Excerpts from newspapers that may be of use for our readers. Abbreviations: NYT=New York Times, GW=Guardian Weekly, LAT=Los Angeles Times

Red Eye

Cops harass by ‘race’ and class

NYT, 3/13 — New York City....cops are making more than a half-million of these stops every year. A vast majority of the people targeted — close to 90 percent — are completely innocent....

If they’ve shown their identification to the cops or answered any questions,...a permanent record of the encounter...is promptly entered into the department’s staggeringly huge computerized files. Why the Police Department should be keeping files on innocent people is a question with no legitimate answer. This is Big Brother in Blue....

Blacks and Hispanics, and especially those who are young and those who are poor, are disproportionately singled-out for this peculiar form of police harassment....

The overwhelming majority of the stops yield no law-enforcement benefit whatsoever....

The reasons given by the cops for deciding which unfortunate New Yorkers will be stopped are beyond bogus. A “furtive movement” is the most popular....

The truth — and many cops will tell you this privately — is that the stops are made first and the justification is dreamed up later.

Capitalism kills morality in Poland

NYT, 3/16 — Warsaw — They loiter at the mall for hours, young teenage girls selling their bodies  in return for designer jeans, Nokia cellphones, even a pair of socks.

Katarzyna Roslaniec, a young filmaker....scribbled their secrets in her notepad....

The result is the darkly devastating fictional film, “Galerianki,” or Mall Girls, which premiered in Poland in the autumn and has provoked a national debate about moral decadence in this conservative, predominantly Catholic country, 20 years after the fall of... [the Berlin Wall].

Ms. Roslaniec called mall girls the daughters of capitalism. “Parents have lost themselves in the race after a new washing machine or car and are rarely home,” she said. “A 14-year-old girl needs a system of values.... these girls live in a world where there are no feelings....

“....All this would have been unimaginable during Communism.”

Iran nukes? Criminal!
Israel? Hmm...

GW, 3/12 — Droning on about the dangers of a nuclear Iran, Clinton in Qater appeared to treat her Arab interlocutors as though they were children, but most children above a certain age in the Middle East know about the blatant contradiction in US policy of punishing Iran while mollycoddling the only country with undeclared nuclear weapons in the region [Israel].

‘The Making of African America’

NYT, 3/21 — What sets the African-American story apart is the terrible strain of oppression that runs áthrough it. Other groups suffered from discrimination, of course. But nothing comes close to matching the ferocity of racism....

Mr. Berlin brilliantly evokes the horrors of....the rise of systematic segregation in the late-
19th-century South as it stangled the promise of independence and equality that Emancipation had created. He traces...the creation of a segregated North in...the way that employers pushed African-American workers into the lowest-paying, most dangerous jobs they had to offer; the way that real estate agents, bankers, insurance agents and white homeowners restricted black migrants to the most dilapidated neighborhods, hemming them into the ghettos many of them would never escape....Profound inequalities..continue to plague African-American communities — poverty, segregation, incarceration — despite the obvious triumphs of the last 40 years....

Not that Berlin sees victimization as the main theme of black history. “The Making of African America” is primarily a story of the resilience, creativity, and courage African-Americans drew upon as they engaged in the difficult process of piecing together their new lives....

Recession will hurt a generation

NYT, 3/20 — A story that is not getting nearly enough attention is the ruinous fiscal meltdown occurring in state after state, all across the country.

Taxes are being raised. Draconian cuts in services are being made. Public employees are being fired....The sick, the elderly, the young and the poor — are getting badly hurt....

For all the happy talk about “no child left behind,” the truth is that in Arizona and New Jersey and dozens of other states trying to cope with the fiscal disaster brought on by the Great Recession, millions of children are being left far behind, and many millions of adults as well....

California has cut billions of dollars from its education system....

In the first few months of this year, state and local governments across the U.S. cut 45,000 jobs. Additional layoffs are expected....

“What we’re seeing now in Arizona and New Jersey and other states spells long-term trouble for the nation’s children....

“We are seeing the emergence of what amounts to a ‘recession generation....’”

Those that rely...heavily on cuts are making guaranteed investments in human misery.

Detained immigrants protest

NYT, 3/17 — Federal authorities shut downNew York City’s only immigration detention center last month and sent most of its detainees to a county jail in New Jersey....

In protest, the detainees have sent appeals for help to the American Bar Association, signe by more than 180 detainees, and have threatened a hunger strike. They cite exorbitant telephone costs...but also complain of poor health care, confiscation of legal documents and mistreatment by guards at the jail....

For detainees shifted from the New York jail...the possibilities for communiction with the outside world have shrunk....

Legal access, inlcuding phone calls at competitive rates, was part of the national detention standards adopted by the federal government in 2000. The Obama administration, however,...has declined to make the standards enforceable....

Detainees said they were not even allowed to read newspapers or watch the news. “They stop us from knowing what is going on with our own family and around us,” one letter said.

 Living in capitalism’s garbage

 GW, 3/19 — Siswando is 14 years old. He doesn’t go to school and every day he can be found up to his ankles in rubbish, covered in flies and swarming insects.

“I like to do this. It’s a way to make money,” he said, sitting in front of several mounds of rubbish at the landfill in Salatiga, a mid-sized town of about 150,000 in Indonesia....

Every day about 40 trucks arrive....The scavengers sift through for items that can be sold....

“In the future I will still do this,” said Siswando. He’s at the landfill every day from dawn....

In Jakarta there are up to 400,000 scavengers....

“They are some of poorest people on the planet. That money is supporting entire families....”

Children usually follow their parents into scavenging and miss out on school....

Greenpeace was quoted...saying that Indonesia’s scavengers were “poisoning themselves to death” by handling electronic waste.

Medical aid doesn’t end problems

 NYT, 3/24 — Doctors and social workers have long said that medical care alone is not enough to address the health woes of the poor, which are often related to diet, living conditions and stress....

A survey of patients in Dr. Kahn’s [Cincinnati] clinic, where nearly all are on Medicaid, found that 28 percent of families had their gas or electricity cut off in the previous year and that 23 percent had doubled up in housing of had to move to a cheaper residence. One in seven mothers with infants said they had diluted their formula to make it last, andonein three said they had sometimes run out of formula without money to buy more.

_