business to produce "growth"? The only way we're going to get out of this mess is for the government to create actual jobs. Robert Cuttner talks about the Georgia Works program model that Obama seems determined to propose instead:

    Basically, the company gets free labor while the person is receiving unemployment insurance. If the company does hire the person, there is no ongoing wage subsidy or training subsidy.

    According to data from the Georgia Department of Labor provided to the Huffington Post, just 16.4 percent of workers who participated in this program between 2003 when the program started and 2010 got hired by the company where they were placed, and only 24 percent got jobs at all. Currently, exactly 19 people are enrolled.

    Obama’s characterization sounds more like Danish or Swedish active labor market policy, where government subsidizes serious retraining and then subsidizes wages. But the Georgia program, now run by a very right-wing Republican state administration, is a far cry from that.

    Georgia’s top weekly benefit is just $330.

    With unemployment stubbornly above 9 percent, and above 15 percent if you count discouraged workers and part-timers seeking full-time work, this program doesn’t make a dent in the problem. It doesn’t create jobs. It simply alters who gets available jobs, while putting downward pressure on wages. As Obama’s suggests, Smith gets his foot in the door ahead of Jones, by offering to work for free.

    Why would Obama be interested in such weak tea? First, there is no additional cost to government.   Second, it has a nice corporate, free-market flavor.  Third, it appeals to Republicans. Obama is fearful that Republicans may block the next extension of unemployment insurance, and this Republican-style embellishment might be part of a bipartisan deal.

    But tiny policy changes like this move employment policy in the wrong direction by pretending that a massive jobs problem is amenable to trivial fixes. And it worsens the related problem of a lack of good jobs by putting downward pressure on wages by adding free labor to the local worker pool. Moreover, to the extent that a better-trained workforce is part (and only part) of the solution, temporary ad hoc training in exchange for free labor is pure tokenism.

    Even if the administration kids itself into thinking that this is smart policy, a political reality check should give the White House pause. How many voters, really, will this impress? What will it do to the actual plague of unemployment?

    As it happens, Obama has just hired as his new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers one of our premier labor economists, Alan Krueger of Princeton University. Krueger came to prominence in 1995 as co-author of an academic study defending minimum wages. Krueger is not making public comments, since he still has to get confirmed.

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A White House bioethics commission has revealed gruesome new details about American-run venereal disease experiments on unsuspecting Guatemalans from 1946 to ’48. Democracy Now.org

The testing focused on sexually transmitted diseases and involved U.S. medical officials intentionally infecting Guatemalan sex workers, prisoners, soldiers, mental patients—without their permission—in order to study the effects of penicillin. The New York Times reports, quote, "When some of the men failed to become infected through sex, the bacteria were poured into scrapes made on the penises or faces, or even injected by spinal puncture."

President Obama personally apologized to Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom for the experiments last year, after they were discovered. Since then, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has studied 125,000 pages of documents and sent investigators to Guatemala.

On Tuesday, the commission concluded nearly 5,500 people were subjected to diagnostic testing in Guatemala, and more than 1,300 exposed to venereal disease by contact or inoculation. President Álvaro Colom has described the experiments as a "crime against humanity" and ordered his own investigation.

The Guatemala program was discovered by Wellesley College Professor Susan Reverby while she was researching the infamous Tuskegee experiments. Professor Reverby spoke to Democracy Now! last year and described how much U.S. officials knew about the practices the program’s architect, Dr. John Cutler, was engaged in.

    SUSAN REVERBY: It’s too easy to say, OK, this was a period when there wasn’t research norms or any of the kind of regulations we’ve had in place since the mid-'70s. But Cutler's bosses at the Public Health Service knew this was sort of really on the edge. And the quote that I found that just really knocked me off the chair was one from the surgeon general himself, who said—and this is secondhand, but it was in a letter to Cutler, where one of his colleagues said, "The surgeon general says, 'Well, we couldn't do this in the United States.’" And that’s just a stunning, absolutely stunning, acknowledgment of what was going on.

Members of the bioethics commission investigating the venereal disease experiments say they recalled Nazi experiments on Jews. They argue that Dr. Cutler, who died in 2003, must have known from the Nuremberg doctors’ trials, underway by 1946, that his work was unethical. Panel members endorsed the idea of creating a compensation fund for subjects who are harmed in the future, or requiring researchers to buy insurance for that purpose. Some countries require these steps; the United States does not.

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Taking a revolution’s weapons: Push comes to shove in Nepal. Posted by Mike E on kasamaproject.org September 2, 2011

We have just learned that the Prachanda and Bhattarai factions of the Maoist party in Nepal have announced that they will not step back from their moves to disarm the Peoples  Liberation Army. Not only will they order then hanging over of keys to weapons storage containers, but they will also begin moving the containers themselves out of three of the cantonments. (Cantonment is the name for the treaty-supervised bases where the PLA forces are concentrated.)

Kiran faction of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has launched a major protest program against the disarming of the People’s Liberation Army being led by Nepal’s new Prime Minister, Baburam Bhattarai. See more reports often appear first on the blog Winter Has Its End. By Eric Ribellarsi

Today, the Kiran faction of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has launched a major protest program against the disarming of the People’s Liberation Army being led by Nepal’s new Prime Minister, Baburam Bhattarai. The Maoist rebels are demanding the immediate reversal of the decision to disarm People’s Liberation Army, a process which has already begun.

So far, this program has included:

A nation-wide one hour blockade of major roads and intersection throughout the country. We have heard this took place at roughly 50 locations in Kathmandu, including Kalanki, the main road used for entrance into Kathmandu. A boycott of major party meetings, including today’s Standing Committee meeting.
Torchlight marches throughout Kathmandu and in other cities throughout the entire country, beginning tonight at September 2nd at 6:00 PM. Visit kasamaproject.org for video.

The crowd was mostly young, and the feel was one of both anger and excitement. One young Maoist said to me “finally, we are standing up.” People were not at all demoralized. They were (and are) ready to fight to save their revolution.

Following these demonstrations, Biplab, a leader of the Maoist party who has opposed the disarming and has argued for revolution, has launched a mass campaign throughout the country to build opposition to the moves of Prachanda and Bhattarai within the Maoist party.

We have learned that this campaign will include mass rallies and educational forums, the mass production of polemical pamphlets, and a new graffiti campaign.