New York Times
In the Shadows, Day Laborers Left Homeless as Work Vanishes
No one knows for sure how many have become homeless since the downturn brought construction projects to a virtual standstill and sapped them of jobs that once paid as much as $200 a day. Most of them are illegal immigrants who may be on the streets one day and off the next, depending on their work.
The rules of the shelter system do not suit them, they said. They might be placed too far from the job pickup site or miss curfew if a job runs too late or is too far from the shelter.
Afraid that their immigration status might be exposed — outreach workers might ask for identification, though the shelters are open to everyone — they say they would rather sleep outside.
“We’re still learning about this population, about their needs,” said Robert V. Hess, the city’s commissioner of homeless services.
To the day laborers clustered on and around 69th Street from Broadway to Queens Boulevard, the downturn came on suddenly: There was work one week, and then there was not.
And for what little work there is, they have more competition — from men who used to be steady hands on roofing, painting and other construction crews and men who lost their full-time jobs in restaurants, at landscaping companies and in garages.
With more people at the corners, day laborers said, contractors will hire whoever agrees to work for the lowest pay.
“We’ve all learned the meaning of the law of supply and demand the hard way,” said Roberto Meneses, 48, a day laborer from Mexico who has been trying to organize his peers under a fledgling group called United Day Laborers of Woodside.
They have had to adapt just as fast as they had learned to install drywall and unclog pipes. One man said he spent 20 days picking apples at a farm near Buffalo in November to earn some cash. Others started to make do with one meal a day. Many are no longer able to send money home.
TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.
“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”
When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.
The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless.
Dec. 3, 2009
Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, origin ... or other status ..."
The Holy Bible tells us that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28)
Every generic religious text encourages believers to respect essential human dignity, yet some selected scriptures are interpreted to justify the derogation or inferiority of women and girls, our fellow human beings.
The rules of the shelter system do not suit them, they said. They might be placed too far from the job pickup site or miss curfew if a job runs too late or is too far from the shelter.
Afraid that their immigration status might be exposed — outreach workers might ask for identification, though the shelters are open to everyone — they say they would rather sleep outside.
“We’re still learning about this population, about their needs,” said Robert V. Hess, the city’s commissioner of homeless services.
To the day laborers clustered on and around 69th Street from Broadway to Queens Boulevard, the downturn came on suddenly: There was work one week, and then there was not.
And for what little work there is, they have more competition — from men who used to be steady hands on roofing, painting and other construction crews and men who lost their full-time jobs in restaurants, at landscaping companies and in garages.
With more people at the corners, day laborers said, contractors will hire whoever agrees to work for the lowest pay.
“We’ve all learned the meaning of the law of supply and demand the hard way,” said Roberto Meneses, 48, a day laborer from Mexico who has been trying to organize his peers under a fledgling group called United Day Laborers of Woodside.
They have had to adapt just as fast as they had learned to install drywall and unclog pipes. One man said he spent 20 days picking apples at a farm near Buffalo in November to earn some cash. Others started to make do with one meal a day. Many are no longer able to send money home.
For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk
“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”
When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.
The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless.
Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.
Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks.
But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.
After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.
Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks.
But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.
After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.
The crash can happen again Pt4
Refugees Are Not Bargaining Chips
By BILL FRELICK
A virus is sweeping Asia. The symptoms are heightened xenophobia and amnesia about fundamental refugee rights. Australia and Indonesia succumbed first, in October, when they stopped boats carrying Sri Lankans.
Cambodia was next to catch the fever. A small group of Uighur men, women and children fleeing the aftermath of the worst ethnic violence in decades in China sought asylum in Cambodia. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees issued “persons of concern” letters on their behalf and moved them into a facility it managed jointly with the Cambodian government. But Cambodia forcibly returned 20 Uighurs on Dec. 19, despite the protests of the U.N. agency, the diplomatic corps and human rights groups. They have not been heard from since.
Now Thailand has gone viral. On Monday, soldiers with truncheons and shields herded more than 4,000 Hmong asylum seekers onto buses back to Laos from the Huay Nam Khao camp in Petchabun Province, where they have lived since 2005. For four years, the Thai Army detained the Hmong in the closed camp, never allowing the U.N. refugee agency to interview them or assess their claims to refugee status. The Thai Army’s own screening process, based on criteria never made public, found that hundreds of the Hmong had legitimate protection concerns, but Thailand never provided any additional protections.
The willingness to flout international refugee law and to ignore the entreaties of refugees not to be sent back to their home countries has become the mark of chummy bilateral relations between Asian states.
The African refugee convention has a provision that should be particularly instructive for Asian governments: “The grant of asylum to refugees is a peaceful and humanitarian act and shall not be regarded as an unfriendly act by any Member State.”
The spate of refugee returns has the urgency of an impending epidemic that needs to be contained.
The spate of refugee returns has the urgency of an impending epidemic that needs to be contained.
Two Savings Accounts in Every Garage
Microcredit is undoubtedly the most visible innovation in anti-poverty policy in the last half century. In the three decades since Mohammed Yunus gave his first loan to a group of Bangladeshi women, the number of microcredit borrowers has crossed 150 millions. The majority had no access to credit from banks before microcredit came to them. MFIs have managed to find ways to be financially sustainable and to keep growing fast.
Hands Off the Watershed
New York City has now officially registered its ringing opposition to a proposal by state regulators to allow natural gas drilling in the watershed that supplies drinking water to more than eight million city residents. Albany should amend its proposal and put the area permanently off limits to drilling.
The watershed covers roughly a million acres of farms, forests, lakes and streams northwest of the city. Its subsurface rock formations contain rich deposits of natural gas and are part of a much larger geologic formation known as the Marcellus Shale, which runs northward from West Virginia into New York’s southern tier.
The state wants to exploit this resource because it could add to the region’s energy supplies and give a much-needed lift to the upstate economy. But the watershed contains just one-tenth of the state’s known gas deposits. That means New York would not be giving up all that much if it does the right thing and bans drilling there.
Last fall, Albany issued a thick set of rules intended to regulate drilling. Environmentalists and city officials immediately cautioned that while carefully regulated drilling could proceed in other parts of the state with minimal environmental damage, it would be foolish to risk the city’s water supply.
A new report commissioned by the city, and written by scientists and engineers who specialize in gas drilling, confirms those fears. It says that the drilling process — which is done by injecting water and chemicals at high pressure into the rock formations — “creates asubstantial risk of chemical contamination and infrastructure damage.”
The watershed covers roughly a million acres of farms, forests, lakes and streams northwest of the city. Its subsurface rock formations contain rich deposits of natural gas and are part of a much larger geologic formation known as the Marcellus Shale, which runs northward from West Virginia into New York’s southern tier.
The state wants to exploit this resource because it could add to the region’s energy supplies and give a much-needed lift to the upstate economy. But the watershed contains just one-tenth of the state’s known gas deposits. That means New York would not be giving up all that much if it does the right thing and bans drilling there.
Last fall, Albany issued a thick set of rules intended to regulate drilling. Environmentalists and city officials immediately cautioned that while carefully regulated drilling could proceed in other parts of the state with minimal environmental damage, it would be foolish to risk the city’s water supply.
A new report commissioned by the city, and written by scientists and engineers who specialize in gas drilling, confirms those fears. It says that the drilling process — which is done by injecting water and chemicals at high pressure into the rock formations — “creates asubstantial risk of chemical contamination and infrastructure damage.”
U.S. Sees Window to Pressure Iran on Nuclear Fuel
( This headline is incessant over decades (!). See a summary of theNPT to understand the U.S. systematic undercutting of the treaty's 'Third Pillar' by always claiming signatories - as Iraq was - are up to weaponization, the very thing the IAEA arrangements are supposedly to help prevent being secret. Dec. 20 on Afghanistan,etc. covers the parameters of the Lie. Dec 4 Climate Fraud gives further context to the overall package. Perception Alteration is the open file on mindwashing articles and sources. )
Contractors Outnumber U.S. Troops in Afghanistan
Civilian contractors working for the Pentagon inAfghanistan not only outnumber the uniformed troops, according to a report by a Congressional research group, but also form the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel recorded in any war in the history of the United States.
What is clear, the report says, is that when contractors for the Pentagon or other agencies are not properly managed — as when civilian interrogators committed abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq or members of the security firm Blackwatershot and killed 17 Iraqi citizens in Baghdad — the American effort can be severely undermined.
( Interestingly, I can recall seeing a TV special on U.S. contractors working for the Sierra Leone government some years back { History Channel, I expect }. That practice was then reported as being pulled back because it bypassed control of U.S. forces by the chain of command : and constituted a domestic menace to the government for companies to own private armies. )
The Afghanistan Abyss
President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.
The group’s concern
is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.
Americans just don’t understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. Mr. Hart adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there — possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.
“We’ve bitten off more than we can chew; we’re setting ourselves up for failure,” said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as “nonsense.”
( Canadian forces were reported to have opined the same. Part of the problem was that burning crops sets people up for starvation in a place where it was plentiful enough. Canada didn't sign up for renewal while that was going on : a change the U.S. then reversed over unanimous NATO opposition. )
Guantanamo, IllinoisThe Cairo Declaration to End Israeli ApartheidThe Gaza Freedom Marchers approved today an important declaration aimed at accelerating the global campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli Apartheid. The Cairo Declaration deserves the widest possible circulation. Hundreds of Israeli pacifists, both Arabs and Jews, marched in central Tel Aviv on Saturday to protest against the blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip. The demonstrators -- estimated at more than 1,000 by organisers of the march -- changed slogans urging "liberty and justice for Gaza" as they marked the first anniversary of Israel's war on Gaza. They called for the lifting of the blockade on the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave and accused Israel of carrying out "war crimes" in the territory. Demolishing Bagram to Destroy Evidence?In a notification filed on December 30th in a U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department has announced that in addition to shifting prisoners from Bagram to a newly built facility in nearby Parwan, the Pentagon also intends to demolish the original facility at Bagram. According to the notification, the Department of Defense will shift prisoners to Parwan by January 19th. Shortly thereafter, plans to demolish the Bagram facility will be put into effect. According to an article in the Huffington Post on December 31st, Ramzi Kassem – a lawyer serving as counsel for several Guantanamo and Bagram detainees – has stated that the plan to demolish Bagram “amounts to destroying evidence in the cases of detainees who say they were tortured there.” Kassem, also a law professor at City University of New York, maintains that Bagram ought to be preserved as evidence and as a crime scene. In Kassem’s view, the administration’s decision to demolish the facility can be read as an ”underhanded attempt” on the part of a government concerned with “covering its own tracks.” Iraq expresses dismay at US verdictBaghdad denounces US judge's decision to dismiss murder charges against five Blackwater members |
HOW DOES ALL THAT HOPE AND CHANGE TASTE NOW? (UPDATE 31)
The cost of "exporting democracy" is real blood on our hands. Look at what your blind support of Obama is costing:
Imagine those are your kids lying there dead. What is the solution to Af/Pak? Nicholas Kristof nailed it. Education and agricultural development, not more troops and bombs and dead children.
An Afghan’s Lament
The Times reports that a team of US-Nato special forces descended on a village in Kunar and apprehended 10 Afghans, including 8 schoolchildren — grades six, nine and ten — and executed them in cold blood. Seven of the children belonged to a single family, and many were handcuffed before being shot. Following is the lament of an Afghan poet who has endured enough of the freedom brought him by the so-called Operation Enduring Freedom.
FOOL YOU 4 TIMES, SHAME ON WHO? WHAT TO BELIEVE ABOUT YEMEN
Am I the only one who thinks this is way too convenient?
Last week it comes out Obama is bombing civilians in Yemen.
Now the "terrorist" who conveniently set his lap on fire is alleged to have ties to Al Qaeda in Yemen.
Melbourne, Australia
Dec. 3, 2009
There are international agreements as well as our own Holy Scriptures that guide us:
Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, origin ... or other status ..."
The Holy Bible tells us that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28)
Every generic religious text encourages believers to respect essential human dignity, yet some selected scriptures are interpreted to justify the derogation or inferiority of women and girls, our fellow human beings.
It is clear that during the early Christian era women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers, and prophets. It wasn't until the fourth century that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant positions within the religious hierarchy.
Canada's airlines fear violating privacy under new U.S. rules
Canada's major airlines say they will be forced either to break privacy laws or to ignore new American air security rules unless the federal government comes up with a response to U.S. demands for passenger information.
The National Airlines Council of Canada, which represents the four largest Canadian carriers, is pleading with the government to find "a permanent solution" to the dilemma posed by the U.S. Secure Flight program.
The program would collect the name, gender and birth date of the approximately five million Canadians who fly through American airspace en route to destinations such as the Caribbean, Mexico and South America, even if their planes don't touch the ground in the States.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would then vet the names against security watch lists. Passengers whose names appear on the lists could face anything from extra security screening to being barred from a flight. There are also concerns the personal data could be used for purposes unrelated to aviation security.
In a November letter to Bill Baker, deputy minister of Public Safety, the National Airlines Council said Canadian carriers "are not aware of any progress" on the discussions and are concerned the TSA might suddenly enact the overflight provisions.
The council said this would force Canadian airlines to breach either Secure Flight or the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, a federal privacy law that applies to Canadian companies.
An internal Public Safety document prepared last January agrees that sharing such information is "currently prohibited" under the privacy law.
SUN'S PROTECTIVE 'BUBBLE' IS SHRINKING
The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, Nasa scientists have warned.
New data has revealed that the heliosphere, the protective shield
of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per
cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the
space race began 50 years ago.
of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per
cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the
space race began 50 years ago.
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