Picture This, and Risk Arrest

By JIM DWYER -New York Times

Published: July 27, 2010

 One afternoon, Duane P. Kerzic was arrested by the Amtrak police while taking pictures of a train pulling into Pennsylvania Station. At first, the police asked him to delete the images from his camera, but he refused. He ended up handcuffed to the wall of a holding cell while an officer wrote a ticket for trespassing.
Mr. Kerzic, a semiprofessional photographer, proceeded to describe his detention on his Web site and included images of the summons. He also hired a lawyer to sue.
In due course, Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report” arrived to sound the gong. He turned the Kerzic story into a segment called “Nailed ’Em.” It mocked Amtrak without mercy.
“Finally,” Mr. Colbert reported, “Kerzic cracked and revealed the reason he was taking his terrifying photos.”
Mr. Kerzic appeared on the screen.
“The reason I was taking photos of trains is that every year Amtrak has a contest; it’s called ‘Picture Our Train,’ ” he explained.
Soon after the show was broadcast, a strange thing happened. The section of Mr. Kerzic’s Web site that dealt with Amtrak all but vanished. His lawsuit was settled, and as a condition of the deal, he had to remove his writings about the episode. Now his page on Amtrak — at duanek.name/Amtrak/ — contains two words: “No Comment!”
Mr. Kerzic and his lawyer, Gerald Cohen, both said they couldn’t talk about what had become of the Web pages describing the arrest and his commentary about it. Carlos Miller, a photographer and blogger who followed the case, reported that Mr. Kerzic received a “five-figure” settlement.
But how could Amtrak — the national railroad, whose preferred stock is owned by the American public and whose chief executive and board of directors are appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress — require that a Web site criticizing the railroad be shut down as a condition of settling a lawsuit for wrongful arrest?
What qualifications does Amtrak have to function as a censor?
“Our policy has been and continues to be that ‘Amtrak does not comment on civil case settlements,’ ”Clifford Cole, an Amtrak spokesman, said in an e-mail message. “We would not have any more to say on this matter.”
Since 9/11, a number of government bodies have sought to limit photography in railroad stations and other public buildings. One rationale is that pictures would help people planning acts of mayhem. It has been a largely futile effort. On a practical level, decent cameras now come in every size and shape, and controlling how people use them would require legions of police officers. Moreover, taking photographs and displaying them is speech protected by the First Amendment, no less than taking notes and writing them up.
LAST year, a man named Robert Taylor was arrested on a nearly empty subway platform in the Bronx, accused of illegally taking pictures. For good measure, the officer threw in a disorderly conduct charge, on the grounds that Mr. Taylor was blocking people’s movement, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, the platform was about 10,000 square feet and there was hardly anyone around. The charges were dismissed, and the city paid Mr. Taylor $30,000 for his trouble. The city had already paid $31,501 to a medical student who was arrested while he was shooting pictures of every train station in the city.
After Mr. Taylor’s case, the New York Police Department reminded officers that there was no ban on taking pictures in the subway system.
In November, Antonio Musumeci, a member of the Manhattan Libertarian Party, was given a ticket while videotaping a political protest in the plaza outside the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan. Citing a federal regulation that dates to 1957, agents of the Federal Protective Service gave Mr. Musumeci a summons as he recorded a man who was handing pamphlets to potential jurors. The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on Mr. Musumeci’s behalf, arguing that the rules that govern photography on federal property were vague and unconstitutional. The lawsuit says people routinely take pictures on the plaza after new citizens are sworn in at the courthouse.
Since Mr. Kerzic’s run-in with the police at Penn Station, Amtrak has dropped its Web page on the “Picture Our Trains” contest.
Mr. Colbert wasn’t standing for it.
“This photography contest,” he said, “is Amtrak’s cleverest ruse since their so-called timetable.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

The Jobless Effect: Is the Real Unemployment Rate 16.5%, 22%, or. . .?

by PALLAVI GOGOI Posted 12:00 PM 07/16/10 Economy, Careers
 

Raghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed.

"Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.

However, Mayur's polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who's unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department's jobless numbers.

Even Austan Goolsbee Has Been Skeptical

Mayur isn't alone in harboring such doubts, nor is he the first to wonder about inaccuracies. For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.

In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled "The Unemployment Myth," that the government had "cooked the books" by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low. At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago. When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn't available to comment.

Such undercounting of unemployment can be an enormously dangerous exercise today. It could lead to some lawmakers underestimate the gravity of the labor market's problems and base their policymaking on a far-less-grim picture than actually exists. Economically, and socially, that would make a bad situation much worse for America.

"The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren't going to be thinking as big as they should be," says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College. "It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn't going to be there."

Indeed, it will add additional stress to an already strained economy. Businesses that might start ramping up after seeing the jobless number drop could set themselves up for disappointment when customers don't appear or orders don't flow in.

College Grads Serving Fries

Plus, having a job today is quite different from what it was just a few years ago: Many Americans have had their hours cut and are working for less pay. A Pew Research survey found more than half of all adults in the labor force had either lost a job or suffered a reduction in income because of the recession.

Ginsburg says the biggest source of undercounting comes from people who can't find a full-time job that they're qualified to do, for instance recent college graduates who take part-time jobs at fast-food joints or retail stores. Today, the Labor Department estimates that 8.6 million people are in this category.

The federal government counts such people as employed. However, polls show that these folks actually consider themselves "unemployed" and "looking for a job," and probably accounted for a large chunk of TechnoMetrica's respondents.

Jobless Workers Who Disappear

Another major source of undercounting is the unemployed who've given up looking for jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline number counts as unemployed only people who have actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. About 2.6 million people had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.

"Isn't it interesting that if you stopped looking for a job, you evaporate as a jobless person and are just not counted," says Gerald Celente, director of Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y. Celente believes this kind of undercounting has suited the government politically. "It's what government does: Downplay disasters and amplify success."

According to the Pew Research Center, a large number of people are out of jobs for a longer period during this economic downturn. The typical unemployed worker today has been out of work for nearly six months. That's almost double the previous post-World War II peak for this measure, which was 12.3 weeks in 1982-83.

Indeed, if all of the truly unemployed were counted, the rate would be significantly higher. The BLS, in a data point titled "U-6," says it counted the total unemployment rate in June at 16.5%.

Misreading Americans' Anxiety

However, John Williams, founder of Shadow Government Statistics, says when accounting for the long-term unemployed, the jobless rate runs up to as much as 22% currently. Williams's newsletter, which analyzes flaws in government economic data, points out that such a rate isn't that far from the 25% it hit during the Great Depression.

Both Celente and Ginsburg believe lawmakers' not-dire-enough view of unemployment is one reason why they didn't extend federal unemployment benefits. Of course, party politics is another deterrent. Ginsburg says the Administration's decision to tackle the health care reform over unemployment reflects its lack of priority.

By taking his eye off one of the most fundamental issues affecting the country, President Obama has seen his popularity sink. The most recent Public Policy Polling survey says 45% of voters approve of the job he's doing, while 52% disapprove -- the first time Obama's disapproval ratings have exceeded 50% in this survey.

It's obvious that Americans view unemployment more urgently than either lawmakers or the president. And if pollsters like Mayur or economists like Ginsburg and Williams are right, it will take longer to fix this hole because it's already bigger than Washington thinks.

Rep. Alan Grayson to Republicans: Stop Taking Food Out of the Mouths of Children

US consumer prices fall for third month in June

16 July 2010 Last updated at 09:44 ET From the BBC

 

Falling petrol prices weighed the inflation index down

The US consumer prices index fell for the third consecutive month in June, raising fears of deflation.

Prices fell 0.1% from the month before, adding to falls of 0.2% in May and 0.1% in April, the Labor Department said.
Falling energy prices were the biggest contributor, down 2.9%, while food prices remained unchanged.
"Core" inflation - a measure that strips out volatile energy and food prices, and used by economists to judge long-term inflation trends - rose 0.2%.
The US Federal Reserve has already pumped some $1.2 trillion (£780bn) into the US economy to try to promote recovery.
The continued fall in prices will add to pressure on the central bank to take further unconventional measures to push inflation into positive territory.
These measures may include increasing the money supply via further quantitative easing or intervening in the US government bond markets to hold down long-term interest rates.
In recently released minutes from the Fed's June meeting, policymakers raised the possibility of further action later this year, if the economy slows down further.

Why isn't this news in America?

New Old Photos

I found some old negatives from 1997, these images were taken at Pooches Pub in Rochester, NY

Table Talk (by Eve Garrard)

From normblog

July 13, 2010

'Bloody Jews,' he said. 'Bloody Jews, bugger the Jews, I've no sympathy for them.'
I gazed at him, aghast. Where had this suddenly come from?
The encounter I'm here describing took place very recently, in the course of a large academic dinner at a University in another city, not my own one. It was a pleasant occasion, and the people at my table were innocuously and comfortably talking about sociological issues connected with the economic crisis, all completely harmless and (relatively) uncontentious. And then I heard the academic on my right hand side say to the person opposite him, 'Bloody Jews.'
When he saw my appalled stare, he said impatiently, 'Oh well, I'm sorry, but really...!'
'I'm glad you're sorry,' I replied politely, collecting myself together for a fight. But then he asked, 'Are you Jewish?' When I nodded, this academic - whom I'd met for the first time that day - put his arm around me and said, 'I'm sorry, but really Israel is terrible, the massacres, Plan Dalet, the ethnic cleansing, they're like the Nazis, they're the same as the Nazis...'
The encircling arm was offensive enough in its own right, but the Nazi reference was conclusive - it's so manifestly false, and when addressed to a Jew, it's designed to wound; no one makes that equivalence without malicious prejudice. And this, after all, was an academic talking, a professor, someone trained to resist casual stereotypes and easy equivalences. I wish I could say that I delivered on the spot a furious and crushing analysis of his various misdemeanours. However, because of the special circumstances surrounding this particular academic occasion, if I'd done that it would have caused distress to other people who were present, towards whom I felt nothing but good will, and who have shown me nothing but warmth and kindness. I thought - perhaps wrongly - that I was under an obligation to be restrained. (Somehow, there always seem to be reasons for not telling anti-Semites just what they are.) So all I did was say loudly, 'I don't have to put up with this crap,' and took myself off to join another table.
What did he expect, I wonder? Breathless deference, perhaps: 'Oh yes, I do agree, Israel is terrible; it doesn't speak in my name, no, no, not in the least, not at all; it's an imperialist colonialist fascistic genocidal apartheid settler state, how right you are to be disgusted at it.' Whatever he expected, I don't think it can have been such opposition as I offered him, tame though this was, since others told me that he shortly became full of remorse, and went around apologising alcoholically to those who were present at our interchange. They, of course, were paralysed with a very English embarrassment at the spectacle of someone dropping a social clanger. I was later informed that one (Muslim) academic told the professor that he should apologise to me, a suggestion which he rejected, saying that he never apologised to 'one of them'. Apart from that, the matter was allowed to drop.
I don't think this would have happened 10 years ago. There certainly was anti-Semitism (of a relatively mild kind) around the place, among academics as elsewhere, but they used to know that there was something wrong with it, and hence restrained themselves, at least in public. I haven't met anything quite as nakedly direct as this in the universities before now, not even in the UCU during the boycott debates: venomous though those debates were, the fig-leaf of anti-Zionism was usually kept more or less in place. Mark Gardner's wry and melancholy comments on the constant drip of criticism of Israel and Jews, the rising waters of this toxic hatred, seem especially resonant to me today.
As I look over what I've written about this encounter, it sounds oddly unreal, even contrived - it reads like an episode in a badly-written novel. But it did happen, a few days ago, here in the UK, exactly as I've described it. (As so often, life seems to imitate second-rate art). The incident wasn't in itself very important - the professor had liquor taken, and perhaps was having a Mel Gibson moment, so to speak. But he wasn't called out on it; no one - not even me - decided that the public expression of hatred towards Jews had to be publicly combated, even at the cost of some social discord. I'm very unsure that my restrained response was the right one, even in the special circumstances which obtained at the time.
People like Ken Livingstone keep telling us that criticism of Israel isn't anti-Semitic, and that those who play the anti-Semitism card (as they see it) are just trying to distract attention from Israel's crimes. The Guardian reviewer Nicholas Lezard seems to think something like this too; as does Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Green party; the UCU leadership has also peddled this line on more than one occasion. Attacks on Israel are nothing to do with anti-Semitism, they say; it's just honest political critique.
'Israel... massacres... Nazis... bloody Jews. Bloody Jews.' (Eve Garrard)

Chinese Artist Who Led Protest Has Been Jailed, His Wife Says

Du Bin for The New York Times

In February, Chinese artists, including Wu Yuren, center, protested a real estate developer's plan to demolish their Beijing studios. Published June 8, 2010 By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — Wu Yuren, an artist who helped lead an unusually bold public protest last winter over a land dispute, has been languishing in a Beijing jail for almost six weeks after having been beaten by police officers, his wife said on Thursday. (more on Feburary 2010 protest)

Mr. Wu’s wife, Karen Patterson, a Canadian citizen, said in a telephone interview that the police were accusing her husband of assaulting an officer when he visited the police station on May 31. Ms. Patterson said she learned this only through their lawyer because the police had so far not formally told her that Mr. Wu had been arrested. She decided to publicly discuss the arrest in recent days, she said, because of what she called her frustration with China’s opaque legal system.
“You don’t realize how arcane this system is until you have to deal with it,” Ms. Patterson said. “It’s a nightmare.”
Ms. Patterson said she and friends of Mr. Wu, 39, believe that he had been arrested because of his recent activism, including his leadership of a group of artists from an artists’ district known as 008 in resisting the encroachment of a real estate developer. In February, those artists joined forces with artists from another Beijing neighborhood to march down Chang’an Jie, a wide ceremonial avenue that runs past the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. Chinese leaders are especially sensitive to protests in that area, and police officers stopped the protesters after they had walked about 500 yards.
The police detained Mr. Wu briefly in March. After he was released, he and the other artists successfully negotiated for compensation for the seizure of their studio space by the developer. Mr. Wu and some other artists then moved their studios to 798, Beijing’s largest arts district.
The land grab dispute had attracted lots of attention in the news media, in part because Ai Weiwei, a well-connected artist who is a vocal critic of the Communist Party, had joined the street protest and sent out Twitter feeds about it. Some of the artists in the protest, including Mr. Wu and Mr. Ai, had taken part in other kinds of activism, including signing Charter 08, a liberal manifesto calling for democratic changes that was signed by thousands of Chinese. Liu Xiaobo, an author of the manifesto, was sentenced to 11 years in prison last December.
Mr. Wu’s latest fracas with the police began on May 31, when Mr. Wu went with a friend, Yang Licai, to the Jiuxianqiao police station to discuss a dispute with a landlord at 798, Ms. Patterson said. The police argued with the two men and took away their cellphones, which then led to more insults, Ms. Patterson said, citing an account by Mr. Yang.
The two men were interrogated separately, and Mr. Wu was beaten by about five policemen, Ms. Patterson said. He has been held since then and was not allowed to see his lawyer until this week, she added. For reasons that remain unclear, Mr. Yang was released after 10 days.
A person answering the phone at the police station declined to comment and said senior officers were not available to talk.
Ms. Patterson and the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Hannah, have not been allowed to see Mr. Wu. Ms. Patterson said she expected that Mr. Wu would be formally charged within a few months.
On Tuesday, she went to collect his personal belongings from the police station. His shirt, pants and shoes were in a plastic bag, she said, along with a letter he had written to the police telling them to call his wife.
Ms. Patterson said Mr. Ai, the prominent artist, had been lobbying on Mr. Wu’s behalf, but she had little hope that his case would be dropped.
“The police haven’t explained anything to me,” she said. “Trying to ask for accountability is very difficult.”
New York Times 

Charter 08

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charter 08 (Língbā Xiànzhāng) is a manifesto initially signed by over 303 Chinese intellectuals and human rights activists to promote political reform and democratization in the People's Republic of China.^[1]
It was published on 10 December 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, named after Charter 77 issued by dissidents in Czechoslovakia.^[2]
Since its release, more than 8,100 people inside and outside of China have signed the charter.^[3][4]

• • oo

Clinton: Activists Being Crushed By 'Steel Vise' Around The World

Quoted from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/03/clinton-global-activists-_n_634715.html:

Clinton: Activists Being Crushed By 'Steel Vise' Around The World

KRAKOW, Poland — Intolerant governments across the globe are "slowly crushing" activist and advocacy groups that play an essential role in the development of democracy, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday.

She cited a broad range of countries where "the walls are closing in" on civic organizations such as unions, religious groups, rights advocates and other nongovernmental organizations that press for social change and shine a light on governments' shortcomings.

Among those she named were Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia.

"Some of the countries engaging in these behaviors still claim to be democracies," Clinton said at an international conference on the promotion of democracy and human rights. "Democracies don't fear their own people. They recognize that citizens must be free to come together, to advocate and agitate."

I am Israel Video

This the video that has been banned repeatably from youtube for what?  public demand...  !   ? What does that mean?

Muslim parents, have a little faith in music | Inayat Bunglawala | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The Best comment of the week

Quoted from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/02/muslim-faith-music-lessons:

Muslim parents, have a little faith in music | Inayat Bunglawala | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

"... the single most important news story that day was that one child had been withdrawn from music lessons in a primary school on religious grounds".

 

Perhaps it was. Even in London we have slow news days sometimes, on those rare occasions we all take a break from knifing each other ;-)