G.O.P.’s Dirty Tricks Begin

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 18, 2007

The folks who gave us the Willie Horton ads, the Swift boat campaign, the purges of black voters in Florida and endless other dirty electoral tricks are at it again.

Like crack addicts confronting the irresistible vial, the evil geniuses of the G.O.P. can’t seem to help themselves. This time — with an eye toward seizing the White House again next year, even if they lose the popular vote — they’re trying to rewrite the rules for the distribution of electoral votes in California.

Under current law, all of California’s 55 electoral votes go to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote statewide. This “winner take all” system is the norm in the U.S. It’s in place in all but two states, Maine and Nebraska, which have just four and five electoral votes, respectively.

Now comes a move, from lawyers with close ties to the Republican Party, to scrap the current system in California and replace it with one that would divide up the electoral votes in a way that would likely give 20 or more of them to the candidate who loses the popular vote in the state.

Democrats fear, correctly, that this maneuver could checkmate even their best efforts to win back the White House next year.

California is widely expected to go Democratic in the presidential election. Its 55 electoral votes are a hefty chunk of the 270 needed to win, and thus crucial to Democratic hopes.

Under this new proposal, the 20 or more electoral votes that would be denied the winner of the statewide vote in California, could well be enough to hand the White House to a Republican candidate who loses the popular vote nationally.

“Their idea is to have California be the only big state to do this,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist who is supporting Senator Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. “If the Republicans can poach 20 electoral votes from the Democrats in California, that’s the same as winning all the electoral votes in Ohio. You’re basically giving them the election.”

The effort to change the way Californians vote for president has been cloaked in the typically deceptive garb that the G.O.P. pulls out for its underhanded maneuvering. The proposal has been dubbed the “Presidential Election Reform Act.” It is being led by Thomas Hiltachk of Bell, McAndrews and Hiltachk, a law firm that has represented both the state Republican Party and G.O.P. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

According to The Associated Press, the firm was also linked to a political committee, largely funded by Bob Perry, that targeted Democratic candidates in 2006. Mr. Perry, a longtime supporter of George W. Bush, contributed millions of dollars to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose intense and deceptive campaign in 2004 was so damaging to the candidacy of John Kerry.

This crowd is no more interested in genuine electoral reform than Britney Spears is.

Mr. Hiltachk and his operatives are trying to gather enough signatures to get their proposal before the voters as a California ballot initiative next June. If they succeed, and the voters approve the initiative, the rules for apportioning the state’s electoral votes would be changed for the 2008 presidential election.

Instead of “winner take all,” 53 of the state’s 55 electoral votes would be apportioned according to the winner of the presidential popular vote in each of the state’s 53 Congressional districts. A single vote would be awarded to the winner in each district. (The other two votes would still go to the statewide winner.)

John Kerry defeated George W. Bush in California in 2004 and collected all of the state’s electoral votes. But Mr. Bush won the popular vote in 22 of the state’s Congressional districts. If this proposed system had been in effect, 22 electoral votes would have been withheld from Mr. Kerry and given to Mr. Bush.

“This clearly is a power grab by the Republican Party,” said John Travis, a longtime political science professor at Humboldt State University in California. Mr. Travis believes that while there may be problems with the Electoral College system, this is not the way to fix it.

“This is simply a way for the Republicans to manipulate California’s electoral votes to their advantage,” he said.

Democrats do not have perfectly clean hands when it comes to this sort of thing. A similar effort by Democrats in North Carolina was scrapped at the insistence of national party leaders, and not a moment too soon.

What the Democrats need to do now is make sure that California voters understand that they are the latest targeted pawns in the G.O.P.’s longstanding efforts to undermine not just the Democrats but democracy itself.

Read full post and comments:
"G.O.P.’s Dirty Tricks Begin" >>

The Nightmare Is Here

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 15, 2007

We’ve heard from General Petraeus, from Ambassador Crocker, and on Thursday night from President Bush. What we haven’t heard this week is anything about the tragic reality on the ground for the ordinary citizens of Iraq, which is in the throes of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

President Bush may not be aware of this. In his televised address to the nation he warned that a pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq could cause a “humanitarian nightmare.”

A trusted aide should take the president aside and quietly inform him that this nightmare arrived a good while ago.

When the U.S. launched its “shock and awe” invasion in March 2003, the population of Iraq was about 26 million. The flaming horror unleashed by the invasion has since forced 2.2 million of those Iraqis, nearly a tenth of the population, to flee the country. Many of those who left were professionals marked for death — doctors, lawyers, academics, the very people with the skills necessary to build a viable society.

The Iraq Ministry of Health reported that 102 doctors and 164 nurses were killed from April 2003 to May 2006. It is believed that nearly half of Iraq’s doctors have fled. The exodus of health care professionals in a country hemorrhaging from the worst kinds of violence pretty much qualifies as nightmarish.

While more than two million Iraqis have fled to other countries, another two million have been displaced internally. According to the Global Policy Forum, a group that monitors international developments:

“Most of these internally displaced persons, or I.D.P.’s, have sought refuge with relatives, or in mosques, empty public buildings, or tent camps. ...I.D.P.’s live in very poor conditions. Public buildings are particularly unsanitary, often overcrowded, without access to clean water, proper sanitation and basic services, in conditions especially conducive to infectious diseases.”

Iraqis are enduring most of their suffering out of the sight of the rest of the world. International relief organizations and most of the news media are largely kept at a distance by the insane levels of violence.

Access to safe drinking water is a problem in much of the country. (The World Health Organization was asked to help with a recent outbreak of cholera in parts of Kurdistan that is believed to have been caused by polluted water.) Sanitation facilities are routinely crippled by violence and sabotage. The economy, like the country’s infrastructure, is in shambles.

The worst aspect of the nightmare, of course, is the rain of death that has descended on Iraq since the U.S. invasion. Controversy has surrounded virtually all attempts to estimate the number of civilian casualties, but no one disputes that the toll is staggering.

The U.S. government has behaved as though these dead Iraqis were not even worth counting. In December 2005, President Bush casually mentioned “30,000, more or less” as the number of Iraqis killed in the war. The White House later said there were no official estimates of Iraqi deaths.

We shouldn’t be so cavalier. Based on all available evidence, it seems unreasonable to believe that fewer than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed thus far. Many very serious scholars believe the total is much higher.

As for the number of wounded and disabled Iraqis — men, women and children who have lost limbs, or been paralyzed or otherwise maimed in air, rocket and bomb attacks — no one has a real grasp of the size of the problem.

“Just considering the number of the dead and the number of displaced, this is probably the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world,” said James Paul, the executive director of Global Policy Forum, which recently compiled an extensive report on the war and occupation. “This is the biggest displacement of people in the Middle East in a very long time.”

The effect on children of the carnage, the dislocations and the deteriorating quality of daily life has been profound. Conditions in Iraq were dire for children even before the war. One in eight died before the age of 5, many from the effects of malnutrition, polluted water and unsanitary conditions.

Now, more than four years after the invasion, huge numbers of Iraqi children are finding themselves orphaned, homeless, malnourished, and worse.

According to Unicef, the U.N.’s children’s agency: “Many children are separated from their families or on the streets, where they are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Most children have experienced trauma but few receive the care and support they need to help them cope with so much chaos, anxiety and loss.”

These are just a few of the things you won’t hear much about from the American officials in Washington who profess to care so deeply about the people of Iraq.

Gail Collins is off today.

Read full post and comments:
"The Nightmare Is Here" >>

Escape From Las Vegas

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 8, 2007

Amber is 19 years old and on Sunday she caught a flight out of Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport and went home to a small town in Minnesota, not far from the Iowa border.

I’m rooting for her. She’s low on funds (“I’ve got my ticket, that’s about all,” she said), and she’s at a crucial turning point in her life.

The question is whether she will go off to college in Florida, and stick with it, which she insists is what she wants to do, or whether she will slip back into her life as a stripper and lap dancer, which is so often the start of the descent into the hell of prostitution.

“I hate the dancing,” she told me. “Sometimes I think I don’t have a strong enough mind for it, because of the way people treat me.”

I met Amber in Las Vegas last week. I was with Melissa Farley, a psychologist and researcher who was asked by the head of the U.S. State Department’s anti-trafficking office to do a study of the sex trade and its consequences in Nevada.

(She published the book-length study this week under the title, “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections.”)

Amber’s story is far more typical than many Americans would like to acknowledge. There are many thousands of Ambers across the country, naïve kids from dysfunctional homes who are thrown willy-nilly into the adult, take-no-prisoners environment of the sex trade with no preparation, no guidance and no support at all.

They are the prey in the predatory world of pimps, johns and perverts that goes by the euphemism: adult entertainment.

Amber’s parents are divorced. Her mother, with whom she lives when she’s in Minnesota, is both physically and emotionally ill.

For awhile, she said, she had a stepfather who physically abused both her and her mother.

“He was on meth,” Amber said. “He’d hit us, scream at my mother. We’d make dinner and he’d go into a rage and throw away the whole dinner. So we’d go without dinner that night.”

Amber was both shy and rebellious and began dancing at a strip club in Minnesota on a dare. That was several months ago.

One afternoon a wrestling coach from her high school came in while she was dancing. “I was topless,” she said, “and I just wanted to crawl into a hole.”

She saved enough money to go to Vegas and tried out for a job there. “The manager told me, ‘You can’t work for me. You’re too big,’ ” she said. “So I didn’t eat for four days. All I had that whole time was one bowl of cereal and some water. It was horrible. I lost 10 pounds and went back. He made me take off all my clothes and dance for him. And then he said I was still too big. You have to be practically anorexic to dance for him.”

I asked why she continued dancing even though she hated it. Her face took on the puzzled look of a kid who had no good answer for not doing her homework.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not very logical, is it?”

She got a job at Sheri’s Cabaret on South Highland Avenue, which trumpets to all and sundry that its dancers are completely nude. The owners of the cabaret also own Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about an hour’s ride outside of Vegas.

“It’s unbelievable the way the customers degrade you,” Amber said. “Their hands are all over you and they’re always trying to have sex with you.”

I asked if she’d ever been tempted to give in. She waited a long moment before answering.

“Sometimes I am,” she said. “Sometimes a guy will offer a lot of money, and I might think that could help with whatever I need for that month. But then I think, I just can’t do that. Nobody should violate my body like that.”

I asked Amber why she was willing to talk candidly and on the record about her experiences. She said, “I want people to know what it’s like for us. They think we’re just a bunch of lowlifes who like to get naked for money. We’re not. We go through a lot.”

When I asked her if she ever wanted to get married and raise a family, she was unequivocal.

“No” she said. “I don’t want any of that. I just feel if I get married the guy will change and show his true colors. I don’t want that to happen to me.”

She swears she’s going to school and will try to find work in the fashion industry.

I asked if she thought she would ever go back to dancing.

“Probably not,” she said.

Read full post and comments:
"Escape From Las Vegas" >>

City as Predator

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 4, 2007

Las Vegas

There is probably no city in America where women are treated worse than in Las Vegas.

The tone of systematic, institutionalized degradation is set by the mayor, Oscar Goodman, who told me in an interview that the city would reap “tremendous” benefits if a series of “magnificent brothels” could be established to cater to johns from across the country and around the world.

“I’ve said there should be the beginning of a discussion of that,” said Mr. Goodman, a former defense lawyer for mobsters who unabashedly describes his city as an adult playground where “anything goes — as long as you don’t go over the line.”

Most of the lines in Vegas have long since been erased. It is without a doubt, as the psychologist and researcher Melissa Farley, says, “the epicenter of North American prostitution and sex trafficking.”

Vegas is a place where women and girls by the tens of thousands are chewed up by the vast and astonishingly open sex trade. You can be sitting at a traffic light and a huge mobile billboard will drive past, promising, “Hot Babes — Direct to Your Room.”

I was drawn to this story by an advance copy of Ms. Farley’s book-length report, “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections.” It’s being published online today.

The report explores what Oscar Goodman doesn’t appear to understand: the horrendous toll that prostitution, legal or illegal, takes on the women and girls involved. If you peel back the thin, supposedly sexy veneer of the commercial sex trade, you’ll quickly see the rotten inside, where females are bought, sold, raped, beaten, shamed and in many, many cases, physically and emotionally wrecked.

Start with the fact that so many of those who are pulled into the trade are so young — early-20s, late-teens and younger. Child prostitutes by the hundreds pass through the Family Division courtroom of Judge William Voy, who views the hapless, vulnerable girls as victims and tries to help them. The girls he sees are as young as 12, with the average age being 14.

He told me about a 14-year-old who was seven months pregnant by her pimp. She was suffering from a sexually transmitted disease, had a drug problem, was undernourished and still craved a relationship with the pimp. “These cases will tear your heart out,” the judge said.

Ms. Farley was asked to study the Nevada sex trade and its consequences 2 ½ years ago by John Miller, who at the time headed the U.S. State Department’s effort to fight human trafficking around the world. Prostitution is legal in some parts of Nevada but not in Vegas, where 90 percent of the state’s prostitution occurs. Vegas is a world-class embarrassment to any U.S. official attempting to reduce prostitution and trafficking in foreign countries.

“We did surveys of people on the street,” said Ms. Farley, “and nearly half thought prostitution was legal in Las Vegas. Guess why that is? Massive advertising.”

There are more than 150 pages of ads in the Las Vegas yellow pages for “college teens,” “mature women,” “mothers and daughters,” “petite Japanese women,” “Chinese teens in short skirts” and every other variation imaginable. I asked Mayor Goodman about that, and he said: “We’ve changed that a little bit. They used to have pictures.”

Sex clubs with teenage girls dancing nude and offering lap dances to johns are legal, ubiquitous and widely advertised. Many of those girls are either prostitutes or one short step away.

What is not widely understood is how coercive all aspects of the sex trade are. The average age of entry into prostitution is extremely young. The prostitutes are ruthlessly controlled by pimps, club owners and traffickers. In the case of legal prostitution, they are controlled by their own pimps and the brothel owners — pimps who have been legalized by the state.

The women are exploited in every way. Most of the money they receive from johns goes to the pimps, the brothel owners, the escort service managers and so forth. Strippers and lap dancers have to pay for the right to dance in the clubs, and the money they get in tips has to be shared with the club owners, bartenders, bouncers, etc.

Huge numbers of foreign women are trafficked into Vegas. The legions of Asian women in the massage parlors and escort services did not come flocking to Vegas from suburban U.S.A.

Mayor Goodman said that he is no fan of illegal prostitution, but is convinced the legal variety could be a boon. He is proud of his city’s tourist slogan: “What happens here, stays here.”

Back in the ’90s, Las Vegas tried hard to promote a family-friendly image.

“That ended when I became mayor,” said Mr. Goodman.

Read full post and comments:
"City as Predator" >>

Anxious About Tomorrow

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 1, 2007

You know you’ve stepped into a different universe when you hear a major American labor leader saying matter-of-factly that employer-based health insurance and employer-based pensions are relics of a bygone industrial economy.

Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, which has 1.9 million members and is the fastest-growing union in the country, is not your ordinary union leader. With Labor Day approaching, he was reflecting on some of the challenges facing workers in a post-20th-century globalized economy.

“I just don’t think that as a country we’ve conceptualized that this is not our father’s or our grandfather’s economy,” Mr. Stern said in an interview. “We’re going through profound change and we have no plan.”

The feeling that seems to override all others for workers is anxiety. American families, already saddled with enormous debt, are trying to make it in an environment in which employment is becoming increasingly contingent and subject to worldwide competition. Health insurance, unaffordable for millions, is a huge problem. And guaranteed pensions are going the way of typewriter ribbons and carbon paper.

“We’re ending defined benefit pensions in front of our eyes,” said Mr. Stern. “I’d say today’s retirement plan for young workers is: ‘I’m going to work until I die.’ ”

The result of all of this — along with such problems as the mortgage and housing crisis, and a domestic economy that is doing nothing to improve living standards for ordinary Americans — is fear.

“Workers are incredibly, legitimately scared that the American dream, particularly the belief that their kids will do better, is ending,” said Mr. Stern. He is trying to get across the idea that in a period of such profound change, the old templates, the traditional ideas and policies of even the most progressive thinkers and officeholders, will not be sufficient to meet the new challenges.

“We can’t be the only country on earth that asks our employers to put the price of health care on its products when a lot of our competitors don’t,” he said. “And job security? Even if you want to stay with your employer, as in the old economic model, we’re seeing in many industries that your employer is not going to be around to stay with you.”

A comprehensive new approach is needed, but what should that approach be? Franklin Roosevelt always hoped to inject a measure of economic security into the lives of ordinary Americans. But the New Deal was seven decades ago. Workers are insecure now for a host of different reasons and Mr. Stern wants the labor movement to be part of a vast cooperative effort to develop the solutions appropriate to today’s environment.

He told me, “I’d like to say to the Democrats that we are as far today from the New Deal as the New Deal was from the Civil War.”

He wants more people to pay attention to the big issues that affect not just union workers but all working families: How do you bring health care to all? What do you do about retirement security? How will the jobs of the 21st century be created?

And what about schools, energy, global warming, the environment?

Mr. Stern tends to see the nation as a team and wants the team to pull together to develop a creative vision of what the U.S. should be about in the 21st century. A cornerstone of that vision, he said, should be adherence to the “primary value” of rewarding work.

“We’re a team in the 21st-century period of rapid change and competition,” he said. “And right now, we don’t have leadership, and we don’t have a plan. At the same time, a group of people are enriching themselves far beyond anything that’s reasonable.”

What he would like to see, he said, is a large group of thoughtful people from various walks of American life — business, labor, government, academia and so forth — convened to begin the serious work of cooperatively developing a real-world vision of a society that is fairer, healthier, better educated, better prepared to compete globally, and more economically secure.

“I think you’re already seeing the beginnings of odd formations of people who appreciate, issue by issue, that we have to do something different here,” he said.

The kind of effort Mr. Stern would like to see would logically be initiated at the highest levels of government, preferably the White House. But if that’s not in the cards, someone else should take up the challenge. And there should be a sense of urgency about it.

The fears of America’s workers are well founded. “There’s something wrong with the system right now,” said Mr. Stern, “and we can’t just say, ‘Well, it’s all going to work out.’ It’s not.”

Read full post and comments:
"Anxious About Tomorrow" >>

Holding Kids Hostage

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 28, 2007

The governors of New York and New Jersey were upset and not trying to hide it.

“We had zero forewarning,” said New Jersey’s Jon Corzine. “It was sprung at 7:30 on a Friday night in the middle of August, the time when it would draw the least fire.”

He was talking about the Bush administration’s latest effort to thwart the expansion of the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program. Governors in several states are trying to include more youngsters from the lower rungs of the middle class and have vowed to fight the president on this issue.

Acting during a Congressional recess, and making a distinct effort to stay beneath the radar of the news media, the administration enacted insidious new rules that make it much harder for states to bring additional children under the umbrella of the program, known colloquially as CHIP.

The program is popular because it works. It’s cost effective and there is wide bipartisan support for its expansion. But President Bush, locked in an ideological straitjacket, is adamant in his opposition.

In addition to the new rules drastically curtailing the ability of governors to expand local coverage by obtaining waivers from the federal government, the president has threatened a veto of Congressional efforts to fund a more robust version of the overall program.

“It’s stunning,” said New York’s Gov. Eliot Spitzer. “He says he’s going to veto health care for kids because it’s too expensive at the same time that these continuing resolutions for the war, where we don’t even know what the cost is, are going through unabated. This is insanity.

“Everybody agrees this is the right thing to do except the Bush administration.”

Health coverage for poor children is provided by Medicaid. CHIP was originally designed to cover the children of the working poor. That has worked well, but there are still huge numbers of families who need help.

“The reality,” said Governor Spitzer, “is that there is an enormous proportion of American society above the poverty level but in the lower middle class that simply can’t afford health coverage.”

Wherever there are large numbers of families without coverage, you will find children who are suffering needlessly and, in extreme cases, dying. They don’t get the preventive care or the attention to chronic illness that they should.

“That has not only an immediate effect on their development,” said Mr. Spitzer, “but a long-term cost to society that is incalculable.”

Several states, including New York and New Jersey, have used federal waivers to raise the family income ceiling for eligibility to participate in CHIP. New Jersey, for example, offers coverage to the children of families with incomes as high as 350 percent of the official poverty rate for a family of four, which is $20,650 a year. New York has an upper limit of 250 percent of the poverty rate and is trying to raise it to 400 percent.

State officials said the onerous new rules would make it all but impossible to offer coverage beyond 250 percent of the poverty level.

Administration officials have argued that the CHIP program should adhere closely to its original intent of limiting coverage to families only slightly above the official poverty line. They said there is a danger that families with higher incomes would begin substituting CHIP for private insurance coverage.

The reality is that under the administration’s approach enormous numbers of children in families without a lot of money will be left with no coverage at all, private or otherwise. The expansion of CHIP is the most efficient, cost-effective way of reaching those youngsters.

Denying CHIP to such families forces them to seek out hospital emergency rooms when medical treatment can no longer be postponed. “I see it every day,” said Governor Corzine. “If you’re uninsured, particularly with children, if you don’t have a place to go, that’s where people show up.”

What’s happening is cruel. Children who should be eligible for CHIP are being held hostage to policies driven by a desire to protect the big insurance companies and an ideology that views CHIP, correctly, as yet another important step on the road to universal health care.

Ronald Reagan, one of the tribunes in the fight against Medicare and Medicaid back in the ’60s, pumped up the warnings against “socialized medicine” by saying that if Medicare becomes a reality “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

I wonder what crazy things the ideologues think would happen if CHIP is expanded to cover the children who have no health insurance today.

Read full post and comments:
"Holding Kids Hostage" >>

War’s Chilling Reality

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 21, 2007

Bryan Anderson, a 25-year-old Army sergeant who was wounded in Iraq, was explaining, on camera — to James Gandolfini, of all people — what happened immediately after a roadside bomb blew up the Humvee that he was driving.

“I was like, ‘Oh, we got hit. We got hit.’ And then I had blood on my face and the flies were landing all over my face. So I wiped my face to get rid of the flies. And that is when I noticed that my fingertip was gone. So I was like, ‘Oh. O.K.’

“So that is when I started really assessing myself. I was like, ‘That’s not bad.’ And then I turned my hand over, and I noticed that this chunk of my hand was gone. So I was like, ‘O.K., still not bad. I can live with that.’

“And then when I went to wipe the flies on my face with my left hand, there was nothing there. So I was like, ‘Uh, that’s gone.’ And then I looked down and I saw that my legs were gone. And then they had kind of forced my head back down to the ground, hoping that I wouldn’t see.”

HBO’s contribution to an expanded awareness of the awful realities of war continues with a new documentary, “Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq.”

Mr. Gandolfini, one of the executive producers of the film, steps out of his Tony Soprano persona to quietly, even gently, interview 10 soldiers and marines who barely escaped death in combat.

The interviews are powerful, and often chilling. They offer a portrait of combat and its aftermath that bears no relation to the sanitized, often upbeat version of war — not just in Iraq, but in general — that so often comes from politicians and the news media.

Dawn Halfaker, a 28-year-old former Army captain, is among those featured in the documentary. She lost her right arm and shoulder in Iraq, along with any illusions she might have had about the glory of war.

“I think I was a little bit naïve to what combat was really like,” she told me in an interview on Sunday. “When you’re training, you don’t really imagine that you could be holding a dying boy in your arms. You don’t think about what death is like close up.

“There’s nothing heroic about war. It’s very tragic. It’s very sad. It takes a huge emotional toll.”

Still, she said, there was much about her experience in Iraq that she was grateful for.

“Nobody in the film is asking for pity or sympathy,” she said. “We’re just saying we had this experience and it changed our lives, and we’re coping with it.”

The term “alive day” is being used by G.I.’s to refer to the day that they came frighteningly close to dying from war wounds, but somehow managed to survive. There are legions of them.

Miraculous advances in emergency medicine, communication and transportation are enabling 90 percent of the G.I.’s wounded in Iraq to survive their wounds, although many are facing a lifetime of suffering.

It’s become a cliché to talk about the courage of the soldiers and marines struggling to overcome their horrendous injuries, but it’s a cliché embedded in the truth. Sergeant Anderson, a chatty onetime athlete, is doing his best to put together a reasonably satisfactory life without his legs or his left hand, and with a damaged right hand

He told Mr. Gandolfini, “If I didn’t have my hand, if I lost both my hands, I’d really think, you know, it wouldn’t be worth it to be around.”

He has a wry take on the term “alive day.”

“Everybody makes a big deal about your alive day, especially at Walter Reed,” he said. “And I can see their point, that you’d want to celebrate something like that. But from my point of view, it’s like, ‘O.K., we’re sitting here celebrating the worst day of my life. Great, let’s just remind me of that every year.’ ”

Last year HBO produced a harrowing documentary called “Baghdad E.R.” that showed the relentless effort of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel to save as many lives as possible from what amounted to a nonstop conveyor belt of G.I.’s wounded in combat. At the time, Shelia Nevins, the head of documentary programming at the network, said, “We tried to put a human face on the war.”

They’ve done it again with “Alive Day Memories,” which is scheduled to premiere Sept. 9.

There are no politics in either production. They are neither pro- nor anti-war.

But the intense focus on the humanity of the men and women caught up in the chaos of Iraq, and the incredible sacrifices some of them have had to make, is an implicit argument in favor of a more thoughtful, cautious, less hubristic approach to matters of war and peace.

Read full post and comments:
"War’s Chilling Reality" >>

Fun and Games, and Hope

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 18, 2007

Boston

I saw what probably was the biggest smile in the state of Massachusetts on Thursday, but I’ll get to that later.

The day started with a drive across an obscure two-lane bridge to an all-but-forgotten island in Boston Harbor. The city’s skyline glistened beyond the silvery expanse of water off to the left.

The mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, was in the front seat of the S.U.V. I’ve been writing recently about kids trapped in urban combat zones where bullets are apt to fly at any moment and the residents in some neighborhoods are taking horrendous casualties. As we came off the bridge and passed through a wooded area, Mayor Menino promised that we were about to see the absolute antithesis of that kind of environment.

“You have to give kids hope and an alternative to the streets,” he said.

Mr. Menino’s alternative is a place called Camp Harbor View, a respite from city life that’s a 20-minute drive and light years away from Boston’s roughest neighborhoods.

The first thing you notice are the kids, hundreds of them in T-shirts and shorts engaged in a mind-boggling array of supervised activities: rope-climbing and soccer, baseball and basketball, swimming and hiking and fishing, dancing and singing and arts and crafts.

The grounds that the youngsters play on are pristine. A spotless beach slopes gently down to the harbor. The city shimmers on the other side of the water, like a mirage.

Harbor View is a day camp for kids 11 to 14 who are bused in each morning to an environment that is the closest some of them have come to nirvana.

“I didn’t know life could be like this,” said Nilza, a 12-year-old girl from Dorchester. “There’s no fighting ’cause that’s a rule here — not to fight.”

A boy standing beside her happily agreed.

“There’s no violence here,” he said. “And no trash on the ground.”

On the first day, the kids are issued backpacks, T-shirts, a couple of pairs of shorts, sneakers and other personal items.

The mayor said, “I can’t tell you how many of them ask, ‘Do we get to keep this?’ I tell them, ‘Yes. It’s yours.’ ”

The kids are given three meals a day, prepared by a first-rate catering company. Junk food is nowhere in sight. The camp experience lasts about a month, during which the kids are taught a variety of new skills and are encouraged to develop leadership traits.

The camp was Mayor Menino’s idea, but getting it going was a heavy lift. There was no money in the budget for such an initiative.

It took an extraordinary $10 million fund-raising effort by a retired advertising executive named Jack Connors, and an equally extraordinary construction effort by workers who at times pitched tents and slept on the island to get the camp ready for the kids by the start of this summer.

It hasn’t always been easy for the kids, either. A 14-year-old named Tyler has embraced the camp as a refuge from the violence in his South End neighborhood.

“Some of my friends have gone to jail already,” he said. “You know, for having guns and shooting. The people here aren’t like that.”

The mayor and camp officials told me later that some of Tyler’s friends have been harassing him, trying to persuade him to quit the camp.

“But he comes here every day,” Mr. Menino said.

Now there were voices raised behind us, and we turned to see a kid in a harness and helmet standing atop a pole about four stories high. The harness was attached to a network of ropes above the youngster, who was frightened.

He was supposed to jump and counselors controlling the ropes would guide him safely to the ground. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Now a chorus of encouraging shouts went up. “You can do it! You’ll be fine! Jump!”

When the kid leaped from the pole, everybody cheered. He drifted toward the ground as though floating in a parachute and gently touched down. His smile lit up the afternoon.

Mayor Menino and the others responsible for Camp Harbor View haven’t remade the world. They’ve simply improved the environment, temporarily, for several hundred youngsters who deserved a break.

They’ve offered the kids a range of healthy activities and supervision. They’ve shown the kids that somebody cares about them. And they’ve tolerated no nonsense.

Mr. Menino’s grin, as we drove back over the two-lane bridge, was almost as wide as the smile on the kid who survived his four-story leap.

Read full post and comments:
"Fun and Games, and Hope" >>

A Bloodbath in Newark, and Beyond

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 11, 2007

NEWARK

Cory Booker seemed tired, beleaguered, bewildered.

The young mayor had been on the run with very little sleep for several days. Now, during a break in a private room at City Hall here, he leaned forward in his chair and said, “There is something going on in our country that people are not, for some reason, awake to.”

He then mentioned what he described as a “poignant” meeting he’d had with a top official of the F.B.I. “I asked him, ‘What is the solution to this problem?’ ” said Mr. Booker. “And he said to me, ‘It’s not law enforcement.’ ”

The mayor was talking about the violent crime that, like a dragon from some Medieval fairy tale, continues to devour the lives of young Americans, especially those in poor black and brown neighborhoods. This is a tale with no happy ending in sight.

Newark has been convulsed since last weekend when the dragons materialized late at night in the rundown playground behind a public school. A 19-year-old college student, Natasha Aeriel, was gravely wounded by a gunshot to the head. Her three companions, including her 18-year-old brother, Terrance, were then marched at gunpoint down a flight of stone steps and ordered to face a 6-foot-high concrete wall.

The youngsters were told to kneel and then were executed with shots to the back of the head in a tableau that seemed too insane to be real. Staring at the wall in daylight, under an extremely hot August sun, I found myself resisting the idea that this really happened, that three young people really died right there, like casualties in a war zone.

Forty years after the riots that wrecked this city, Newark is once again unnerved. People are calling for the resignation of a mayor who has been in office only a year. Others want the National Guard to start patrolling the streets, a stomach-turning suggestion to many who remember the riots.

The sheriff of Essex County, Armando Fontoura, lost it completely on Tuesday, loudly declaring, “I’m on the verge of telling my guys to suspend civil liberties and start frisking everybody.”

There’s a fever in the city. But the biggest mistake one could make in looking at the gratuitous slaughter of these young people (three arrests have been made and more are expected) is to view it as a problem peculiar to Newark.

A month ago, I was interviewing people in a playground outside an elementary school in Chicago, where a 13-year-old girl had been shot to death. She was just one of many. Nearly three dozen public school students in Chicago were slain over the past school year, most of them shot to death.

“It’s difficult out here,” said a woman who was watching her two young sons scamper around the playground where the 13-year-old had died. Her tone was every bit as weary and beleaguered as Cory Booker’s.

In Camden, N.J., on a Sunday morning in June, a 24-year-old nurse’s aide was killed in a burst of gunfire as she stood talking with a friend on a street corner. She was one of four young people killed in a four-day eruption of violence in Camden.

A teenager who lives in the city tried to explain to me what it was like to have a number of friends or relatives murdered: “You don’t exactly get used to it,” he said, “but you expect it.”

Philadelphia, across the Delaware River from Camden, is struggling with an even worse problem. As if signaling the start of an accelerated killing season, six people were murdered on the first day of summer. Philly’s homicide rate is on pace to break last year’s tally of 406.

As Senator Barack Obama said during a visit to a Chicago church last month, “From South-Central L.A., to Newark, New Jersey, there’s an epidemic of violence that is sickening the soul of this nation.”

More attention to this crisis of violence is needed, and more police resources, and more jobs, and better schools, and improved prison re-entry programs, and tighter gun controls. But more than anything else, a cultural change is needed.

The communities hardest hit are those in which too many parents have failed their children. The most effective anti-crime effort begins at home with parents (fathers, are you listening?) who raise their kids to know better than to point a gun at another human being and blow that person away for no good reason.

That’s the essential component. Without it, all other crime-fighting efforts are doomed, and thousands upon thousands of poor youngsters will continue to be denied their most basic civil right — the right to grow safely to adulthood.

Read full post and comments:
"A Bloodbath in Newark, and Beyond" >>

A Voice Raised in Chicago

By BOB HERBERT

Published: July 17, 2007

Senator Barack Obama took his presidential campaign to Chicago Sunday, where he addressed an agonizing issue that has been largely overlooked by the national media — the murder of dozens of the city’s public school students since last September.

Speaking to an overflow crowd of worshipers at the Vernon Park Church of God, Mr. Obama, a resident of Chicago, said:

“I asked to come here because I wanted to talk with you about the spate of violence that’s been robbing the city’s children of their future. In this last school year, 32 Chicago public school students were killed, and even more since the school year ended. This past week alone, two teens were shot in a South Side schoolyard.”

You’ve probably heard more than you wanted to about David Beckham and Posh Spice in recent days, but not a lot about the deaths of these children and teenagers in Chicago. Black, Latino and poor, they are America’s invisible children.

“In one Chicago public school,” said Mr. Obama, “a teacher was calling attendance, and when she got to the name of a particular student who wasn’t there and had missed a lot of classes, she asked if anyone knew where he was. And the answer she got was, ‘He’s dead.’ ”

He mentioned another school: “In Room 104 at Avalon Park Elementary School, an empty chair is pushed against the wall in memory of Quinton Jackson, the eighth grader who used to sit there, and who was stabbed to death a few months ago.”

And he mentioned Blair Holt, 16, who was riding home from school on a city bus when a gunman opened fire. “As the bullets flew, and Blair was shot,” the senator said, “he pulled a friend onto a seat and saved her life. And as he was driven to the hospital, where he would pass away a short time later, he asked the paramedics to tell his parents that he loved them.”

Over the past school year, Mr. Obama said, the number of public school students killed in Chicago was higher than the number of soldiers from the entire state of Illinois who were killed in Iraq during that period.

As I mentioned in a previous column on this issue, Chicago is hardly alone when it comes to the slaughter of youngsters who are living in conditions that can fairly be compared to combat.

“From South-Central L.A. to Newark, New Jersey,” said Senator Obama, “there’s an epidemic of violence that’s sickening the soul of this nation. For the third year in a row, violent crime and murder are on the rise nationwide. As we’ve all borne witness to here in Chicago, this is partly due to the rise of gang violence. The F.B.I. says there are now more gang members on our nation’s streets than police officers.”

The senator talked about the need for more stringent gun control laws, and he criticized the Bush administration for “decimating” a Clinton administration initiative that had added more than 100,000 police officers to local departments.

He said governments need to do more to combat gangs and gang violence and invest more in after-school programs that provide an alternative to the streets for vulnerable youngsters.

But he added, “There is only so much government can do.” There is also a need, he said, “for a change in attitude.”

The senator talked about the young men and boys who have gone down “the wrong path.” And he said one of the main reasons they are wreaking havoc and shooting one another is that they had not received enough attention while growing up from responsible adults.

“We’re not reading to them,” he said. “We’re not sitting down with them and talking to them. We’re not guiding them. We’re not disciplining them.”

In a conversation yesterday, he stressed that the plight of young people struggling in tough environments demands both governmental attention and a heightened sense of individual responsibility. Both are essential.

He said in his speech that he will keep fighting in Washington for more money and more programs. “But that money and those programs,” he said, “will not make any difference unless we have a change of heart.”

He also noted that there was tremendous grief across the country when the massacre at Virginia Tech happened last April, “and rightfully so.” But with 34 schoolkids dead in Chicago since the beginning of the last school year, he said, “for the most part, there has been silence.”

It’s important, he said, that Americans reach a mind-set in which “we care just as much” about the children slain in Chicago as those killed at Virginia Tech.

Read full post and comments:
"A Voice Raised in Chicago" >>

Poor Kids Living in a War Zone

By BOB HERBERT

Published: July 14, 2007
==================

Chicago

The colorful playground outside Frederick Funston Elementary School has swings and sliding boards and a heartbreaking makeshift memorial for the 13-year-old girl who was shot to death in the playground a few weeks ago.

“It’s difficult out here,” said a woman who sat on a bench, watching her two small boys scampering around the playground.

What she meant was that there was nothing particularly unusual about schoolchildren getting blown away in Chicago’s black and Latino neighborhoods. Since September, when the last school year started, dozens of this city’s public school students have been murdered, most of them shot to death. As of last week, the toll of public schoolchildren slain in Chicago since the opening of the school year had reached 34, including two killed since the schools closed for summer vacation.

“That’s more than a kid every two weeks,” said Arne Duncan, the chief executive of the city’s school system. “Think about that.”

The girl killed in the playground was Schanna Gayden, who, according to the police, was shot in the head by a gang member who was aiming at someone else. Blair Holt, a high school junior, was shot to death on a city bus. Another teenager was killed as he walked home from a library.

Lazarus Jones, a 13-year-old computer-lover who was looking forward to beginning high school in the fall, was jumped by several members of a gang and beaten to death. Twelve-year-old Laura Joslin was stabbed to death, police said, by an 18-year-old girl on Thanksgiving Day. Victor Casillas, 15, was killed in a drive-by shooting.

And so on.

This should be a major national story, of course, and it would be if the slain children had come from more privileged backgrounds. But these are the kids that most of America cares nothing about — black, Latin and poor.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper covered the story. He said of the kids, poignantly: “Their names should be known. Their lives should be honored. Their deaths should be remembered.”

But that was an exception. Outside of Chicago, very little reporting has been done on this horrifying wave of murders. The truth, of course, is that Chicago is not alone. It may be jolting, even in our blood-drenched society, to have so many students from one school system killed over the course of a single school year. But most people know (and take for granted) that boys and girls growing up in America’s inner cities often have to deal with conditions that can fairly be compared to combat.

“There’s just a tremendous amount of passivity and a lack of public outrage,” said Mr. Duncan, a fierce champion of efforts to control the relentless arming of Americans — young and old, rich and poor — with firearms.

“No one even talks about all the kids who are shot but not killed,” he said. He mentioned a 7-year-old who was shot at a family barbecue. “The amount of trauma these kids and their families are living with is just staggering,” he said.

We know at least some of the things that need to be done about the slaughter of poor children in the U.S.

Mr. Duncan is surely right when he says that the easy availability of guns is roughly the equivalent of spraying gasoline on an already fiery situation. The effect of the guns is to make a bad situation much, much worse.

Beyond the guns, apart from the horrifying fact that they might meet up with a bullet at any time, poor youngsters are suffering from a ruthless pattern of abuse and neglect that has lasted for many years.

Too few have been afforded the benefits of a quality education. Too many are left to their own devices because of an absence of after-school programs and other kinds of activities — clubs, sports, art and music programs, summer camps — that can enrich the lives of children and shield them from harm.

Summer jobs programs have been decimated by the federal government.

And in far too many cases, the very people who should be caring for these youngsters the most, their parents, have walked away from their most fundamental responsibilities. Fathers, especially, have abandoned their young in droves.

Life is not fair. Society will not make these vulnerable youngsters whole. We all have a responsibility, but the kids desperately need those closest to them to step up, especially the ones who gave them life.

Read full post and comments:
"Poor Kids Living in a War Zone" >>

Abusing Iraqi Civilians

By BOB HERBERT

Published: July 10, 2007
==================

With no end yet in sight for the long dark night of the Iraq war, The Nation magazine is coming out this week with an article that goes into great and disturbing detail about the brutal treatment of Iraqi civilians by some U.S. soldiers and marines.

The article does not focus on the handful of atrocities that have gotten substantial press coverage, like the massacre in Haditha in November 2005. Instead, based on interviews conducted on the record with dozens of American combat veterans of the war, the authors address what they describe as frequent acts of violence in which U.S. forces have abused or killed Iraqi civilians — men, women and children — with impunity.

The combination of recklessness, wantonly destructive behavior born of panic and deliberate acts of cold-blooded violence by G.I.’s are believed to have cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the article says. The soldiers interviewed said they believed that only a minority of U.S. troops engaged in objectionable behavior, but the toll of their actions has been huge.

The article describes soldiers and marines frustrated and fearful in an alien environment in which the enemy hides among civilians and uses acts of terror as the primary tactic. “The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effects of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis,” said the authors, Chris Hedges, a former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, and Laila al-Arian.

Jeff Englehart, a 26-year-old Army specialist from Grand Junction, Colo., said in the article: “I guess while I was there, the general attitude was a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi. You know, so what?”

For a lot of troops, he said, that attitude tended to morph into a debilitating sense of guilt after their return home.

Kelly Dougherty of Cañon City, Colo., who served in Iraq as a sergeant with a National Guard military police unit, remembered investigating an incident in which a military convoy ran over a boy, about 10 years old, and his three donkeys. When she and others from her unit arrived at the scene, the boy was lying dead by the side of the road. The donkeys had also been killed.

“We saw him there,” she said, “and, you know, we were upset because the convoy didn’t even stop. They really, judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down.”

Accidents, even those caused by recklessness, are bad enough. More disturbing are the incidents described in the article in which G.I.’s routinely abused civilians. Among the worst abuses have been the shootings of innocent civilians and the improper arrests that have occurred in the course of raids carried out by soldiers and marines looking for insurgents.

There have been thousands of such raids. An extraordinary number of them — the vast majority, according to the interviews for article — were exercises in futility, yielding nothing but grief and terror for the innocent families whose homes were invaded.

“So you have all these troops, and they’re all wound up,” said Army Sgt. John Bruhns of Philadelphia, who participated in many raids while serving in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib. “And a lot of them think once they kick down the door there’s going to be people on the inside waiting for them with weapons to start shooting at them.”

In most cases, there is nothing more than a terrified family on the other side of the door. In instances in which unarmed civilians are shot and killed in raids, which happens frequently, it’s not unusual for G.I.’s to plant weapons by their bodies and to arrest survivors on false charges of participating in the insurgency, the article says.

“Every good cop carries a throwaway,” said Joe Hatcher, who served with the Army’s Fourth Cavalry Regiment in Iraq. “If you kill someone and they’re unarmed, you just drop one on ’em.”

The article emphasizes the extreme stress that G.I.’s are operating under in Iraq. A byproduct of that stress is the tendency to stereotype and dehumanize all Iraqis. What the soldiers find out, after they get home, is that in dehumanizing the people they supposedly were fighting for, they often end up dehumanizing themselves.

There is no upside to this war. It has been a plague since the beginning. But it’s one thing to lose a war. It’s much worse for a nation to lose its soul.

Read full post and comments:
"Abusing Iraqi Civilians" >>

A Girl’s Fear and Loathing

By BOB HERBERT

Published: July 7, 2007

In a column earlier this week I wrote about a cop who grotesquely abused his power by invading a high school classroom in the Bronx because a girl had uttered a curse word in a hallway. Not only did the cop handcuff and arrest the girl in a room filled with stunned students and a helpless teacher, but he arrested the school’s principal, who had attempted to reason with the officer.

The principal was suspended from his job immediately after the arrest in February 2005, but was reinstated when the charges — bogus from the very beginning — were eventually dropped. Still, the police commissioner, Ray Kelly, defended the police officer’s action, telling reporters at the time, “The principal was simply wrong.”

As I continued to look into this case, it became clear that police officials were trying to withhold important information about the officer, Juan Gonzalez. In response to a question, a spokesman for Commissioner Kelly said that Officer Gonzalez, now 29, had been placed on modified duty and that his gun and shield had been taken away.

But why? Despite repeated requests, the department would not say.

Then I found out through other sources that Officer Gonzalez had gotten into trouble for stalking, kissing and otherwise harassing a 17-year-old girl at another high school in the Bronx. The girl, extremely upset over the unwanted advances, notified school authorities and they notified the Police Department.

The Police Department confirmed this yesterday.

The encounter with the girl occurred in September 2005 outside Truman High School. The girl, questioned at a hearing by a lawyer representing the city, said she had just left the school and was on her way to a bus stop when Officer Gonzalez, in uniform, walked up to her.

He let her know that he had been watching her, and he followed her as she tried to walk away. He asked to see her school program, which lists, among other things, a student’s classes and schedule. She handed it to him.

According to the girl, the officer said, “It doesn’t have what I’m looking for.”

She said that when she asked what he was looking for, he replied, “Your address.”

The girl said Officer Gonzalez began touching her as they were passing another school. “He started touching my hair,” she said, “and pulling it all towards one side to touch my neck.” She backed up against a wall, she said, and the officer leaned over her, pressing his arms against the wall.

“I wasn’t looking at him,” the girl said. “I was turning my face away, and he touched my face and put my face to look directly towards, at him. He said, ‘Why can’t I look at him?’ And he touched my waist and pulled me closer to him, and he kissed me on my cheeks.”

The girl said, “I tried to push him away, but I couldn’t. So I had to duck under his arms.”

Officer Gonzalez followed her as she resumed walking toward the bus stop. He suggested they go out on a date. The girl said she told the officer, “I don’t think so.”

Then, she said, he told her what a powerful man he was, how he had kicked down doors and even arrested a high school principal.

This week, even as I continued asking questions about Officer Gonzalez’s status, the Police Department gave him back his gun and his badge and put him back on patrol.

It was a wildly irresponsible decision. Parents across the city should be warned about this officer.

Over the past several weeks I have heard one credible story after another of police officers ruthlessly harassing, and frequently arresting, youngsters who have done nothing wrong. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly seem to be in denial about this problem, which is widespread. There is an astounding reluctance to criticize or properly discipline police officers, no matter how egregious their conduct.

The big losers are the good kids who are treated like criminals by bullies and predators masquerading as New York’s finest. Other losers are the many cops who routinely take their crime-fighting mission seriously, but are undermined by these lowlifes in blue.

Jonathan Moore, a civil rights lawyer who represents the girl harassed by Officer Gonzalez, said his client had agreed, with “some hesitation,” to my request to tell her story in a column. She is still afraid, he said, that Officer Gonzalez will “track her down and cause her harm.”

Read full post and comments:
"A Girl’s Fear and Loathing" >>

Harassed in the Classroom

By BOB HERBERT

Published: July 3, 2007

Michael Soguero was a first-rate principal at Bronx Guild High School. He loved his job, and he loved teaching in New York. He has not blamed the New York City Police Department for his departure to a school in Estes Park, Colo. Nevertheless, the facts are the facts.

Back on Feb. 3, 2005, a student came running into Mr. Soguero’s office at Bronx Guild to say that a police officer was in a classroom. “I jumped up and ran to the classroom,” Mr. Soguero told me in an interview last week. “I found this officer, Gonzalez, exchanging words with a female student.

“Everyone is sitting down except for the teacher and these two. The girl was saying, ‘What did I do? What are you talking to me about?’ ”

What was about to unfold was another episode of bizarrely excessive police activity inside a New York City public school.

The girl, who was 16, had apparently uttered a curse word in a hallway. While that is undoubtedly inappropriate behavior, it is hardly a criminal offense. The police officer, Juan Gonzalez, who was part of a security task force assigned to the school, had followed the girl into the classroom.

Mr. Soguero quieted things down and asked the officer to leave the room, which he did. “I got the girl to sit down and I told her I would talk to her later to address this,” Mr. Soguero said. He thought the crisis was over.

The principal was shocked when he walked out of the classroom. Officer Gonzalez was waiting and made it clear that he wanted the girl arrested.

“He told me,” said Mr. Soguero in the interview, “that I had two minutes to ‘bring her out here.’ I said, ‘I’m not bringing her out here.’ ”

The angry officer, according to Mr. Soguero, barged past him and into the classroom. “I followed him,” said Mr. Soguero, “and he’s pushing desks aside, walking through students to get at her, disrupting everything. She’s sitting in a chair. He grabs her arm, her left arm with his right hand, and he’s reaching back to grab his cuffs. At that point I walked around him and physically stood in between the two of them.”

This sort of thing, the police wildly overreacting to behavior by schoolkids that is not criminal, happens much more often than most New Yorkers realize. Officer Gonzalez behaved as if he were rounding up the James gang. He arrested the girl. He arrested Mr. Soguero. And he arrested a school aide who had tried to come to the principal’s defense.

Mr. Soguero was handcuffed in full view of everyone — students, teachers, staff — and marched out of the school. Later the police paraded him in front of news photographers in a humiliating “perp walk.”

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly supported Officer Gonzalez, telling reporters at the time, “The principal was simply wrong.”

But that was not the case. There was no evidence that a crime had been committed, and the charges were later dropped. Mr. Soguero, who was suspended by school authorities at the time of his arrest, was allowed to resume the post of principal.

Now, more than two years after the incident, I learned from the Police Department that Mr. Gonzalez is indeed a problem officer, despite the initial knee-jerk support he received from the commissioner, from the Bronx district attorney, Robert Johnson, and from others in the criminal justice system.

In response to a query last week, Commissioner Kelly’s office disclosed that Officer Gonzalez is currently on “modified assignment.” His gun and badge have been taken away. But the department declined yesterday to disclose further details.

The Soguero incident is among many outlined in a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union titled “Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools.” Students, teachers and principals who have done nothing wrong are frequently harassed, abused and in some cases arrested and jailed by cops who are supposed to be on the lookout for criminal activity.

It’s common for police officers to belittle and curse at students. And many students have complained about “pat-downs” and intrusive searches by the police.

This is part of what appears to be a widespread campaign of police harassment against young people in New York, especially young people who are black or Latino.

If Rudy Giuliani were mayor, much of the city would be in an uproar over this kind of behavior by the police. Instead, all we’re hearing is a disturbing silence.

Read full post and comments:
"Harassed in the Classroom" >>

Doubting the Police

By BOB HERBERT

Published: June 26, 2007

The woman was reluctant to let her name be used. She said she had a teenage son and was afraid that he might be harassed by the police. But her desire to have the truth come out overcame her fears.

“You can use my name,” she told me, “because I did not like what the police did to those kids. My name is Greer Martin.”

Ms. Martin was standing outside her home on a quiet, tree-lined block of Putnam Avenue in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. This was the block on which, a few weeks ago, the police closed in on a large group of young men, women and children who were walking toward a subway station, on their way to a wake for a friend who had been murdered.

Thirty-two of the young people, including a 13-year-old, were arrested. Most were charged with unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct. Commissioner Ray Kelly and others in the Police Department have been spreading the word that these youngsters had been out of control, walking on top of cars and illegally blocking traffic in the street and on the sidewalk.

It does not appear that any of that was true.

The arrests occurred right outside Ms. Martin’s first-floor windows. “I was shocked beyond shock,” she said. “My windows were open, and it didn’t look like the kids had done anything wrong. The police handcuffed them and lined them up right there, at the beginning of my fence. One young lady was crying, but they didn’t resist in any way.”

She said she asked a detective why the young people were being arrested. “He told me they were trying to defuse a situation,” she said. “He said they were going to take the kids in and have a talk with them.”

A man named Conroy, who asked that his last name not be used, said he witnessed the entire incident. He lives across the street from Ms. Martin, and his 2007 Chevrolet Suburban was parked on the same side of the street that the kids were walking along when they were arrested.

He also said he was shocked by the police action. “The kids weren’t doing anything wrong,” he said.

I asked if anyone had been walking on top of cars. Conroy laughed and gestured toward his gleaming black vehicle. “Don’t you think if they had been climbing on top of cars, I would have noticed?”

He pulled out his cellphone to show me photos of some of the youngsters handcuffed and in police custody. I asked if the youngsters had blocked traffic. Conroy said, “No, not at all. There wasn’t any traffic out here until the police cars swooped in.”

I have interviewed many civilians about this case, and none have supported the police version of events. This is not a small matter. It’s a terrible thing if the police have been lying about their reasons for arresting these youngsters.

The official charges make no mention of people climbing on top of cars. It took a while for that tale to develop. The first time I heard it was in an interview I did with Capt. Scott Henderson of the 83rd Precinct a few days after the arrests. He said he had seen people walking on top of cars and that several of the youngsters had red bandanas.

The bandanas would have signaled that the youngsters were affiliated with the Bloods, the violent and notorious street gang. I asked what had happened to the bandanas. Captain Henderson said he didn’t know.

I e-mailed a list of questions to Commissioner Kelly’s office, trying to get whatever information might be available to corroborate Captain Henderson’s version of events. I asked if there were any other officers who saw anyone on top of cars. I was told that that information could not immediately be tracked down.

I asked if there were any civilian witnesses to such activity. I was referred to the office of the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, which did not provide the identity of any witnesses.

I asked if the Police Department had the names of any youngsters who had climbed on top of a car. I was told no.

I believe that an outlandish miscarriage of justice has occurred here, that the youngsters arrested did nothing wrong and that the Police Department’s version of events is false. Commissioner Kelly could clear the matter up once and for all by mounting an honest investigation to determine what really happened.

Read full post and comments:
"Doubting the Police" >>

Mr. Mayor, the Nader of ’08?

By BOB HERBERT

Published: June 23, 2007

A huge ego and a few billion dollars can cause an awful lot of mischief.

Michael Bloomberg is weighing a possible run for the White House. This is frightening for a couple of reasons. First, consider the prospect of a half-billion-dollars worth of 30-second Bloomberg-for-president ads running all day and all night on television screens in every part of the country.

Americans of every persuasion will have images of the mayor of New York all but burned into their retinas.

For Democrats, the other reason is much more frightening. If Mr. Bloomberg actually decides to run, he risks becoming the Ralph Nader of 2008, drawing votes away from the Democratic nominee and helping to install yet another Republican in the White House.

(Mr. Nader is also making noises about running next year, but it’s generally agreed that Mr. Bloomberg has a much more credible shot at being a spoiler.)

The main thing to keep in mind about Mr. Bloomberg is that he is a Democrat. He changed parties and registered as a Republican for tactical reasons when he ran for mayor in 2001. But he was a Republican in name only. He did not change his political philosophy, and he has continued to pursue the kind of policies you would expect from a Democrat.

As Chris Lehane, a Democratic political consultant, said this week in a reference to Mr. Bloomberg: “If you closed your eyes and you were told that someone was pro-public education, pro-choice, pro-immigration rights, pro-gun control, pro-civil rights, pro-gay rights and pro-women’s rights — you would be pretty happy if you were a Democrat.”

So whatever political banner he may be waving at any given time (he’s now calling himself an independent), Mr. Bloomberg is a Democrat. If he runs for president, he is far more likely to take votes from the Democratic nominee than the Republican one.

That’s why, for all the talk about the feuding between the Bloomberg and Giuliani camps, it’s the leading Democratic candidates who are the most unhappy about the possibility of a Bloomberg candidacy. A number of individuals close to Bill and Hillary Clinton said this week that a Bloomberg presidential run would have an especially harmful effect on Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, which, if anything, has been strengthening of late.

“He definitely hurts us,” said one dismayed Clinton supporter, who added: “You know, sometimes politicians have such big egos they can’t see reality. But Bloomberg is known for seeing reality. So he must know that if he runs he puts a Republican in the White House, which I don’t think he wants.”

The mayor would draw votes from people who want change, who are interested in something different, a new direction. Right now, almost by definition, such voters are Democrats, or independents and Republicans who are inclined to vote for a Democrat. These are voters upset not just by the war in Iraq and the demonstrated incompetence of the Bush administration, but by a variety of other major issues.

“They’re very anxious about a perceived decline in America’s fortunes,” said Mr. Lehane, “about the loss of the American dream for the middle class, the rise of China, global warming, the effect of technology on people’s lives, nuclear proliferation. I think these anxiety voters, who don’t feel that politics is working for them, are going to be the swing voters next year.”

Mr. Bloomberg, a self-made billionaire with a reputation for speaking his mind and a carefully crafted message of political independence, could be very appealing to some of those voters. But not to enough of them to win. And that is the flaw in the enormous trial balloon sent up by Mr. Bloomberg this week when he let it be known that he had abandoned his marriage-of-convenience to the Republican Party and would henceforth officially be independent.

You will find very few people who honestly believe that Mr. Bloomberg can win the presidency. So the crucial issue if he were to run would be the impact he has on the race.

He may not run. He may be enjoying the burst of attention his trial balloon has attracted. He may see this heightened attention as a way to amplify his voice nationally.

There are myriad ways this thing could play out. But the weirdest would be if Michael Bloomberg, who sees himself as such a serious person, plunged headlong into this race with little or no chance to win, and ended up spending $500 million to $1 billion on a venture that undermined the core issues and values he claims to believe in.

Read full post and comments:
"Mr. Mayor, the Nader of ’08?" >>

When Dollars Trump Compassion

By BOB HERBERT

Published: June 19, 2007

You won’t see these stories on television, but Marian Wright Edelman and Dr. Irwin Redlener could talk to you all day and all night about children whose lives have been lost or ruined because they didn’t have health insurance.

This is not a situation one associates with a so-called advanced country. That you can have sick children wasting away in the United States, the wealthiest nation on the planet, because medical treatment that could relieve their suffering is withheld by men and women with dollar signs instead of compassion in their eyes is beyond unconscionable.

Ms. Edelman is the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and Dr. Redlener is president of the Children’s Health Fund.

Both are appalled at the embarrassing fact that nine million American children have no health coverage at all. Among them are children with diabetes, chronic asthma, heart conditions, life-threatening allergies and so on. In many instances they are left untreated until it is too late.

Leaving children uninsured is a form of Russian roulette, Dr. Redlener said.

“All children should be covered,” said Ms. Edelman.

Congress and the president could do something about this right now. Of the nine million children without coverage, six million are already eligible for either Medicaid or the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip, which covers children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but too little to afford private health insurance. The bulk of the funding for S-chip comes from the federal government.

S-chip, which had strong bipartisan support when it was established 10 years ago, is currently up for reauthorization in Congress. The program should be expanded as part of a broader effort to cover as many of the six million eligible-but-uninsured kids as possible.

Eligible children remain outside of S-chip and Medicaid for a variety of reasons, including the following: because there is insufficient funding to cover them; because families do not realize their children qualify for coverage; because red tape and complicated regulations discourage families from signing up.

A number of S-chip re-authorization proposals are being developed. The best-case scenario would be legislation — costing as much as $50 billion in additional funding over the next five years — that would cover millions of additional youngsters from poor and working-poor families. This would put the U.S. on the road toward universal coverage for children.

Ten billion dollars a year is considered a pittance when it comes to funding wars and tax cuts for the very wealthy. But it’s suddenly a lot of money when the subject is the health of American children.

One of the worst scenarios has been offered by President Bush in his White House budget proposal. That calls for just $4.8 billion in new funding for S-chip over the next five years. The result, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would be a net loss of coverage for 1.4 million children.

The old expression was “taking candy from a baby.” The White House is ready to take away vitally needed medicine.

Negotiations over the reauthorization of S-chip are under way. It will be interesting to see whether the Democrats who crowed so much about their newfound power when they took control of Congress will stand tall for the kids of the poor and working poor, and whether there are enough caring Republicans to resurrect the spirit of bipartisanship from a decade ago.

As the heat gets turned up on this issue, the White House appears to be falling into its old habit of creating its own reality.

The Congressional Budget Office and most researchers have agreed on the six million figure for the number of youngsters who are eligible for government-sponsored health coverage but remain unenrolled — roughly four million for Medicaid and two million for S-chip. This has not been controversial.

Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services began circulating a study that tries to make the case that the total number of eligible but uninsured youngsters is a mere 794,000, an absurdly low figure.

If you can wave a magic wand and make five million poor kids disappear, you no longer have to think about caring for them.

Advocates like Dr. Redlener and Ms. Edelman don’t have that luxury.

“Kids who grow up with poor access to health care carry a high risk of having underdiagnosed and undertreated chronic illness, both physical and emotional,” said Dr. Redlener. “We know what to do. We should fully fund this effort at the $50 billion level and make coverage mandatory for all children.”

Read full post and comments:
"When Dollars Trump Compassion" >>

Flip Side of the Dream

By BOB HERBERT

Published: June 16, 2007

Camden, N.J.

Emmanuel Wayne pressed his back against the shabby, one-story building, trying unsuccessfully to escape the downpour. The blue-and-white sign overhead said Bill’s Liquors.

I was standing there with him. The water pouring down the teenager’s face created a funhouse mirror effect, making it look like he was laughing and crying at the same time. It was an absurd place to conduct an interview, but a lot of things about the inner-city are absurd.

“I been looking for a job,” he said, “but you know ... .” He shrugged. “I went to the McDonald’s. I was up to the Cherry Hill Mall. Ain’t too much out here.”

It was a gloomy late afternoon. Throughout the rundown neighborhood, young people were gathered in clusters on porches, looking out at the rain. I talked to some and they told the same story as Emmanuel. No jobs. No money.

“That’s why people go on the hustle,” said one young man. “Got to get the money somewhere.”

The summer job outlook for teenagers is beyond bleak. A modest 157,000 jobs were added to the nation’s payrolls in May. But teen employment fell for the fifth consecutive month, an ominous trend as we head into the summer months when millions of additional teenagers join in the hunt for jobs.

From January through May, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, “the national teen employment rate averaged only 33.1 percent, tying for the lowest employment rate in the past 60 years.”

For youngsters like Emmanuel Wayne and others in this distressed city just a stone’s throw from Philadelphia, the problem is much worse. Last summer, the employment rate for black teens from low-income families was an abysmal 18 percent.

This is the flip side of the American dream. Kids who grow up poor and never work at a regular job tend not to think in terms of postgraduate degrees, marriages and honeymoons, careers and the cost of educating the next generation.

A steady job could make all the difference. Along with the paycheck comes a sense of the possibilities. Kids develop a clearer understanding of the value of education and are more likely to stay in school. The heightened sense of self-worth that comes from gainful employment can be a bulwark against negative peer pressure. Contacts are made and a work history established.

“The more you work today, the more you’re going to work tomorrow,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies. “And the more you work while you’re in school, the easier it is to transition to the labor market when you graduate.”

It seems obvious that we should be putting as many young people to work as possible, but the opposite is happening. The youth labor market in the U.S. has all but collapsed. Teens were especially hard hit by the recession that followed the employment boom of the late 1990s, and there has been no substantial recovery in the teen job market since then.

Years ago the federal government played a major role in bolstering job opportunities for teenagers. There was substantial bipartisan support for both year-round and summer employment programs. But that important commitment vanished with the conservative onslaught of recent years.

The result was inevitable. As the center has reported, “Far fewer youth across the nation are gaining exposure to the job market and to the real world of work than in the late 1980s and 1990s.”

What you are left with are frustrated youngsters, full of energy but lacking appropriate outlets, who have trouble figuring out what to do with themselves. It’s an environment that is all but guaranteed to spawn bad choices.

I asked Emmanuel what he might do if he couldn’t find a job for the summer.

“Don’t know,” he said. “I got a buddy doing this and that. He could help me out.”

The rain had eased up and Emmanuel was off. A man named Darnell, who said he was 23, came out of the liquor store. He and I talked for awhile about the summer prospects for teens in the neighborhood.

“Well, there ain’t no jobs in Camden,” he said. “Not for teenagers. If you can’t get a job, you have to hustle. People be pushing weed. Cutting hair. Lifting stuff. The girls do their thing. It ain’t no picnic out here. It’s depressing.”

Read full post and comments:
"Flip Side of the Dream" >>

The Divide in Caring for Our Kids

By BOB HERBERT

Published: June 12, 2007

A few weeks ago, Teri Hatcher, one of the stars of the television series “Desperate Housewives,” was on David Letterman’s show, talking very animatedly about a time when her daughter needed emergency dental care.

“It was causing her some pain,” Ms. Hatcher said. “And then, of course, it was a Friday night. Overnight the whole thing blew up and it turned out to be an abscess.”

Where to get a dentist on a Saturday?

Luckily, Ms. Hatcher’s best friend is married to a dentist who was more than happy to open up his office that Saturday. But he needed an assistant. Ms. Hatcher volunteered.

She digressed: “I hate the dentist... . Just my whole life, you know. It’s the worst. I would do anything to get out of going to the dentist. Really. Anything.”

But Ms. Hatcher stood there like a trouper as the dentist examined her daughter’s tooth. “He sees it is an abscess, and he has to do surgery,” she said. “So you, I’m trying to — I hate it. I’m squeamish. I’m going to throw up, and then I’m trying to pull it together...

“So he does the Novocaine and gives her a little of the gas. She is perfectly fine, because she’s going, ‘I love the dentist. I want to come here every day.’ And then, of course, I’m thinking, ‘Can I take a tank of that home? Because that is really what I need.’ ”

And so on. The story, of course, had a happy ending. Ms. Hatcher’s daughter was fine. Mr. Letterman got to tell a raunchy dentist joke. The audience was amused, and Ms. Hatcher eventually exited to a robust round of applause.

I was particularly interested in the segment because just a few hours earlier I had filed a column for the next day’s paper about health care for children. The column included the story of Deamonte Driver, a homeless 12-year-old from Prince George’s County, Md., who also had an abscessed tooth.

Now, if I had been in Ms. Hatcher’s position, I would have done exactly as she did. I would have knocked down doors if necessary to get help for a child in distress. So this is no criticism of her. It’s an illustration of the kind of stunning differences in fortune that can face youngsters living at opposite ends of America’s vast economic divide.

Deamonte needed his tooth pulled, a procedure that was estimated to cost $80. But his mother, Alyce Driver, had no health insurance for her children. She believes their Medicaid coverage lapsed early this year because of a bureaucratic foul-up, perhaps because paperwork was mailed to a homeless shelter after they had left. In any event, it would have been difficult for Ms. Driver to find an oral surgeon willing to treat a Medicaid patient.

Untreated, the pain in Deamonte’s tooth grew worse. He was taken to a hospital emergency room, where he was given medication for pain and sinusitis and sent home.

What started as a toothache now became a nightmare. Bacteria from the abscess had spread to Deamonte’s brain. The child was in agony, and on Feb. 25 he died.

There’s a presidential election under way, but this sort of thing is not a big part of the campaign. American children are dying because of a lack of access to health care, and we’re worried about Mitt Romney’s religion and asking candidates to raise their hands to show whether they believe in evolution. I’m starting to believe in time travel because there’s no doubt this nation is moving backward.

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul,” Nelson Mandela once said, “than the way in which it treats its children.”

There are nine million children who lack health care in the U.S. and millions more who are eligible for coverage but fall through the cracks for one reason or another.

What we need is a national commitment to provide basic health care to all children, not just the children of the well-to-do. This should be a no-brainer. You’re a child in the United States? You’ve got health care. We’re not going to let you die from a toothache. We’re better than that. We’re not going to let your family go bankrupt because you’ve got cancer or some other disease, or because you’ve been in a terrible accident.

The cost? Don’t fall for that bogyman.

There’s plenty of give in America’s glittering $13 trillion economy. What’s the sense of being the richest nation on the planet if you can’t even afford to keep your children healthy and alive?

Read full post and comments:
"The Divide in Caring for Our Kids" >>