http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/1016leepson1016.html

'God' not part of 1st pledge

Leepson

FREELANCE WRITER

Oct. 16, 2005 12:00 AM

The nation's highest courts for the second time in two years are wrestling with the constitutionality of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. If the Supreme Court deletes the words, it will be the fifth change in the pledge since millions of schoolchildren first recited it as part of the nationwide Oct. 12, 1892, 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus' voyage.

The words those children spoke that day were: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." The words came from the pen of 37-year-old magazine editor Francis Bellamy, who wrote them for the 1892 commemoration, officially known as the National Columbian Public School Celebration. Bellamy, then an assistant editor of the Youth's Companion magazine, also happened to be an ordained Baptist minister.

Bellamy, whose father also was a Baptist minister, was born in Rome, N.Y., and graduated from the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1876. He went on to practice his ministry at the Baptist Church in Little Falls, N.Y., and then at the Dearborn Street Church in Boston before turning to magazine editing.

Despite his long involvement with the church, Bellamy wrote the pledge without any reference to religion. That's because the pledge's origins had nothing to do with religion. The pledge was an integral part of what was known as the schoolhouse flag movement, a campaign led by patriotic and veterans groups - spearheaded by the nation's first politically powerful veterans' service organization, the Grand Army of the Republic - to put the Stars and Stripes in all the nation's schools. The idea was to gain the allegiance of millions of immigrant schoolchildren and the children of immigrants to their new nation.

"We are all descendants of immigrants, but we want to hasten that day, by every possible means when we shall be fused together," future President Theodore Roosevelt, a strong backer of the pledge and the schoolhouse flag movement, wrote to Bellamy in 1892. "Consequently, by all means in our power we ought to inculcate, among the children of this country, the most fervent loyalty to the Flag."

Bellamy chose the words "one nation indivisible," he later explained, to promote post-Civil-War reconciliation. As for "liberty and justice for all," Bellamy said he was inspired by "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," the "historic slogan of the French Revolution, which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends."

The first change in the pledge's wording was a minor one. It came after Bellamy heard thousands of students in Boston recite the pledge on Oct. 12, 1892. On that day, he changed the words slightly to read, "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic . . . "

Six years later, New York became the first state in the nation to mandate that students recite the pledge, then primarily known as the Flag Salute, in public schools at the beginning of the school day. Other states soon followed suit.

The second and third changes in the pledge's wording came in 1923 and 1924. They were made at the National Flag Conference in Washington, D.C., in which dozens of veterans and patriotic groups, led by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, met to draw up a national Flag Code. Delegates to the conference replaced the words "my flag" with, first, "to the flag of the United States," and, then later with "to the flag of the United States of America." On June 22, 1942, Congress officially recognized the pledge by including it in the U.S. Flag Code, which was adopted that year. In 1945, it became known officially as the Pledge of Allegiance.

The third, and by far most controversial, change in the pledge, adding "under God," came about in 1954 as the result of a national campaign waged by the Knights of Columbus and with the strong support of President Eisenhower during the Cold War.

Bellamy, who died in 1931, adamantly opposed the 1923 and 1924 changes to his Pledge of Allegiance. He was miffed at not having been consulted about the changes, and he regarded his original words as sacrosanct. The changes "incensed me more the more I cannot say," Bellamy's biographer quotes him as saying. "Robbed of my authorship, my Salute was changed and revamped with not even the courtesy of consultation on the revisions." I "never acknowledge these changes," Bellamy said, "My Salute contains only twenty-three words."

It's a safe bet, therefore, that Francis Bellamy would be on the front lines with those working to delete "under God" from the pledge. It's difficult to speculate, though, what he would have thought about an earlier Supreme Court ruling on the pledge. In 1943, the court ruled on an 8-year-old case involving a young Jehovah's Witness who refused to salute the flag. In a landmark case, the court found that schoolchildren cannot be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, a ruling that still stands.

Marc Leepson is the author of "Flag: An American Biography," a history of the American flag from the beginnings to today. His Web site is www.flagbiography.com.

<#==#>

13 October 2005

Dear ********,

Thank you for writing me again so soon. It’s good to hear from you. You’re right that I don’t really need your news updates, as I do receive the Arizona Republic regularly. Sometimes I am reminded of an article I read a long time ago, and sometimes there are articles from other sources, so its not totally useless. The other inmates would not be interested in your news summaries. They are surprisingly pro-government for a bunch of people the government is locking up for many years. I have heard many uttering pro-war sentiments.

Mostly what I do all day is read and watch my cellmates television. I can’t hang around in the prison yard, because we are locked down all day. They only let us out for recreation, food, and medical appointments. Recreation is three times a week.

I have never actually seen someone taking drugs or dealing drugs here, but from what I hear it does go on, and the Aryan Brotherhood is involved with it. One inmate asked to borrow ten stamps from me (postage stamps are a de facto currency in here), and I was told later by my cellmate that he needed the stamps to pay a cocaine debt. I don’t know what the attitude of the guards is to drugs. There aren’t enough guards here to monitor everything, so I imagine if one is discreet it is possible to get away with taking drugs.

You have my permission to post my letters on other the Indymedia site or other websites as you feel fit.

There are definitely dangers her, but it would be an exaggeration to say that I fear for my life in on a daily basis.  90% of the inmates here are nice and friendly. It’s a few inmates in a few circumstances that cause the trouble.

There are nine housing units (HUs or “houses”_ on the yard (the Rincon Unit). I am in HU6 or “House Six”. Each house has three corridors or “Runs”, A, B, and C. I am in B run or “Baker Run”, as the guards call it.

Each run is governed by a representative of the Aryan Brotherhood. For my run, HU6 B, the representative is an inmate named Todd Huston. (inmate number 115953,  DOB 12/28/1977 )  If anyone wants to submit any kind of paperwork to the prison authorities, even a request for medical treatment Todd has to see it  to make sure no one is snitching. My paperwork has been examined closely this past week because Todd is afraid I will report what happened in the recreation field when I refused to enter the lottery the Aryan Brotherhood was conducting. The Aryan Brotherhood doesn’t insist on examining letters going to people outside the prison, however, and so I can be perfectly frank about what goes on here. Still I prefer to write these letters when my cellmate is at work and finish before he comes back.

Todd also collects a tax of one stamp (37 cents) per month from each of us – supposedly it goes to help the white inmates who are being held in the Supermax yard in Florence. Supposedly that lottery they wanted me to enter goes to that also.

I am glad that Laro was able to defy the will of the Aryan Brotherhood while he was being transferred. It would be very dangerous for him to sit next to a black man here.

Thank you for telling me about Krystin Sinama. I am glad we have someone in the anti-war movement in the House of Representatives. I’m also glad she sticks it to the religious folks as well.

The television here has four channels devoted to Department of Corrections material. Channel 2 has a lot of fundamentalist Christian garbage on it, but now that it is Ramadan, they have Muslim shows on it so I suppose they let different religions take turns.

I am surprised to learn that all my letters have been opened and read. They did not do that to the outgoing mail when I was in jail, only incoming.

Yours,

Kevin

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http://www.boston.com/news/local/vermont/articles/2005/10/16/volunteers_get_cold_reception_in_vermont/

Volunteers get cold reception in Vermont

They run into protest and walk through wild to watch Canada border

By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff  |  October 16, 2005

NEWPORT, Vt. -- It's hard to save the United States from illegal immigrants when you can't find the border.

 At noon yesterday, some volunteers in the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps were in this bucolic town in northern Vermont, trying to do both.

Eleven members of this citizens group had come to the Vermont-Canada border to patrol for illegal immigrants. They had intended to station themselves in Derby Line, a quaint village that straddles the border.

But these Minutemen were forced out of town by a larger crowd of protesters, who denounced their opposition to illegal immigration as a front for racism.

So the volunteers set off to watch a stretch of border on a bike path that runs along Lake Memphremagog.

Only they got lost.

Some of the men stood at a break in the path, which is crossed by the Canadian border close to where they stood. But the group's leader, Bob Casimiro of Weymouth, Mass., was not sure which way to send them.

He pointed down the path toward a footbridge. The Minutemen started walking.

''Stay within sight," he told them. Within minutes, they were out of sight.

The Minutemen were formed in Arizona by ordinary citizens who believe that the federal government is not doing enough to secure the country's borders. In April, they stationed themselves along the southwest border with Mexico, armed with binoculars and cellphones.

They alerted border patrol officers whenever they saw people crossing illegally into the United States, hoping to deter others from trying.

Last month, they announced they would start patrolling the border with Canada.

Border patrol officers are careful not to criticize the Minutemen directly. But they do point out that the officers are best qualified to watch the border.

Others were more openly critical this week. Yesterday, about 40 men and women stood in the pouring rain on the village common in Derby Line to protest the arrival of the Minutemen in town.

''They are outsiders, and we don't want them here," said David Van Deusen of Moretown, Vt., who helped to organize the protest. ''We don't want their racist policies in Vermont."

The Minutemen's efforts are as much about public relations as apprehending illegal immigrants. They hope to make the issue of immigration more prominent nationally and to pressure the Bush administration into providing more funding for border patrols.

Casimiro spent three weeks in Naco, Ariz., earlier this year. He alerted authorities to one illegal immigrant, but he said he saw more important results than that.

''What we saw in Arizona is our presence certainly has energized [border enforcement] down there, because they don't want to be embarrassed," he said.

John Pfeifer, assistant chief patrol agent for Customs and Border Protection in the sector that includes Vermont, defended the agency.

''Our resources are obviously not unlimited," Pfeifer said. ''But we work with what they give us, and I think we do a really good job of monitoring and enforcing the laws on the border."

 A couple of miles from the road where Casimiro left them, three of the Minutemen were still walking, grand houses on their left, the lake on their right. The rain quickly soaked them.

''This is really nice," said Weymouth police officer Bob Johnson. ''We get a foliage tour thrown in for no extra cost."

The border in this part of Vermont is nothing like the mostly flat and open one that separates Arizona from Mexico, where the Minutemen staged a high-profile border watch that brought them to national prominence in April.

This northern border is a slash through thick forest or a tree line a few yards from a road in the town of Holland, Vt. In Derby Line, it is narrow Lee Street, dotted with pretty Victorian houses, or the building at 209 Main St., where apartment 2A is in Canada and 2B is in the United States.

It is the thin, black line that runs along the floor of the Haskell Free Library. It is a small obelisk in a field or in the backyard of a run-down house high on a hill.

It is Canusa Avenue in the town of Beebe Plain, where residents on one side of the street are Canadians and those on the other are in the United States, and crossing the road to borrow a cup of sugar means passing through a checkpoint at the end of the street. It cuts through the middle of Lake Memphremagog.

Border patrol officers arrested 1,927 people along the 195 miles of border in the Swanton sector, which includes Vermont and part of New York, between Oct. 1, 2004, and Sept. 30. Of those, 856 were crossing the border illegally. Others were picked up on expired visas and other violations.

Along the 4,000-mile border between the United States and Canada, 7,340 people were arrested in the last fiscal year, 2,100 of those in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Those numbers are minuscule compared to arrests along the 1,951-mile border with Mexico, where over the same period about 1.2 million people were arrested by border patrol officers.

Watching the northern border is far more complicated than it is in the South. Border patrol officers are constantly in motion through the border towns in this region, policing the boundary in all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, boats, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft that use infrared technology to survey the area at night.

They also rely on residents to report anything suspicious.

''The residents are critical," Pfeifer said. ''The border goes through people's backyards and through buildings. Obviously, we can't put a camera and a sensor on every inch of the border, so we rely on the residents to call us. [Derby Line] is a real small town, so people know who belongs there and who does not."

Residents in Derby Line were mostly opposed to the arrival of the Minutemen.

''I don't think they're needed," said Buzz Roy, a pharmacist. ''The border patrol does an ample job. I don't think we need a bunch of yahoos enforcing the law."

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the federal government has tripled the number of officers patrolling the border and tightened the rules: It used to be easier for locals to cross the border, but now everybody in Derby Line has to check in every time they pass over it.

''I don't know why [the Minutemen are here]," said Florence Joyal, a sales assistant in Brown's Drugstore. ''We've got border patrol beaucoup. Security is tighter now."

''It's just another form of vigilantism," said James Griffin, 62, who came to Derby Line eight years ago. ''I think their agenda is racist, and they're just trying to impose their will. They're just another form of militia. I don't like their very presence, and I don't think Vermonters are going to be too happy to have them crossing over their land."

Those criticisms are unjustified, said Casimiro, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform and leader of the 11 volunteers from Massachusetts, Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, and Connecticut.

''It's very simple," he said. ''I'm just trying to save my country."

''National security is a big part of this," said Casimiro, 67, a retired design and project engineer. ''As far as I'm concerned, I don't care where it is, I just want the border secured. We cannot survive as a nation with porous borders like that. It affects our economy, and it affects our culture. We're just rapidly becoming a nation other than the one I grew up in."

Casimiro had heard that people in Derby Line had defended the border patrol. He pointed out that the Minutemen were observers and that their aim is to call border patrol whenever they see illegal border crossers.

''Until the border is 100 percent secure, they're not doing a good job," Casimiro said.

Back on the bike path, the three Minutemen trudged on in the rain. Finally, they knocked on Amy Audet's door to ask directions.

The border, she told them, was in the opposite direction.

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at abraham@globe.com.

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

<#==#>

18 USC Sec. 1696

01/19/04

TITLE 18 - CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE

 PART I - CRIMES

 CHAPTER 83 - POSTAL SERVICE

     Sec. 1696. Private express for letters and packets

       (a) Whoever establishes any private express for the conveyance of letters or packets, or in any manner causes or provides for the conveyance of the same by regular trips or at stated periods over any post route which is or may be established by law, or from any city, town, or place to any other city, town, or place, between which the mail is regularly carried, shall be fined not more than $500 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both. This section shall not prohibit any person from receiving and delivering to the nearest post office, postal car, or other authorized depository for mail matter any mail matter properly stamped. (b) Whoever transmits by private express or other unlawful means, or delivers to any agent thereof, or deposits at any appointed place, for the purpose of being so transmitted any letter or packet, shall be fined under this title.  Libertarian Myth my ass.

--

        Escape the Rat Race for Peace, Quiet, and Miles of Desert Beauty Take a Sanity Break at The Bunkhouse at Liberty Haven Ranch

                          http://libertyhavenranch.com

From wikipedia.

Monopoly status The USPS enjoys a government monopoly with respect to first-class and third-class letter delivery under the authority of the Private Express Statutes. The USPS says that these statutes were enacted by Congress "to provide for an economically sound postal system that could afford to deliver letters between any two locations, however remote." In effect, those who mail letters to a near location are subsidizing those who are mailing letters to distant locations. The USPS enjoys monopoly status in that it possesses the exclusive permission under federal law to deliver first and third class mail. However, an exception to private carriers is made with regard to "extremely urgent letters" as long as the private carrier charges at least $3 or twice the U.S. postage, whichever is greater (other stipulations, such as maximum delivery time, apply as well); or, alternatively, it may be delivered for free. The USPS also enjoys a monopoly privilege in placing mail into standardized mailboxes marked "U.S. Mail." Hence, private carriers must deliver packages directly to the recipient, leave them in the open near the recipient's front door, or place them in a special box dedicated solely to that carrier (a technique commonly used by small courier and messenger services). In the 1840s Lysander Spooner started the commercially successful American Letter Mail Company which competed with the United States Post Office by providing lower rates. He was successfully challenged with legal measures by the U.S. government and exhausted his resources trying to defend what he believed to be his right to compete. The 37 cents (USD) required by the USPS to deliver a letter in the U.S. compares favorably to other industrialized countries, such as those of the European Union, where the postage for an ordinary domestic first-class letter is nearly twice that much. Today, it is arguable whether any meaningful competition for ordinary letter delivery would develop in the absence of a legal monopoly, as letter volume continues to dwindle due to replacement by more efficient electronic means of communication and payment. In countries that have recently undergone postal service privatization, such as Germany, no meaningful competition for first-class letter delivery has materialized and the overall cost of services to consumers has risen. As it continues to lose package services market share to private competitors, the USPS and its organizational structure face an uncertain future. As an affiliate of the federal government, the USPS is not required to pay any of the federal or state income taxes that regular businesses pay. Since the USPS is also directed by law to break even in the long run, there is currently not much tax revenue lost due to this tax exemption. However there is a possibility that a private alternatives to the USPS monopoly on normal letter delivery could be profitable and net tax contributors (Private competitors in package delivery have become profitable even with the tax burden placed on them). Therefore some critics view the current tax exemption as a subsidy provided by the government to the USPS. [edit]Subsidized services The USPS claims to have operated "in a businesslike manner without taxpayer support" since its spinoff from the cabinet on July 1, 1971 following the passage of the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970. It does, however, receive compensation from taxpayer funds for certain services that it is mandated to provide for free or at a discount, including free mail for the blind, military mail, nonprofit mail and overseas ballots. $36 million such compensation was paid for fiscal 2004. In addition, Congress appropriated the USPS a total of $762 million for biohazard decontamination and detection equipment in response to the 2001 anthrax attacks.

-----Original Message-----

From: lightonliberty@aol.com

To: lpaz-discuss@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 13:28:50 EDT

Subject: Re: [lpaz-discuss] Japan to privatize its postal agency

In a message dated 10/16/2005 1:26:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time,

***********@***********.**** writes:

> i vaguely remember incidents in the past when people

> offered mail delivery that competed directly with the

> post office that the feds shut them down.

> 

> 

> mike

> 

Can't think of any myself. Your vague memories are by their nature, vague, probably inaccurate.

Kevin O'Connell

<#==#>

normally i give you news articles but i will change for this time and give you a web site. this web page is from the cato institute which is a libertarian think tank in washington dc. read it and find out how the post office is making our mail service better. yea sure!!!!! (for those convicts who dont know what libertarians are we are a political party like the republicans or democrats. we have ballot status in all 50 states. we are the only political party with a platform that alway has and always will demand that ALL drugs be legalized, well and ALL guns too, well and all victimless crimes. last the libertarian party always had and probably always will welcome convict to join our party if you have libertarain views)

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-146.html

Cato Policy Analysis No. 146 February 1, 1991

Slower Is Better:

The New Postal Service

by James Bovard

James Bovard is an associate policy analyst of the Cato Institute and the author of The Farm Fiasco (ICS Press, 1989).

Executive Summary

The U.S. Postal Service is combining the largest increase in stamp prices with the greatest intentional slowdown in mail delivery in U.S. history. Billions of letters a year are being delayed as part of a novel scheme to "improve mail service." Postmaster General Anthony Frank has emerged as America's grand champion of Doublespeak with his endless misrepresentations of the Postal Service's performance.

In l764 colonial postmaster general Benjamin Franklin announced a goal of two-day mail delivery between New York City and Philadelphia.(1) In 1991 the Postal Service considers it a "success" to deliver mail from New York City to next-door Westchester County in two days.(2) The average first-class letter now takes 22 percent longer to reach its destination than it did in 1969.(3) If the current trend continues, the Postal Service may soon be charging people a storage fee for each letter they mail.

Frank declared in 1989 that the Postal Service is "the most efficient and most loved American institution."(4) In September 1990 he declared that the Postal Service is "better than 99.5 percent perfect"--meaning, according to Frank, that fewer than 1 of every 200 letters "is delayed, missorted or touched by some mistake."(5) In reality, the Postal Service is trying to solve its problems by shredding its customers. The worse the Postal Service's failures, the more grandiose its rhetoric.

The Postal Service is becoming increasingly secretive. Last August it ceased divulging data on the number of Express Mail letters that arrive late. Last November it refused to divulge key information from a $23 million test that revealed how many letters postal workers lose or throw away each year. In recent years the Postal Service appears to have knowingly violated Federal Trade Commission regulations on false advertising, and it may have also violated the U.S. Mail Fraud Act.

Mail service in America is slow and unreliable because the government has a monopoly. Private companies can only deliver letters pursuant to an exemption to the private express statutes. Ironically, such exemptions are granted by the Postal Service itself. Under the current exemption, private companies must charge more than $3 per letter and more than double the price the Postal Service would charge for the same letter. As long as the Postal Service can legally quash its competitors, it need not exert itself for its customers.

The Great Mail Slowdown--or "Just Say Slow!"

A l987 Postal Service poster proclaimed, "The New Postal Service. We're changing. We move mountains of mail for you. Amazingly accurate. Amazingly fast. . . . We're delivering the mail faster than ever."(6)

But last year the Postal Service decided to improve mail service by delaying letter delivery. The Postal Service has taken a great leap backwards, sharply reducing the role of airplanes in mail delivery. Targets for overnight and two-day mail delivery have been sharply reduced.

As Frank explained to the House Government Operations Committee last September, "I began to hear complaints from mailers and customers about inconsistent first-class mail delivery. . . . We learned how important consistent, reliable delivery is to our customers."(7) The Postal Service seized on a supposed need for more consistent delivery as a pretext for a general slowdown of the mail. As Rep. Francis X. McCloskey (D-Ind.) complained, "Postmasters from locations across the country have informed this subcommittee that first-class mail is being delayed for no apparent reason. Mail that could be processed at 3:00 in the morning. . . is not being processed so that the morning shift has mail to process."(8)

With its previous standards, the Postal Service strove for overnight delivery of first-class mail within a 100- to 150-mile radius of sectional mail-handling facilities. Now, in many areas, the target zone for overnight delivery has been reduced to less than 50 miles. Nashua, New Hampshire, is only 45 miles from Boston; the new standards call for two-day delivery, thereby allotting roughly an hour for each mile a letter must travel between the two cities.(9) The Postal Service planned to put mail between Washington and Baltimore on a two-day standard, but the protests of Maryland senators and congressmen persuaded the Postal Service to retain an overnight delivery standard.(10)

Surprisingly, Frank insists that the new slower standards will result in "improved mail service for our customers."(11) Frank has even cited the mail slowdown campaign as proof that the Postal Service is "living up to that 'We Deliver' promise."(12) Last September Frank told the Economic Club of Detroit: "We have not, contrary to some opinion, slowed down mail service. We've made very minor adjustments to our service areas."(13)

But the Postal Service's own tests show that mail delivery has slowed since implementation of the new standards began in late July 1990. The Postal Service conducts internal examinations of mail delivery using its Origin-Destination Information System. Though the ODIS is heavily biased to present a rosy picture of postal performance, ODIS tests do provide a series of statistics on the average number of days required to deliver a first-class letter. In 1969 it required l.5 days on average to deliver a first-class letter.(14) By 1982 the average first-class letter required 1.65 days for delivery, and by 1987, 1.72 days. In the quarter of 1990 before the new standards were implemented, the average had increased to l.80 days. In the quarter after the new standards began to be implemented, the average rose to l.83 days--a 1.7 percent increase that makes current average delivery 22 percent slower than 1969 delivery.(15) According to Postal Service official John Potter, the reform could increase the average delivery time for all first-class mail by as much as 10 percent.(16)

Frank has downplayed public concerns about the delivery cutback, calling the slowdown a "nonevent."(17) When asked about the costs of the slowdown to the American public, Frank declared, "I don't think it costs the American public anything."(18)

The American Bankers Association estimates "that banks' lockbox customers could lose in excess of $90 million each year as a result of the slower standards."(19) The U.S. Chamber of Commerce warns, "Small businesses will be especially hard hit by this slowdown because of their reliance on customers' prompt payments to keep their businesses afloat."(20) John Mapley, general manager of the New Hampshire branch of the world's largest mail-order photofinishing business, told a congressional committee that, because of the new standard, his first-class mail had slowed more than 20 percent.(21)

Before implementing the slowdown, the Postal Service conducted a public survey. A House Government Operations Committee report subtitled Just Say Slow notes: "The [Postal Service's] research was based largely on customer surveys in which a single question asked respondents to choose between speed of delivery and consistency of delivery. The question implied that they could not have both."(22) Robert Cohen, technical director of the Postal Rate Commission, observed, "There is no evidence that the interviewees had any idea what was meant by the concept of consistency as . . . employed in the questionnaire."(23) Stephen A. Gold, the consumer advocate of the Postal Rate Commission, declared, "The Service leaped to the conclusion that a one-day delay in volume, no matter how great, of local First-Class Mail was acceptable if it produced any improvement, no matter how small, in consistency."(24) Frank declared at a congressional hearing that "we believe the savings will be negligible."(25)

The primary benefit is that the slowdown will make it appear that the Postal Service is better serving the public. Frank claims that the new standards will "improve our ability to deliver local mail on time."(26) But that is almost entirely a result of the Postal Service's changing the definition of "on time." As Frank says, "You have a better chance to get l00% perfection in a small radius than a large radius."(27) Sen. David Pryor (D-Ark.) observes, "This is like trying to fool the public by cutting the top off the flag-pole when the flag is stuck halfway up."(28) The Postal Rate Commission concluded that the slowdown will provide "minimal, if any, countervailing benefits to the postal customer."(29)

The goal of prompt mail delivery is sinking into a swamp of postal relativity. In l960 the U.S. Post Office's Annual Report proudly announced "the ultimate objective of next-day delivery of first-class mail anywhere in the United States."(30) In 1990 Frank declared: "I don't think we have anything to be ashamed of. Over half the mail in the U.S. has an overnight standard."(31) Thus, Frank is now bragging that the Postal Service has a goal of next-day delivery for over half of first-class mail. But even that is no longer true. According to the Postal Service's Consumer Affairs Department, as a result of the new slower standards, there was an overnight delivery commitment for only 49 percent of first-class mail in the third quarter of 1990.(32)

At the August 1990 meeting of the Board of Governors, Frank defended the Postal Service's overnight delivery standards by noting that the Mexican mail service does not have an official overnight delivery goal for any of its mail.(33) In 30 years the Postal Service has progressed from striving to provide prompt delivery of all first-class mail to using comparisons with the Mexican mail service to justify itself.

The behavior of the Postal Service can be understood only in light of its monopoly. No private delivery service would lecture its customers that there was no real difference between faster and slower delivery. What would happen if MCI announced that, in order to make life easier for MCI operators, many calls placed via MCI in the future would take twice as long to complete? AT&T and Sprint would have a field day savaging MCI for its contempt of its customers.

Mail Fraud: The Speed of Mail Delivery

For decades postal leaders have declared that 95 percent, or almost 95 percent, of all local first-class mail is successfully delivered overnight. Former postmaster general Preston Tisch, responding to calls for privatization of mail service, declared in 1987, "Stamped, overnight first-class mail was delivered at a record-equalling 95.5 percent ontime pace" in the previous year.(34) Postmaster General Frank bragged to the National League of Postmasters on August 17, 1989, that the Postal Service was succeeding in meeting the 95 percent delivery standard for local first-class mail.(35) The Postal Service's l989 Annual Report, released in early 1990, declared that "overnight stamped first-class mail service performance was 94%."(36) Postal leaders stress that the service's official standard calls for 95 percent next-day delivery of local first-class mail.

The Postal Service's perennial claim of 95 percent, or nearly 95 percent, next-day delivery of local first-class mail--the first line of defense for the nation's postal monopoly--was derived from the Origin-Destination Information System. But the ODIS does not measure the actual time required for letter delivery; it measures the time between when a letter leaves the originating postal facility and when it arrives at the final postal facility. ODIS does not measure the service the Postal Service provides to the public but the transport of mail bags between post offices. ODIS is designed to make mail service appear far speedier than it actually is.

ODIS tests have long been recognized by postal critics as bogus; Commissioner John Crutcher notes, "Notice is given before data are collected--enough notice to move the over-ripe mail out of the way."(37) The Postal Inspection Service found that pervasive cheating occurred in tests of delivery speed of first-class mail.(38) Postal clerks in Cleveland told the Postal Inspection Service that management used "subtle forms of intimidation" to get good results on the ODIS tests.(39) Some postal employees have been bumped from their jobs because they refused to cheat on the mail delivery tests.(40) Even Frank has conceded, "Our service standards were internal and exclusively for our own convenience and not for the customers."(41) On November 6, 1990, Frank admitted, "We've never had a customer-oriented measurement" of mail delivery speed.(42)

Last year, for the first time, the Postal Service contracted with a private firm--Price Waterhouse--to measure the speed of delivery of first-class mail. In November the Postal Service announced the results. Even with the new slower standards for overnight mail delivery, almost four times more first-class letters were delivered late than Postal Service officials had previously claimed.(43) Yet Postmaster General Frank praised the results: "They show we are doing a pretty good job in the 86 cities where the tests are being conducted."(44) In some ways Frank's statement is more shocking than the actual test results. What CEO of a private corporation, upon discovering that his company had a service failure rate 300 percent higher than the company's standard, would cite that as evidence that the company was doing "a pretty good job"?

The Price Waterhouse results for New York City were especially revealing. In 1989 the Postal Service lowered the target for mail delivery for New York City, thereby affecting 26 percent of all first-class New York mail.(45) (New York City accounts for over 10 percent of all letters mailed in the United States.) Previously, the target for overnight delivery was a radius of roughly 100 miles around New York City; under the new standard, anything outside the city limits fell into two- or three-day delivery target zones. In September 1990 Frank declared that the New York City delivery goal cutback "worked splendidly. . . . The improvement in service was immediate. Service performance for stamped and metered mail improved substantially in the local area and has continued to improve."(46) Yet the Price Waterhouse test revealed that mail service in the Big Apple was the worst in the nation: only 46.9 percent of first- class letters mailed within the city of New York to New York City destinations were delivered overnight.(47)

Frank said in response to the Price Waterhouse comments at the November 6, 1990, meeting of the Postal Service's Board of Governors, "I think the numbers came out pretty much about where we expected them under this different kind of a measurement system."(48) A week later, writing in USA Today, Frank commented, "The results of this . . . 'checkup' are about what we expected."(49) Yet if the Postal Service "expected" that the Price Waterhouse test results would come in far lower than its own in-house measurements, why did the Postal Service spend millions of dollars in the past decade making false claims about first-class mail delivery in its advertisements?

The question arises: what did the postmaster general know, and when did he know it? If Frank actually recognized that the ODIS information understated by 75 percent the number of late first-class letters, he knowingly sought to deceive the American public in his speeches claiming a 95 percent success rate. And if Frank did not realize that the ODIS numbers were a farce, he was completely in the dark about the actual performance of his organization.

As Federal Trade Commission spokesman Joel Winston noted: "If a company is claiming a success rate for a product or service, and that is not the rate that the company has, then that would be false advertising. If you knew what you were saying was false, or if you showed reckless disregard for the facts, then that might be considered fraudulent."(50) According to Postal Inspection Service spokesman Daniel Mihalko, mail fraud is any type of scheme or artifice to obtain money or property by means of misrepresentation or deception via the mails, and it is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.(51) The Postal Service published false information in its advertisements for first-class mail in order to persuade people to use its mail services.

Since the Price Waterhouse results were released, not a single postal official has stepped forward to apologize to the American public for the service's decades of deceptive advertising claims about the delivery of first-class mail.

The Postal Service's War on Service

Since 1987 the Postal Service has slashed service by abolishing Sunday mail pickups and rolling back the last mail pickup times in many towns and cities from 5 p.m. to 4 p.m. But the biggest cutback in service has been the abolition of home mail delivery for millions of Americans.

Doorstep delivery was abolished in 1978 for new homes and is gradually being phased out for older homes. The Postal Service is imposing a new mail delivery system. It is delivering mail to central locations--"cluster boxes"-- and requiring people to travel half a mile or more to pick it up. The Postal Service is carrying out that service cutback solely because it is cheaper not to deliver mail to people's homes. And the Postal Service will fine or imprison any private carrier who delivers letters to people's doorsteps.

The Miami Herald reported in 1988 that "only 29 percent of South Florida residents get their letters delivered to their doors."(52) According to Meg Harris, a Postal Service Washington spokeswoman, "Times are changing. . . . Communities are growing so large and the volume of mail increasing so rapidly that new delivery methods are essential. Over time, door delivery is going to be phased out."(53) Postmaster J. N. Campbell of Virginia Beach, Virginia, declared: "The old days of mail being taken to your home are coming to an end. Efficiency is first in our minds."(54) The Miami Herald noted, "Only a decade after the new regulations took effect, half of all new deliveries nationwide are to cluster boxes."(55) A 1987 General Accounting Office report concluded that local postal officials were forcing developers of new housing to install cluster boxes regardless of whether those developers wanted cluster boxes.(56)

Cluster boxes may be mail thieves' best friend. Ed Gleiman, a staff director of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, noted: "It is nobody's obligation to watch the cluster box, and a thief can steal 16 people's mail at once with a simple screwdriver. Those locks might make the Postal Service feel safe, but they certainly wouldn't discourage anyone who really wanted to break into them."(57)

The Postal Service is substituting a profusion of grandiose claims for real service. Postmaster General Frank told a congressional committee in September, "I want to emphasize that I believe the Postal Service provides the best service in the world."(58) In early 1990 Frank declared, "We deliver 41 percent of the world's mail volume and we do it faster . . . than . . . the postal services of Great Britain and Germany."(59) But in the United States customers must pay the Postal Service $8.75 for quasi-guaranteed next-day delivery with a high failure rate. In Great Britain and West Germany, for 50 cents, a citizen can get practically guaranteed next-day mail delivery throughout the country. The United States is much larger than Germany, but at the U.S. Postal Service's pace, a first-class letter would take three or four days to go from Hamburg to Munich.

Missing: Honest Information on Lost and Destroyed Mail

When the contract for the Price Waterhouse study was announced, a special part of the study was to determine how much mail vanishes into the postal abyss--the percentage of mail lost or misdelivered.(60) Though the Postal Service did release some of the Price Waterhouse test results, it decided that other parts of the test results must be kept secret. As the New York Daily News editorialized, "How many of these 'overnight' letters fail to arrive within two days? or three days? or even two weeks? That the post office won't say. It arrogantly draws a line on public disclosure about its quality of service, claiming 'proprietary rights' to secrecy. With mail service as bad as it is, of course, it's easy to understand the silence. Postal officials no doubt fear the public's wrath if more figures are released."(61) Postal Service spokesman Michael West explained: "The only information that we have been making public is the percentage of first-class mail that was delivered on-time in the respective categories: overnight, two-day, and three-day. I cannot provide any more information."(62)

The monopoly Postal Service is effectively forcing American citizens to pay for the $23 million Price Waterhouse survey. Yet postal officials insist that the citizens have no right to more than a tiny sliver of the information the survey gathered. If a private business conducts a survey and keeps the results confidential, that is one thing. But if a government entity with a monopoly forces its captive customers to pay for a survey and then refuses to release most of the results of the survey to the customers who paid for it, that is entirely different. There is probably a huge variance in the percentage of letters lost by different post offices in different cities. If a city has an especially high rate of lost letters, then citizens should be so informed so that they can protect themselves against being victimized by an inefficient, incompetent, and apathetic postal operation.

The Postal Service may soon have to file environmental impact statements for all the mail its workers are dumping in America's trash cans and on her roadsides. A Rhode Island carrier was arrested after 94,000 letters were found buried in his back yard.(63) A Boulder, Colorado, mail carrier was arrested after three tons of undelivered mail were discovered in his house.(64) Eleven letter carriers at a Brooklyn post office--a quarter of all the carriers at the post office--were arrested in 1988 for throwing away thousands of letters.(65) One Arlington, Virginia, postal clerk told a customer, "We don't have room for the junk mail--so we've been throwing it out."(66) A Postal Inspection Service audit found properly addressed mail dumped in the trash at 76 percent of the post offices visited.(67) The Federal Times reported that an investigation of Philadelphia post offices "found deliverable first-class mail strewn on the workroom floor and being walked on by employees . . . and the destruction of mail that could have been returned to senders."(68) Between October 1989 and March 1990, the Postal Inspection Service arrested almost 1,000 postal workers for stealing, delaying, or destroying mail.(69) Throwing away mail has be come so pervasive that postal inspectors in 1986 notified employees that throwing away mail is bad for business.(70) The Postal Service is probably losing or throwing out over a billion letters a year.(71)

Express Mail: The Biggest Turkey of Them All?

Express Mail is widely perceived as the "flagship of the Postal Service," as former Board of Governors member John Mckean declared in 1986.(72) Even though Express Mail accounts for less than 0.05 of 1 percent of the Postal Service's annual mail volume and less than 1.5 percent of its total revenue, postal managers have become obsessed with increasing Express Mail volume. As Adweek noted in 1989, "A winning battle against Fed Ex could gain the Postal Service new credibility with Congress."(73)

The Postal Service's share of overnight courier mail has collapsed in recent years--down from 30 percent in the late 1970s to 12 percent in l990. Craig Kloner, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, observes: "The quality of service the post office provides is not anywhere near what Federal Express offers. The post office's market is with the infrequent user who for some odd reason uses the post office. Maybe they just don't know any better."(74)

Federal Express has an extensive computer tracking system that can tell a customer at any time the location of his letter. If Fed Ex cannot tell a customer within half an hour exactly where his package is in the system, the company will provide a full refund. The Postal Service has no tracking system and has suffered some major embarrassments over lost packages. Swimming champion Mary Meager had two gold medals from the l984 Summer Olympics vanish when her parents mailed them to her via Express Mail.(75)

One Washington postal expert observed, "You go to any post office and the management is worried about increasing this tiny slice of the Postal Service's total volume--and it gets more management attention than any other service they have on the menu."(76) The late Rep. Mickey Leland (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Postal Operations and Services Subcommittee, complained in 1989 that much of the Express Mail operation "is a wasteful allocation of resources in derogation of the postal constitutional mandate, unsound as a business matter and needlessly duplicates the same or better service available from private service entities."(77) Business Mailers Review reported in 1988:

Express mail sales representatives are under the gun. While their product usually isn't competitive in the corporate market, post offices' commercial accounts reps. are pressured to get new business. There are penalties for failing. . . . As a result of such pressures, corporate mailers have been told that more Express Mail business would "enhance" their relations with the post offices.(78)

According to Frederick W. Smith, the CEO of Federal Express, if a company cannot meet the delivery deadline for over 99.5 percent of its courier letters, the company should not be in the express business.(79) The Postal Service's goal for Express Mail delivery is 95 percent.(80) Thus, the Postal Service's standard explicitly sanctions 10 times more late express letters than does the Federal Express standard. (The Postal Service's low Express Mail standard has been sharply criticized by postal governor John Griesemer.)(81)

But even with its low standards, the Postal Service has performed dismally. In the second quarter of 1990, the Postal Service failed to deliver almost 10 percent of all Express Mail letters on time. From mid-December 1989 through mid-January 1990, over 16 percent of all Express Mail letters were delivered late.(82) Those figures are derived from Postal Service internal tests that, like other internal tests, probably severely understate the percentage of late mail. Express Mail service is especially bad in the West. Joseph Caraveo, postmaster general of the Western Region, told the Board of Governors of the Postal Service last July: "In our western hub at Las Vegas . . . we have suffered from poor reliability. . . . The Pacific Northwest continues to be a difficult area to connect with transportation, and as a consequence Portland and Seattle continue to experience Express Mail service problems."(83)

The Postal Service deftly solved the problem of its odious early 1990 Express Mail performance statistics. In August 1990 the Postal Service announced that it would no longer reveal its Express Mail failure rate.(84) Postal Service spokesman Michael West explained: "It was decided to keep Express Mail proprietary. The information would unfairly benefit our direct competitors in this product line."(85) The Postal Service rarely misses a chance to wrap itself in the American flag; it even uses the American eagle as a symbol of its service. The Postal Service apparently feels that it is entitled to all of the benefits of being a government agency but should have to accept none of the responsibilities.

In October 1990, three months after Express Mail performance data had become top secret, Frank announced that "Express Mail has reached record highs for on-time delivery."(86) Since the performance data are now top secret, it is difficult to dispute Frank's claim. But it is extremely unlikely that in a few months Express Mail turned itself around and went from near all-time low levels of performance in early 1990 to the levels of performance it had attained in the mid-1980s, when it claims to have delivered 96 percent of its letters on time. It is also highly implausible that the Postal Service decided to keep Express Mail performance data secret just at the time the service achieved by far its greatest increase in reliability. The Postal Service has no plans to have Price Waterhouse measure the delivery success rate of Express Mail any time in the future.

Postal Service officials perennially exaggerate the contribution of Express Mail to postal revenues. In October 1990 Frank declared that Express Mail made a "net contribution of $500 million to the Postal Service," meaning that, after costs of providing Express Mail, the Postal Service made a $500 million profit.(87) But the Postal Service's total revenue from Express Mail was only $676 million. For Frank's statement to be accurate, the Postal Service would have needed to have made a profit of 284 percent on Express Mail. According to the Postal Rate Commission, the "institutional contribution"--the amount left over after payment of directly attributable costs--of Express Mail was only $150 million in both 1989 and 1990, and that contribution has fallen by over 50 percent since 1985.(88) In percentage terms, first-class mail makes a much greater contribution (185 percent) to the Postal Service than does Express Mail (128 percent).(89) Since a large portion of the costs of all mail classes is classified as institutional, the Postal Service is effectively forcing first-class mail users to subsidize Express Mail services.

If the Postal Service is unwilling to publish its Express Mail failure rate, the least it could do is to voluntarily print a warning on each Express Mail letter clearly stating, "Warning: Relying on Express Mail Could Be Fatal to Your Business."

The Mirage of Postal Productivity

On September 19, 1990, Postmaster General Frank declared, "In a year when productivity slumped in every sector of the American economy, ours rose four consecutive quarters from the final quarter of last fiscal year."(90) Postal officials have made great hay of the fact that the Postal Service has shown a slight increase in productivity in the last year and a half, after its productivity had sharply declined in the previous year. But despite Frank's bragging, the Postal Service's productivity has long been abysmal. Its problems are the natural results of a government monopoly with minimal incentives to maximize its productivity or control its costs.

Frank bragged to a congressional committee in April 1989: "We are deploying the greatest amount of automation that has ever been deployed. Every day we are making progress."(91) But the great mail slowdown is intricately connected with the "success" of the Postal Service's automation program. Representative McCloskey observes, "It appears that the decision to insure two-day rather than one-day delivery was based solely upon the sorting of mail with new automated equipment."(92) Robert Cohen, of the Office of Technical Analysis and Planning of the Postal Rate Commission, concluded, "We found no savings and no impact on postal productivity for the three-quarters of a billion dollars spent on automation" since 1982.(93)

The Postal Rate Commission issued a massive report last year that concluded, "Postal productivity peaked in 1978 . . . and generally has declined with some fluctuations since that time."(94) The commission's Cohen observed: "For l988 the Service said automation and other cost control plans would reduce the number of work years by l7,222. Instead they increased 24,8l3 over its plan."(95) A General Accounting Office investigation found that at 22 sites where mail was being processed on new machinery, "only about a third of the work-hour savings forecast from the equipment was being attained."(96)

The U.S. Postal Service's productivity increases compare extremely poorly with those of the Canadian postal service. The U.S. Postal Rate Commission found that the total factor productivity of the Canada Post increased 30 times faster during the 1980s than did that of the U.S. Postal Service.(97) The commission also noted, "Labor productivity gains in [Postal Service] mail processing functions, which are in many ways analogous to manufacturing operations, were 0.8 percent per year in 1971-89, compared with 2.7 percent per year for the Manufacturing Sector."(98) The real measure of productivity is the cost of production--whether the cost of delivering mail has increased or decreased in constant dollars. The commission concluded, "Since 1971, the Postal Service's real unit operating expenses have risen 14 percent."(99)

The poor productivity of postal workers should come as no surprise. A survey by the Postal Inspection Service concluded that the average letter carrier wasted an hour and a half each day, thereby costing the Postal Service $646 million per year.(100)

During the 1990 Postal Rate Commission hearings on the proposed rate hike, the Postal Service was forced to admit that the amount of time U.S. mail-processing employees were unproductive had tripled in the last 20 years. In 1969 the Post Office paid $118 million for mail processors' nonproductive time; by 1989 that cost had ballooned to $l.82 billion. Postal officials had little or no idea why the increase in nonproductive time occurred; one hypothesis was that workers were taking more cigarette breaks. Assistant Postmaster General Frank Heselton reassured Washington Post reporter Dana Priest "that the increase in nonproductive time has not affected productivity."(101)

Postal clerk C. J. Roux told the Washington Post: "The mail is not coming in here so we have to slow down. . . . We don't want to work ourselves out of a job."(102) Postal carriers also told Post reporters that they slowed down in order to preserve their jobs.(103) I have talked with several postal employees who are profoundly frustrated and disgruntled by the lack of proper management; workers who hustle are not recognized and rewarded by managers, and workers who loaf routinely go unpenalized.

The Postal Service has also gotten poor returns on its investments. Congress recently raised the Postal Service's borrowing limit to more than $10 billion. Yet, like a Third World government that borrows heavily and then wastes the capital, the Postal Service often squanders what it borrows. A recent internal study of l4 major Postal Service capital projects found that most had negative returns or returns of less than 5 percent.(104) The GAO recently surveyed the Postal Service's property acquisition program and found rampant bureaucratic imperialism: the Postal Service bought 50 percent more property than its own estimates showed that it needed. On 28 percent of the purchases, the Postal Service did not even attempt to negotiate a lower price--it simply paid the seller's first asking price.(105)

Postal management has a novel attitude toward productivity. Frank told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1989: "There are aspects of the Postal Service that do not deal with productivity--in fact, that are inimical to productivity. And, one, of course, is service. Well, I suppose the higher the level of service, the lower the productivity."(106) It is peculiar that the postmaster general believes that a service organization's productivity can somehow be decreased by providing service.

The slower the mail becomes, the more productive the Postal Service can appear to be. The Postal Service's productivity measurement completely disregards the quality, or speed, of the service that it provides to its customers. Thus, it is not surprising that the service claims some of the biggest productivity advances in the year of the largest mail slowdown. A spokesman for the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee told the Federal Times in November, "Anybody can save money by not delivering the mail."(107)

Contracting Out and the Unions

The Postal Service is raising stamp prices largely because it has failed to control its labor costs. Labor accounts for 83 percent of the Postal Service's budget. Each worker is costing the Postal Service over $43,000 per year in pay and perks, according to John Crutcher of the Postal Rate Commission in a survey that compared postal wages with the wages of state government mailroom and delivery workers.(108) Commissioner Crutcher has called postal workers "the highest-paid semi-skilled workers in the world."(109)

U.S. Postal Service employees are paid far better than workers performing comparable work elsewhere in the U.S. economy. In the previously mentioned survey, Commissioner Crutcher and his associate, Len Merewitz, concluded that postal wages were 84 percent higher than wages paid by state governments for the same type of work.(110) The U.S. Department of Labor compared Postal Service mail handlers' pay in the Binghamton, New York, area with the pay earned by private-sector mail handlers and concluded that Postal Service pay and perks were more than double those received by workers in the private sector.(111)

Contracting out postal work could save billions of dollars. The Postal Service already contracts out some rural delivery routes. A 1989 Postal Inspection Service audit that compared the contract delivery routes with the postal carrier routes found that "most offices rated contract delivery service, attendance, route coverage, customer satisfaction, and security of the mail equal to rural route and city carrier performance."(112) Eight cities reported that contract carriers had better attendance records than postal employees doing the same type of delivery work. The inspection service concluded that, on average, the contract routes provided service for only half the cost of the postal carrier routes.(113)

In 1989 the Postal Service contracted to put postal outlets manned by Sears employees in Sears stores. The service paid Sears 7 percent of sales, roughly one-third of the in-house cost of providing the same service.(114) The American Postal Workers Union was outraged; APWU members sent a form letter to Sears declaiming, "We're mad as hell over the low-wage, no-skill, non-union postal outlets."(115) (It is surprising that the union would admit that being a postal clerk is a "no-skill" job.) APWU president Moe Biller declared, "Postal workers view this as an outrageous attack on their jobs. It represents a dangerous step down the road towards privatization."(116) The APWU urged its members to tear up their Sears credit cards and mail them back to the store.(117)

Sears eventually succumbed to the union boycott and closed down its postal outlets. Though that contract represented a huge savings for the Postal Service--and a benefit to its customers, who appreciated the longer opening hours of Sears postal outlets--the Postal Service did nothing to come to Sears's support when the APWU began attacking Sears. At least one Sears official felt that the company had been "set up" by postal management to get clobbered in a public relations fiasco.(118) Van Seagraves, editor of Business Mailers Review, observed, "In hindsight, it is obvious that postal management goofed by setting up Sears up as the 'lightning rod.'"(119)

Postal unions have even denounced allowing grocery stores to sell stamps. Al Walker, president of National Post Office Mail Handlers Local 318 in Hollywood, Florida, declared, "I am opposed to anybody else selling stamps, because it would be denying dedicated people the work they were hired to do."(120) Manuel Moro, APWU's vice president, complained: "Eventually they will be taking our jobs. We don't want anybody to invade our turf."(121)

The long lines at many post offices are simply the Postal Service's way of forcing the average citizen to "make a contribution" to the members of the APWU. The Postal Service agreed to a clause in the union contract that prohibits postal supervisors from pitching in to help customers when long lines develop at post office windows. But at least the Postal Service has begun asking its clerks to be less surly to customers.

Postal unions donate over $1 million a year to congressional campaigns, and Congress has sometimes intervened to prevent postal management from adopting cost-saving measures that would diminish union members' power or income. Rep. William Clay (D-Mo.) is taking over the chairmanship of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee this year. When he was asked at a recent dinner for the Board of Governors of the Postal Service what his postal legislative policy would be, Clay answered, "Anything the postal unions want, I want."(122)

"Image Is Everything"

Postal Service managers are trying to solve the Washington riddle of the sphinx--how to achieve a better image while providing worse service. Since the agency does not face competition--and has no reason to strain itself to serve its customers--it has become obsessed with its own image.

The Postal Service spent roughly $15 million for the right to be a cosponsor of the 1992 Olympic Games and will spend more than $120 million on Olympic promotions during the next three years. As the Federal Times noted, "Fundraising plans include the Postal Olympic Express, a festive cross-country caravan that will stop in 30 cities and be used to generate enthusiasm for the games, advertising campaigns and the selling of rights to use the Olympic/Postal Service logo to businesses and mailers."(123) (Postal management believes it will be able to turn a profit by selling the right to cosponsor the Olympics to foreign postal systems and others.)

The Postal Service's obsession with its Olympic sponsorship--and its bizarre hopes that the sponsorship will change its image--epitomizes management's thinking. Assistant Postmaster General Deborah Bowker declared at the September 1990 meeting of the Board of Governors, "Research following the 1988 Olympics concluded that 95 percent of Americans view Olympic sponsors as successful; 88 percent see sponsors as vital and energetic; 86 percent see sponsors as industry leaders; and 80 percent believe that Olympic sponsors are dedicated to excellence."(124) Frank declared, "Olympic sponsors such as VISA, 3M, and Coca-Cola are viewed by customers as industry leaders, as quality service providers--the kind of people you'd like to do business with."(125) Postal management appears to have blind faith in "competence by association"--that Olympic viewers will somehow assume that, since many topnotch private companies back the Olympics, the Postal Service must also be topnotch. One congressional staffer cynically suggested that part of the enthusiasm for sponsorship of the Olympics derives from the fact that many top postal officials will get free trips to the games.

"We're 'going for the gold' by focusing on competitive excellence--the Olympic spirit--that the Postal Service shares. We hope to tap that personal and institutional pride 'to deliver America's best,'" Frank declared last September.(126) The Postal Service's pride in its Olympic sponsorship is difficult to reconcile with its enthusiasm for slowing the mail. How would people respond if a U.S. Olympic coach announced that, in the future, U.S. hurdlers would run 10 percent slower so as to hit fewer hurdles--or that American swimmers would swim 10 percent slower to avoid bumping their heads on the edge of the pool?

There is also irony in the Postal Service's attempt to capitalize on the theme of "competitive excellence." If the U.S. Olympic team "competed" like the U.S. Postal Service, it would take a few hundred lawyers to Barcelona in 1992 to file suits against foreign athletes who jumped too high, ran too fast, or punched too hard.

Last year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, angry over the plans for the big rate hike, solicited Postal Service "horror stories" from businesses. Postal workers were furious, and the chamber was soon deluged with form letters denouncing its efforts. As columnists Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta noted, "Nearly all correspondence from Kansas was a form letter and the majority of the letters were sent on Postal Service stationery stamped for official business."(127) James Mruk, postal spokesman for the Central Region, said the Postal Service "has a responsibility to respond to such attacks. We're not apologizing in any way for using official business stationery. We did it the most efficient and least expensive way we could."(128) This is the Postal Service's view of "efficiency": doing what is best for postal workers at the public's expense. The Postal Service needs to retain a monopoly in order to provide sufficient revenue to finance postal workers' counterattacks on anyone who criticizes the Postal Service.

The New Rates

The new postage rates that become effective on February 3 are carefully crafted to sacrifice the Postal Service's captive customers to subsidize mailers in mail classes in which the Postal Service faces competition. The Postal Service had requested a 30-cent first-class stamp; the Postal Rate Commission instead mandated a 29-cent stamp, thereby saving mailers $800 million a year. The commission concluded that "the original Postal Service rate proposals placed an increasing and unjustified proportion of [the burden on] institutional or overhead first class while reducing the burden on bulk third class."(129) The Postal Service sought a rate structure that would increase the relative institutional/overhead burden on first-class users from 20 percent above the average for all classes of mail to 35 percent above that average and a reduction of the overhead costs imposed on third-class mailers from 16 percent below average to 21 percent below average. The commission revised the rates, mandating that first-class users make a contribution to overhead costs 24 percent higher than the average for all mail classes, while third-class users make a contribution 7 percent less than the average. Though the commission package is better than the Postal Service proposal, first-class mail users are still being forced to help underwrite junk mail. Partly because of that indirect subsidization, third- class mail volume increased 214 percent between 1970 and 1989, rising from 24 to 39 percent of all domestic mail.

The most revealing aspect of the entire debate on the rate package was the proposed rate for a category of third- class mail in which the Postal Service is now facing fierce competition from private delivery services. While the Postal Service sought to raise the rate for first-class mail by 20 percent, it proposed reducing the rate for the lowest priced third-class mail by 9 percent. Postal Service economist Richard Mitchell told the Wall Street Journal that the rates were being cut in order to help the service meet private competition.(130) Mitchell, in testimony before the Postal Rate Commission, voiced concern over "whether private [third-class delivery companies] can compete unfairly with the Postal Service."(131) Mitchell warned that private delivery rates lower than Postal Service rates could "create an anticompetitive situation" and that, "from the point of view of the nation, this is a very undesirable outcome."(132) The Postal Service apparently feels that the national interest requires it to manipulate rates in order to crush private competition. While first-class rates have increased 93 percent in nominal terms since 1981, from 15 cents to 29 cents, rates for the lowest priced third-class mail have increased less than 30 percent.

Postal Service officials claim that the rate increase is justified because the service is obliged by law to operate on a "break-even" financial basis. But that is simply a glorified version of the old doctrine of "need is the basis of right." Any time the Postal Service appears to need more revenue, citizens should be forced to pay higher prices for stamps. Citizens have an unlimited duty to pay for the Postal Service's operation, but the Postal Service has no obligation to operate in an efficient, effective manner or to provide prompt, reliable service.

Why Not the Best?

Anthony Frank appears to suffer from a severe case of "agonistephobia"--fear of competition. In January 1990 he declared, "Competition--as an economic principle--might make us more efficient but that would be at the expense of making us less effective."(133) Frank told USA Today, "What I'm after is to make the Postal Service so efficient that we don't have to worry about the marketplace."(134)

Frank has missed few opportunities to denounce proposals to allow private competition in mail delivery. He warned in 1989 that privatization would be "the Wino and Derelict Full Employment Act. . . . A lot of [private carriers] would only work until they get the price of a bottle of Ripple and then they'd quit."(135) The Postal Service's own employees, in contrast, are paragons of virtue. Fourteen New York employees were arrested in April l988 for backdating postmarks on entries in a New York Daily News contest to predict the final score of the l987 Super Bowl.(136) The most recent U.S. Postal Inspection Service semiannual report noted that, in La Puente, California, "a letter sorting machine clerk was identified and arrested for supplying credit cards stolen from the mail to a major credit card ring" (losses to 16 credit card companies totaled $4.5 million); in Wichita, Kansas, a postal clerk was convicted of stealing letters containing food stamps; in St. Paul, Minnesota, a mailhandler "rifled and embezzled the contents of hundreds of parcels being returned to Fingerhut Corporation."(137) Of course, most postal workers are honest, law-abiding citizens. Yet there is no reason to assume that postal workers are inherently more virtuous or trustworthy than private employees.

Frank, commenting on the mail slowdown last September, declared, "We could just tell [the American people] that we are 'all you've got' and 'tough luck' or we could have listened to them, and we listened to them."(138) "Tough luck" is exactly what Americans will have if they need speedy delivery of first-class mail

.

To protect the U.S. Postal Service, the government has effectively nationalized every American's mailbox. The federal government prohibits any private company from depositing letters or other material in private citizens' mailboxes. Even if a private citizen chooses to allow a private carrier to deposit mail in his mailbox, the Postal Service will confiscate the privately delivered letters and impose a heavy fine on the private carrier. Frank told Fortune magazine in August 1989 that his "doomsday scenario" was "that Congress would give other deliverers access to the mailbox."(139)

Frank told Steve Tompkins of the Memphis Commercial Appeal in July 1990, "The framers of the Constitution said everybody is entitled to the same service at the same price."(140) That is a figment of the postmaster general's imagination. The Founding Fathers never made any such claim. The U.S. Constitution says that the U.S. government has the power to establish a post office. (It does not require the government to do so.) There is nothing about uniform rates or service or about a monopoly. Besides, the Postal Service does not provide the same service to all the people: citizens in Kansas City are twice as likely to get next-day delivery of local first-class letters as are citizens in New York City.(141)

Frank told Advertising Age in September 1989, "Private delivery has . . . been tried plenty of times before and failed every time."(142) In reality, for 200 years the government's postal service has been playing a game of catch-up with its illegal competition. The Pony Express was originally a private service that delivered mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, in less than half the time it took the Post Office to deliver it. Likewise, private carriers pioneered home delivery of mail in the 19th century--after which the Post Office's lawyers shut them down and the Post Office management adopted their methods.

In every area in which the government has not banned alternative delivery, private competition is burying the Posal Service. When asked about the near-extinction of the Postal Service's fourth-class parcel business, Frank declared in 1989: "Unfortunately, we only handle about six to eight percent of all the parcels in the United States. The remainder is sent primarily with United Parcel Service and some of the other services. So we never even get a shot at being able to compete."(143) This is the ultimate in self-delusion: a businessman, whose company vexes customers almost every chance it gets, whining about not getting a chance to compete. In 1973 Postmaster General Elmer Klassen admitted that the Postal Service damages five times as many packages as does United Parcel Service.(144) Little has changed since the 1970s. And the Postal Service's first-class mail delivery goals are now slower than United Parcel Service's standards for fourth-class parcel mail.

The postal monopoly gives local post offices the right to arbitrarily ban mail delivery to some people's houses. In the old days, postal officials loved to brag that "neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." But in the 1990s the only thing necessary to stop mail delivery is a few leaves. In California, the Altadena post office informed one disabled woman that it would not deliver her mail until she picked up the leaves on the parkway in front of her house because postal officials feared that the leaves made the dirt road "slippery when wet," and therefore too dangerous for a postal carrier.(145) In Lynn, Massachusetts, postal officials ended mail delivery to dozens of residents on Vine Street after someone reportedly verbally harassed a female postal carrier. The residents were told that they could come to the post office to pick up their mail between l0 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays. (A local police sergeant disagreed with the Postal Service's belief that the neighborhood was dangerous for a female carrier.)(146) If the Postal Service actually cared about serving its customers, and a threat to the female carrier actually existed, the service could have simply assigned a male carrier to the route.

Frank, who is concerned about the strong postal unions, recently complained to Fortune: "The auto industry and the UAW cooperate largely because of the Japanese threat. Well, I don't have a Japanese threat to wave over our people."(147) Frank is learning the same lesson that Gorbachev is learning: it takes more than moral exhortation to make workers exert themselves. And like Gorbachev, Frank has failed to reach the logical conclusion: full-fledged competition is needed to boost productivity.

Frank declared last September that one reason for cutting back next-day mail delivery targets was the increase in mail volume.(148) The Postal Service insists on monopolizing letter delivery--and then cites the quantity of letters as an excuse to delay mail delivery.

Last fall Sen. James R. Sasser (D-Tenn.) proposed an amendment to allow private companies to carry priority mail at the same price the Postal Service charges during an 18-month trial period. Currently, postal regulations mandate that competitors must charge at least double the Postal Service's rate for priority mail.(149) The amendment would have allowed private companies to carry bundles of letters for as little as $3 a bundle; currently, such discounts are forbidden by postal regulations.(150) As Frank told the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, the Sasser amendment "provides for large corporations to take all of their mail from one place to another place and bundle them up without stamps and send them, via these packages."(151) Frank warned that the Sasser amendment "would be the beginning of the end of the Postal Service as we know it. . . . It would open up priority mail to be raided by the overnight couriers."(152) (According to the Postal Service's Consumer Affairs Department, "priority mail" is an oxymoron: over 17 percent of priority mail nationwide was delivered late according to the most recent official report.)(153) Sasser is expected to reintroduce his amendment this year.

The foundation of the postal monopoly is the belief that government must prohibit other people from carrying the mail--no matter how slowly the mail moves, or how many letters the government loses, or how high stamp prices go. America's postal system is based on the idea that it is better to trust a public monopoly to provide service out of its own good will than to rely on private companies to provide good service out of sheer necessity. Postal Service officials perennially proclaim they are a public service-- even as they repeatedly slash service to the public.

America should recognize that the words "monopoly" and "public service" will almost always be in contradiction. We have a choice of blindly trusting the generosity of government bureaucrats or of relying on competing entrepreneurs. Who believes that America would be better off if the government outlawed Federal Express and United Parcel Service?

Pressure to end the postal monopoly is mounting. The Third Class Mail Association, one of the largest mailer lobbies, is on the warpath to repeal the monopoly over third-class letters. New Zealand recently privatized its postal system, and Canada is now allowing competition for all classes of mail except first. As a Reason Foundation study reported, Britain, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, South Africa, and South Korea are also taking steps toward ending government mail monopolies.(154)

Conclusion

Last October the Polish Parliament voted 256 to 1 to end the Polish government's postal monopoly, formally opening the door for private postal delivery.(155) Scores of U.S. government officials have flown to Poland in the past year to lecture the Poles on the virtues of free enterprise and the evils of socialism. The United States should not be too proud to take a lesson from a nation that has suffered grievously from government-controlled enterprises.

The United States cannot afford to enter the 21st century with a communications system that has been deteriorating ever since the 18th century. Regardless of Frank's good intentions, mail service continues to get slower, more expensive, and less reliable. How much more can the Postal Service punish its customers before it loses the right to ban competitors?

In 1843 Postmaster General Charles Wickliffe admitted that many people thought the government's mail monopoly was "odious" but insisted that it must be preserved for the good of the country.(156) Now, almost 150 years later, the monopoly is still odious and less justifiable than ever. There is no need to give a federal behemoth exclusive control over the transport of small envelopes. It should not be a federal crime to deliver the mail faster than the Postal Service.

Notes

(1) Thomas Dibacco, "Slow Mail Has Roots in American Histo ry," Washington Times, October 20, 1989.

(2) James Bovard, "Mail Monopoly Says Happy New Year," Wall Street Journal, December 29, 1989.

(3) U.S. Postal Service, Rates and Classification Depart ment, Origin-Destination Information System Quarterly Sta tistics Report, 1969 and 1990.

(4) Quoted in Mark Kodama, "Postal Scene--Striving for Improvement through Working Together," Federal Times, July 24, 1989.

(5) Anthony Frank, speech to the Economic Club of Detroit, Detroit, Michigan, September 17, 1990.

(6) Official poster on the wall of a post office in Palo Alto, California, July 1987.

(7) U.S. Congress, House Government Operations Committee, hearing on Slower First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, Sep tember 6, 1990, written statement of Anthony Frank.

(8) U.S. Congress, House Post Office and Civil Service Com mittee, hearing on Implementation of New First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, September 27, 1990, p. 1.

(9) Ibid., p. 51.

(10) Mick Rood, "Postal Service Backs Off Proposal for Two- day D.C.-to-Baltimore Delivery," Evening Sun, July 2, 1990.

(11) Jim Luther, "Lawmakers Criticize Reduced Overnight De liveries," Associated Press, September 6, 1990.

(12) U.S. Postal Service, Board of Governors, official tran script of meeting, Hartford, Connecticut, July 10, 1990, p. 11.

(13) Anthony Frank, speech to the Economic Club of Detroit.

(14) U.S. Postal Service, Rates and Classification Department, Origin-Destination Information System Quarterly Sta tistics Report, 1969, 1982, 1987, 1990.

(15) Interview with an official in the Postal Service's Rates and Classification Department, January 3, 1991.

(16) U.S. Postal Rate Commission, Advisory Opinion Concern ing a Proposed Change in the Nature of Postal Service, July 25, 1990, p. 14.

(17) Quoted in DM News, September 17, 1990.

(18) U.S. Congress, House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, hearing on Implementation of New First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, p. 28.

(19) U.S. Congress, House Committee on Government Opera tions, U.S. Postal Service Realignment of First-Class Mail Delivery Standards: Just Say Slow, November 30, 1990, p. 13.

(20) U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "Comment on U.S. Postal Ser vice's Planned Slowdown in Mail Delivery by Tracey Schreft, Associate Director, Small Business Center," press release, Washington, D.C., July 27, 1990.

(21) U.S. Congress, House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, hearing on Implementation of New First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, p. 58.

(22) U.S. Congress, House Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Postal Service Realignment of First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, p. 7.

(23) U.S. Congress, House Government Operations Committee, hearing on Slower First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, writ ten statement of Anthony Frank.

(24) U.S. Congress, House Committee on Government Opera tions, U.S. Postal Service Realignment of First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, p. 8.

(25) Ibid., p. 12.

(26) U.S. Congress, House Government Operations Committee, hearing on Slower First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, writtern statement of Anthony Frank.

(27) Ibid.

(28) Business Mailers Review, August 6, 1990.

(29) U.S. Postal Rate Commission, Advisory Opinion, p. 9.

(30) U.S. Post Office, Annual Report, 1960, p. 4.

(31) U.S. Congress, House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, hearing on Implementation of New First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, p. 22.

(32) U.S. Postal Service, Consumer Affairs Department, "Service Performance, Quarter IV, Fiscal Year 1990."

(33) U.S. Postal Service, Board of Governors, official tran script of meeting, Washington, D.C., August 7, 1990, p. 11.

(34) Robert Walters, "Delivering Doctored Numbers?" Washington Times, July 31, 1987.

(35) Anthony Frank, speech to the National League of Post masters, Atlanta, Georgia, August 17, 1989.

(36) U.S. Postal Service, Annual Report, 1989, p. 7.

(37) Gil Klein, "U.S. Has Questions about Its Own Service," Richmond Times Dispatch, August 20, 1990.

(38) Ibid.

(39) Business Mailers Review, July 13, 1987.

(40) Ibid.

(41) U.S. Congress, House Post Office and Civil Service Com mittee, hearing on Implementation of New First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, p. 18.

(42) Albert R. Karr, "Time Is Elastic at Postal Service, Outside Test Finds," Wall Street Journal, November 7, 1990.

(43) Mark Kodama, "Delivery Scores Fall Short of Goal," Federal Times, November 19, 1990.

(44) Anthony Frank, "The Postal Service is Getting Better," USA Today, November 13, 1990.

(45) U.S. Postal Rate Commission, Advisory Opinion, p. 20.

(46) U.S. Congress, House Government Operations Committee, hearing on Slower First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, written statement of Anthony Frank.

(47) Editorial, Register (Orange County, California), November 11, 1990.

(48) U.S. Postal Service, Board of Governors, official transcript of meeting, Washington, D.C., November 6, 1990, p. 95.

(49) Frank, "The Postal Service is Getting Better."

(50) Interview with Joel Winston, January 2, 1990.

(51) Interview with Daniel Mihalko, January 2, 1991.

(52) Elinor Burkett, "Door to Door No More," Miami Herald, July 25, 1988.

(53) Quoted in Burkett.

(54) Norfolk Virginian Pilot, December 19, 1983.

(55) Burkett.

(56) U.S. General Accounting Office, Mail Delivery to New Residential Addresses--Adherence to Policy Can Be Improved, June 1987, p. i.

(57) Burkett.

(58) U.S. Congress, House Government Operations Committee, hearing on Slower First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, written statement of Anthony Frank.

(59) Anthony Frank, speech to the Indianapolis Economic Club, Indianapolis, Indiana, January 25, 1990.

(60) U.S. Postal Service, Board of Governors, official transcript of meeting, Los Angeles, California, February 6, 1990, p. 57.

(61) Editorial, Daily News, November 24, 1990.

(62) Interview with Michael West, January 3, 1991.

(63) James Bovard, "Enough Fourth-Class Service on Third- Class Mail," New York Times, June 9, 1987.

(64) "One Man's Junk Mail Is Another's Home," Washington Times, July 10, 1989.

(65) Marvine Howe, "11 Carriers Charged with Discarding the Mail," New York Times, July 27, 1988.

(66) Business Mailers Review, November 9, 1987.

(67) Direct Mail News, March 1, 1988.

(68) J. P. Mackley, "Inspectors Find Little to Boast about in Philadelphia Division," Federal Times, September 19, 1988.

(69) Mark Kodama, "Inspection Service Chalks Up 5800 Arrests in Six Months," Federal Times, June 25, 1990.

(70) James Bovard, "Prepare for Talks by Parceling Out the Mail," Wall Street Journal, January 9, 1987.

(71) No accurate estimates of the percentage of first-class mail that is trashed or destroyed are available. Business groups have done many surveys of third-class mail. A 1987 survey by Doubleday and Company found that up to 14 percent of bulk business mail was either thrown away or lost. Busi ness Mailers Review, November 9, 1987. A Postal Service in-house test found that only 2.5 percent of bulk business mail is lost or misdelivered. DM News, February 15, 1989. But the Postal Service's results were heavily biased because some of the test mail pieces were specially marked and addressed to postal employees' supervisors. Since third-class mail volume is now over 50 billion pieces a year, the Postal Service almost certainly loses or trashes over a billion pieces of mail--not counting first-class letter losses.

(72) Cited in Bovard, "Prepare for Talks by Parceling Out the Mail."

(73) Nancy Nichols, "Waking Up a Sleeping Giant," Adweek's Marketing Week, June 12, 1989.

(74) Ibid.

(75) "Olympic Swimmer Loses 2 Gold Medals in Mail," Palm Beach Post, July 18, 1988.

(76) Interview with a Washington postal expert who wished to remain anonymous, January 2, 1991.

(77) Mark Kodama, "Kill Express Mail, Hill Critic Says," Federal Times, June 5, 1989.

(78) Business Mailers Review, June 13, 1988.

(79) Interview with Federal Express official, January 2, 1990.

(80) U.S. Postal Service, Consumer Affairs Department, "Ser vice Performance, Quarter IV, Fiscal Year 1990."

(81) According to Griesemer: "If you are shooting for 95% [delivery rate for Express Mail], you are shooting to go out of the market. You have got to be 99% or better, or you are not even trying." Business Mailers Review, February 20, 1989.

(82) U.S. Postal Service, Consumer Affairs Department, "Ser vice Performance, Quarter II, Fiscal Year 1990."

(83) U.S. Postal Service, Board of Governors, official transcript of meeting, Anchorage, Alaska, June 5, 1990, p. 37.

(84) Interview with Michael West.

(85) Ibid.

(86) Anthony Frank, "Postal Report Card Shows Progress, Potential," DM News, October 1, 1990.

(87) U.S. Congress, House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, hearing on Implementation of New First-Class Delivery Standards, p. 62.

(88) U.S. Postal Rate Commission, Postal Rate and Fee Changes, 1990: Opinion and Recommended Decision, January 4, 1991, vol. 1, p. V-395.

(89) Ibid., pp. V-102, V-393.

(90) Anthony Frank, speech to the National Postal Forum, Washington, D.C., September 19, 1990.

(91) U.S. Congress, Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Annual Report of the Postmaster General, April 7, 1989, p. 5.

(92) U.S. Congress, House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, hearing on Implementation of New First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, p. 4.

(93) Robert Cohen, speech to the Graphics Communication Association, Hilton Head, South Carolina, March 30, 1989. (94) U.S. Postal Rate Commission, A Study of U.S. Postal Service Productivity and Its Measurement, May 9, 1990, vol. 1, p. iii.

(95) Business Mailers Review, April 10, 1989.

(96) Gil Klein, "If Big Mailers Fly the Coop, U.S. Agency 'Will Melt Away,'" Richmond Times Dispatch, August 19, 1990.

(97) U.S. Postal Rate Commission, A Study of U.S. Postal Service Productivity and Its Measurement, vol. 1, p. viii.

(98) Ibid., p. ix.

(99) Ibid., p. iv.

(100) Business Mailers Review, January 27, 1986.

(101) Dana Priest, "Postal Workers 'Nonproductive' Time Said to Triple in 20 Years," Washington Post, September 21, 1990.

(102) Dana Priest and Judith Havemann, "Benefits of Costly Automation Elude Nation's Postal Managers," Washington Post, November 26, 1989.

(103) Ibid.

(104) John Crutcher, speech to the Industry Leaders Confer ence, Miami, Florida, January 23, 1990.

(105) U.S. General Accounting Office, Sites for New Post Offices May Be Larger Than Needed, September 1989, p. 1.

(106) U.S. Congress, Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Annual Report of the Postmaster General, p. 7.

(107) Kodama, "Delivery Scores Fall Short of Goal.

(108) John Crutcher and Leonard Merewitz, A Survey to Compare Compensation for Mail Services in State Government with U.S. Postal Service Wages, U.S. Postal Rate Commission, October 30, 1989, p. 1.

(109) John Crutcher, speech to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, California, August 26, 1983.

(110) Crutcher and Merewitz, p. 7.

(111) Business Mailers Review, May 21, 1990.

(112) Don Lambro, "Stamp Out Waste by Canceling Postal Service," Register (Orange County, California), July 17, 1989.

(113) Ibid.

(114) Business Mailers Review, May 8, 1989.

(115) Ibid.

(116) John Purnell, "Postal Union Urges Members to Trash Their Sears Cards," Washington Times, July 7, 1989.

(117) Ibid.

(118) Interview with a Sears official who preferred anonymity, September 17, 1990.

(119) Business Mailers Review, July 10, 1989.

(120) Larmia Robbins, "Postal Union Opposes Private Sales," Sun-Tattler (Hollywood, Florida), July 30, 1988.

(121) Ibid.

(122) Business Mailers Review, September 17, 1990.

(123) Mark Kodama, "Postal Service Sees Olympics As Event Paved with 'Gold,'" Federal Times, October 1, 1990.

(124) U.S. Postal Service, Board of Governors, official transcript of meeting, St. Louis, Missouri, September 11, 1990, p. 88.

(125) Anthony Frank, speech to the Direct Marketing Association Conference, San Francisco, California, October 31, 1990.

(126) Anthony Frank, speech to the National Postal Forum, Washington, D.C., September 19, 1990.

(127) Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Postal Service's Stamp of Disapproval," Washington Post, July 11, 1990.

(128) Ibid.

(129) U.S. Postal Rate Commission, "Postal Rate Commission Announces Recommended Decision," press release, January 4, 1991.

(130) Barbara Marsh, "Some Mailers Give Stamp of Approval to Postal Plan," Wall Street Journal, March 8, 1990.

(131) U.S. Postal Rate Commission, hearing on Postal Rate and Fee Changes, 1990, USPS-T-20, Docket no. R-90-1, testimony of Robert W. Mitchell, p. 93.

(132) Ibid., p. 94.

(133) Frank, speech to the Indianapolis Economic Club.

(134) "Delivering the Mail--Interview with Anthony Frank," USA Today, April 17, 1989.

(135) Interview with Anthony Frank, "Ask Washington," the Learning Channel, Larry Butler, host, July 21, 1988.

(136) "Winners with Marked Advantage," Washington Post, April 20, 1988.

(137) U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Semiannual Report, vol. 4, April 1, 1990-September 30, 1990, p. 17 et seq.

(138) U.S. Congress, House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, hearing on Implementation of New First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, p. 23.

(139) "Can This Man Really Deliver?" Fortune, August 14, 1989.

(140) Stephen G. Tompkins, "Horror Stories Abound Despite New Technology," Commercial Appeal, July 25, 1990.

(141) Kodama, "Delivery Scores Fall Short of Goal."

(142) "Harried Pace in Race," interview with Anthony Frank, Advertising Age, September 25, 1989.

(143) Anthony Frank, speech to the National Press Club, Wash ington, D.C., January 6, 1989.

(144) John Haldi, Postal Monopoly: An Assessment of the Pri vate Express Statutes (Washington: American Enterprise In stitute, 1974), p. 5.

(145) Marina Milligan, "A Falling Out Briefly Cancels Mail Delivery," Pasadena Star-News, November 10, 1990. The post office decided to resume delivery after postal managers discovered that a reporter was writing a story about the incident.

(146) United Press International bulletin, July 3, 1989, Lynn, Massachusetts.

(147) "Can This Man Really Deliver?"

(148) U.S. Congress, House Government Operations Committee, hearing on Slower First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, writ ten statement of Anthony Frank.

(149) Mark Kodama, "Congress May Allow Private Firms to Reduce Rates for 'Priority' Mail," Federal Times, October 15, 1990.

(150) Ibid.

(151) U.S. Congress, House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, hearing on Implementation of New First-Class Mail Delivery Standards, p. 24.

(152) Ibid.

(153) U.S. Postal Service, Consumer Affairs Department, "Service Performance Quarterly Report, Quarter IV, Fiscal Year 1990."

(154) Lloyd Schwartz, "Countries Take First Steps to Postal Privatization," Stamp Collector, July 29, 1989.

(155) "Pole Lawmakers: End Monopolies," Associated Press, October 26, 1990.

(156) Haldi, p. 5

© 1991 The Cato Institute

<#==#>

free money for cops??????

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=50726

Arizona seeks security goals shift

By Le Templar, Tribune

October 16, 2005

Arizona officials want to dramatically shift how they spend federal Homeland Security money — focusing more heavily on border enforcement and disaster preparation and away from buying vehicles and personal protection equipment for local police officers and firefighters.

Arizona Homeland Security Director Frank Navarrete has been meeting with Republican state lawmakers to discuss new priorities for millions of dollars in federal grants that were bulked up by Congress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Now, Navarrete and key lawmakers have reached a quiet, tentative agreement that some Homeland Security grant dollars should be used to improve control of the Mexican border.

Navarrete, who reports directly to Gov. Janet Napolitano, has control of federal Homeland Security grants. Napolitano has frequently clashed with GOP lawmakers over the proper role of the state in addressing illegal immigration.

Until now, a large portion of Arizona’s federal grants have been used by state and local public safety agencies to buy equipment ranging from communication vans and fire vehicles to biohazard protection suits and gas masks.

State officials want a change, saying limited federal dollars should be devoted to regional or statewide projects. Navarrete said he plans to spend more on effective training and border security.

"In terms of equipment and hard assets, I think the state . . . is in pretty good shape," Navarrete said. "Let’s start using some of this gear and quit focusing on buying more gear."

Key lawmakers also now say they are concerned that some public safety agencies have used federal grants for equipment and other expenses that should be covered by local tax dollars.

"Anytime there’s money available, they are going to go after it because it’s free money," said Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, chairman of a House appropriations committee. "It’s not a matter of picking on them, but somebody has to say ‘no.’ "

Local police agencies hadn’t heard that the state was considering changing how the money was spent so police were reluctant last week to discuss how that might affect their agencies’ operations.

Sgt. Mark Clark, a spokesman for the Scottsdale Police Department, noted that police agencies were continuing to take advantage of Homeland Security dollars still available but that the effects of any changes on his agency’s funding weren’t yet clear.

The focus on buying equipment for local agencies has contributed to the slow pace of spending of Homeland Security grants, which total more than $113 million for the past three years.

Navarrete said Arizona has committed about 80 percent of the $41.7 million in grants received this year. But almost none of the money actually has been spent because state officials have to wait for public safety agencies to prove they have ordered and received specific equipment before they can be reimbursed, he said.

Some of the delays have been extensive, with agencies waiting up to two years for specialized vehicles for radio communications or toxic chemical decontamination. For the prior two fiscal years, Arizona received six-month extensions on federal deadlines to finish spending the grant dollars.

Border security will be much a higher priority for the next round of federal grants, Navarrete said. He already has used Napolitano’s emergency declaration for the four border counties in August to combine $1.7 million in state and federal dollars to pay overtime costs for local law enforcement.

Now, Navarrete wants to learn more about a ground radar system built by a Scottsdale company and already used by the U.S. Marines Corps to keep illegal border crossers away from a flight training area in southeast Arizona. Pearce and several other lawmakers toured the Marine operation last month, and Pearce estimates similar radar sites could be placed along the entire Arizona-Mexico border for up to $60 million.

"To be fair to Frank, he came to me about this, a radar and a fence on the border," Pearce said. "We are going to talk about how he can help with some of this."

A number of issues would have to resolved, such as who would operate the radar sites and who would be expected to respond when an illegal crossing is detected. Pearce said he would expect the state to sign agreements with federal immigration officials and encourage local police to act as well.

Napolitano vetoed an attempt during the 2005 regular session to have local police involved in immigration enforcement. But during the summer, Napolitano sought agreements with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security related to using state troopers at ports of entry and to deporting foreign criminals directly from state prisons.

Navarrete acknowledged he supports changing priorities for Homeland Security grants, in part, because Napolitano is pushing her administration to develop concrete solutions for problems created by illegal immigration.

Contact Le Templar by email, or phone (602) 542-5813

<#==#>

there are only two really big questions in government. who are we going to steal the money from? and who are we going to give the money to?

in this case the money is stolen from the citizens who own the land. who gets to steal the money is the big question.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MINING_THE_WEST?SITE=AZMES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Oct 16, 2:40 PM EDT

Colorado Residents Challenge Mining Laws

By JOHN HEILPRIN

Associated Press Writer

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. (AP) -- The ruddy slopes of 12,392-foot Mount Emmons loom over this town, drawing hikers, backcountry skiers and snowshoers. But to residents such as Jim Starr, they also stand for what is wrong with the nation's antiquated mining laws.

Those laws allowed the Bush administration to sell 155 acres of public land on the "Red Lady" to a mining company for less than $900. The land has deposits of molybdenum, a gray metal used to make steel, alloys and lubricants.

"It's a huge threat. If anyone did put a mine in there, it's hard to imagine that it would not destroy this area," said Starr, a lawyer and Democratic chairman of Gunnison County's board of commissioners.

The sale was made possible by an 1872 mining law that lets the government sell, for just $2.50 or $5 an acre, public lands that contain minerals. This land sale, known as a patent, gives companies absolute title to the property.

Since October 1994, Congress has voted each year to renew a temporary ban that prevents companies from submitting new patent applications to buy more government land at rock-bottom prices.

That left the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management with 405 applications it had received before October 1994. Those applications came from companies looking to buy land managed by the BLM and the Forest Service.

John Leshy, who approved 68 of those patents as the Interior Department's top lawyer during the Clinton administration, said the law requires the government to give land away needlessly.

"The mining law was a cover for getting the land for non-mining purposes like hunting, fishing, brothels or a saloon. I don't think people need incentives to settle the West any longer," said Leshy, a University of California law professor and author of "The Mining Law."

The Bush administration and Congress have made a push to approve the remaining applications - approximately 200 - that were unresolved when President Bush took office. Under the Bush administration, 139 were approved and 50 remain to be considered.

The BLM's deputy director, Jim Hughes, said the patents convey property rights, but not a free pass to disregard environmental laws. He said private investment, mostly in the rural West, provides good jobs, but acknowledged that some oppose mining because of legitimate aesthetic values.

"As always, the BLM is sort of caught between the two and we have to make decisions on those competing interests," he said. "At the end of the day, we are told to follow the law. It's not an easy choice."

Getting a patent is not easy. Slightly more than one-third of the 405 applications were withdrawn or rejected by the Bush and Clinton administrations, often for lack of supporting paperwork.

Companies have to convince the Interior Department that the land has a valuable mineral deposit and it can be mined at a profit. Department officials say companies typically spend about $10,000 to $15,000 per acre trying to document that it is economically viable to mine there.

Once a patent is granted, officials say, the law does not let them challenge a company if it drops its plan to mine at a site that could be resold as valuable real estate.

The department acknowledges cases in which lands that companies had patented for mining were used for private, commercial development, such as at the ski resorts of Aspen, Breckendridge, Keystone and Telluride in Colorado and Park City in Utah.

At Keystone, developers fetched $11,000 an acre in 1989 selling off more than one-quarter of the 160 acres the government had sold. The land was never mined.

In Arizona, a Phoenix luxury hotel sits on 61 acres, part of an area that a businessman patented in 1970 for $153. He sold it to a developer for $400,000, plus a 1 percent share in future profits.

Congress has made numerous efforts to change the law, and not even the National Mining Association is a vigorous defender. Spokeswoman Carol Raulston said the trade group would support updating the law so companies pay "fair market value" for patents.

But advocates of overhauling the law have been thwarted by those resisting an end to the free-access approach to public lands upon which the nation was built.

This year, the chairman of the House Resources Committee, GOP Rep. Richard Pombo of California, tried to have the ban on new patents lifted. The committee's top Democrat, Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, proposed sweeping changes, including a permanent end to such patents.

The remaining applications, mostly in Nevada, Arizona, California and Montana, involve selling 71 square miles of federal land in 11 states for just $130,000, according to Westerners for Responsible Mining, a coalition of 12 state and national conservation groups.

The lands' real value is $178 million, the coalition has estimated, based on figures from local assessors and real estate agents. Some $85 million of that total is in just one parcel - 3,000 acres near Arizona's popular Roosevelt Lake - that could be sold for $8,500, the coalition said.

Other patents, the coalition said, would allow the sale of 995 acres of California's Inyo National Forest, worth $7.5 million, for $3,100; 673 acres of California's Mojave National Preserve, worth up to $1 million, for $2,300; and 100 acres of Washington state's Mount Baker National Forest, worth up to $937,000, for $470.

At Mount Emmons, it is unclear what will happen. Phoenix-based Phelps Dodge Corp., inherited the applications from a company it acquired, but has said in court documents it wants to unload the property.

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a foolproof government issued photo id. only the INS idiots dont scan it most of the time

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AZ_LASER_VISAS_AZOL-?SITE=AZMES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Oct 16, 3:19 PM EDT

Authorities trying to prevent misuse of laser visas

NOGALES, Ariz. (AP) -- The federal government is trying to fight a trend of illegal immigrants trying to sneak into the country using U.S. laser visas that are supposed to offer the highest level of security available.

The U.S. State Department is starting a new tracking system Monday to dissuade people from selling off their laser visas - or to at least encourage them to hold on to them more carefully.

The visas are counterfeit-proof and in 2004, Congress appropriated $11 million to install scanners at all U.S. ports of entry to read the data embedded on the cards.

Smugglers and spotters have noticed that U.S. Customs inspectors don't always scan the laser visa cards, relying instead on their instincts about border-crossers, to speed up the entry process.

The illicit laser visa scam is booming in towns like Nogales, Sonora. Hundreds are reported lost or stolen every year, and hundreds more are seized as impostors try to cross through the ports of entry.

U.S. border officials have tracked thousands of stolen laser visas, some up for sale, available to migrants who want to avoid the desert for prices ranging from $50 to $2,000.

Theft is only one way visas end up on the streets. Border residents also sell their visas and claim them stolen.

Officials at the Nogales port of entry seized 1,745 laser visas from impostors in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, said Jesus Jerez, chief of passenger operations at the downtown Nogales port. The year before that, more than 2,300 were seized.

Starting Monday, consular offices will no longer issue replacement laser visas, said Benjamin Ousley, the consular section chief for the U.S. Consulate in Nogales, Sonora.

Instead, people who report their missing visas to consular officials for a replacement will be issued a sticker visa to place inside their passport. The sticker will be annotated with a stamp denoting the missing laser visa as lost or stolen.

The hope is that inspectors at the ports of entry will notice the "lost/stolen" annotation and ask more questions of the person seeking entry into the United States, Ousley said.

"You're walking up to the inspector holding a red flag," he said.

Critics say the new passport sticker system is as flawed as the initial scanner system put in place last year.

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http://www.prensahispanaaz.com/index.asp?id=3598

Desafían a racistas

Cientos de personas, incluyendo anglosajones, se unieron en protesta contra Rusty Childress y van por Andrew Thomas y Russell Pearce.

Edmundo Apodaca

Por primera vez en mucho tiempo, anglosajones venidos de distintas ciudades del valle participaron junto con hispanos en la protesta pacífica en la empresa Childress Automall, propiedad del principal patrocinador de la 200.

El mensaje fue claro: No pemitirán el avance de leyes racistas.

Rusty Childress fue uno de los principales aportantes de dinero para promover la proposición 200, que luego se convirtió en ley.

Encabezados por Elías Bermúdez y una gran cantidad de líderes sociales, entre ellos Julián Nabozny, José Robles, de la Diócesis católica de Phoenix, Alfredo Gutiérrez, Phillip Austin, de la Asociación de Ciudadanos Hispanos de Mesa, entre otros, cientos de personas se reunieron el pasado fin de semana en la 23 avenida y la Camelback, para manifestarse en contra del racismo. Con pancartas en mano se mostraron a favor de una reforma migratoria y que se frene, de una vez por todas, la aprobación de leyes antiinmigrantes en Arizona.

Advirtieron que la movilización social continuará en los próximos días, incluso realizarán un plantón en la sede de la Conferencia sobre Inmigración Ilegal, Crimen y Seguridad Fronteriza que promueve el procurador Andrew Thomas.

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the mexican embassy or consulate is moving to south phoenix - 6401 S.  Central between Southern and Baseline.

http://www.prensahispanaaz.com/index.asp?id=3604

Realizarán Consulado Móvil en Sur Phoenix

Será este sábado 15 de octubre en la escuela de Santa Catalina de Siena.

Leo Hernández

Personal del Consulado General de México en Phoenix instalarán un Consulado Móvil, en el que ofrecerán trámites de documentos, darán información gratuita y tendrán muchos otros servicios.

El evento será este sábado 15 de octubre en las instalaciones de la escuela Santa Catalina de Siena, la cual se localiza en 6401 S. de la avenida Central, entre las calles Southern y Baseline.

La atención al público será de 9 de la mañana a 2 de la tarde, y durante la jornada se expedirán diversos documentos como la matrícula consular, el pasaporte, la cartilla del serivicio militar y documentos del registro civil. Además, se proporcionará información gratuita sobre asuntos civiles, legales, laborales, migratorios y penales. Los interesados en tramitar la matrícula, deben presentar el acta de nacimiento, una identificación oficial con fotografía, comprobante de domicilio a nombre del interesado y acta de matrimonio (los casados). Si van a tramitar el pasaporte mexicano, deben tener acta de nacimiento, identificación oficial con fotografía, tres fotografías tamaño pasaporte de frente y a colores, así como acta de matrimonio si es el caso.

Para la cartilla militar se necesitan el acta de nacimiento, una identificación oficial con fotografía, cuatro fotos tamaño pasaporte de frente, que no sean instantáneas y con la cara despejada, además, comprobar que ha residido en los Estados Unidos por al menos un año.

Para más información sobre el Consulado Móvil, los interesados pueden llamar al (602) 242-7398, extensión 230.

Semana binacional de salud

Como parte de un acuerdo de cooperación entre Estados Unidos y México, se llevará a cabo la Quinta Semana Binacional de Salud en el Valle del Sol del 13 al 15 de octubre con varios eventos.

Este jueves 13 habrá uno en Mesa titulado Autism Raising Awareness, que tendrá lugar en Del Sol Reception, localizado en 243 S. Mesa Drive; el viernes habrá una feria de salud en el supermercado Ranch Market de la calle 16 y Roosevelt, en Phoenix, donde se ofrecerán varios servicios gratuitos a la comunidad.

El sábado 15 se celebrará el Día Nacional para la Con-cientización del VIH, el cual marcará la clausura de la Semana Binacional de Salud; será en el Concilio Latino de Salud, localizado en 546 E. Osborn, en Phoenix.

Todos estos eventos son organizados por el Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior (IME) a través del Consulado de México en Phoenix.

Pie de foto:

Un nuevo Consulado Móvil se realizará este sábado, será en Sur Phoenix.

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childress buick is run by racists who support prop 200 and hate latinos??? si?

http://www.prensahispanaaz.com/index.asp?id=3564

El “gigante” se mueve

Miembros de la comunidad anglosajona se sumaron a la gigantesca protesta realizada el pasado sábado contra la empresa Childress Automall o Childress Buick, ubicada en Camelback y 23 Avenida.

La compañía es propiedad de Rusty Childress, uno de los principales patrocinadores de la Proposición 200, contra quien los cientos de manifestantes lanzaron consignas y pidieron a la comunidad entera no comprar carros en esa empresa, “por la hipocresía de su propietario, quien por un lado se lanzó contra la comunidad inmigrante y por otra parte trata de venderle sus autos”, dijo Elías Bermúdez.

A la manifestación, encabezada por el presidente de Migrantes Sin Fronteras, se unieron muchos líderes y activistas comunitarios, entre ellos Julián Nabozny, reconocido benefactor de la comunidad hispana, José Robles, de la Diócesis de Phoenix, Phillip Austin, de la Asociación de Hispanos de Mesa, el ex senador Alfredo Gutiérrez, entre otros.

Fue una protesta pacífica, donde se leían cientos de consignas en contra de la empresa Childress Buick y su propietario, a quien acusaron de ser un ignorante de la realidad del fenómeno migratorio y de tratar de restarle valor e importancia a la enorme contribución de los hispanos al desarrollo y fortaleza de este país y del estado de Arizona.

Evidencias

Incluso, en un intento por “borrar” evidencias de lo importante que es la comunidad hispana para su negocio, Childress retiró un letrero que por años mantuvo en las afueras de su negocio, donde se anunciaba que ahí se habla español, y de esta manera atraer a clientes hispanos, obviamente a quienes no les pide papeles que demuestren su estatus legal para poder venderles.

La Iglesia en defensa de la comunidad inmigrante

José Robles, representante de la Diócesis de Phoenix, dijo que este tipo de acciones, que se multiplicaron el pasado fin de semana en varios estados de la Unión Americana como Chicago, Dallas, Nueva York, Los Ángeles y Washington, tiene el propósito de llamar la atención de los congresistas federales para que respalden una reforma migratoria justa, que reconozca las aportaciones de la comunidad inmigrante al desarrollo y fortaleza de este país. Se trata de un movimiento nacional en defensa de la dignidad de los inmigrantes.

Señaló que la protesta contra Childress es porque este empresario patrocinó la Proposición 200, que luego se convirtió en ley para negar servicios a la comunidad inmigrante.

Para Elías Bermúdez, uno de los principales impulsores de estas acciones de protesta, que el pasado 10 de mayo reunió a más de 4 mil hispanos en la defensa de sus derechos, afirmó tajante que este movimiento seguirá creciendo porque es justo, hasta que se logre la aprobación de la reforma migratoria. Además, es preparativo para una gran concentración en el Congreso local el próximo 9 de enero del 2006, cuando se reanuda el trabajo legislativo, a fin de que no se sigan aprobando leyes antiinmigrantes.

“Vamos a seguir presionando para que en Arizona no siga creciendo el sentimiento antiinmigrante. Además, tenemos que enviarle el mensaje a la comunidad anglosajona que los promotores de la 200 son mentirosos, ya que con engaños lograron el apoyo de la población, le metieron miedo con el argumento de que los inmigrantes son criminales, cuando en realidad se trata de gente trabajadora, honesta, dedicada, y cuyo único propósito es ganarse el pan de cada día con el sudor de su frente.”

“Serenata” a Russell Pearce y plantón a Andrew Thomas

Anunció para los próximos días una protesta frente a la casa del legislador republicano Russell Pearce, ubicada en Mesa, Arizona, y para el 3 al 5 de noviembre un plantón en la Conferencia del Suroeste sobre Inmigración Ilegal, Seguridad Fronteriza y Crimen, que promueve y patrocina el Procurador del Condado Maricopa, Andrew Thomas.

El evento se efectuará en el Scottsdale Resort y centro de conferencias de esa ciudad.

Julián Nabozny, propietario de restaurantes McDonald’s y un activo miembro de la comunidad de Arizona, expuso que se tiene que educar a la comunidad anglosajona del valor que representa para el estado y para el país la presencia de los inmigrantes hispanos para que se una a la lucha contra el racismo. Hoy están mal informados y por tanto temerosos, porque les han mentido sobre la realidad del fenómeno migratorio.

Buscan apoyo del reverendo Jesse Jackson

Nabozny anunció que se han puesto en contacto con gente del influyente reverendo Jesse Jackson, para buscar el apoyo de la comunidad afroamericana a esta lucha. El contacto es Raúl Yzaguirre, líder moral del Consejo Nacional de la Raza, actualmente el hispano con mayor influencia en el país.

Se une la comunidad anglosajona

Para los cientos de personas que se sumaron a la protesta resultó sorpresiva y estimulante la presencia de anglosajones en la manifestación.

Linda y Richard Brown -padre e hija-, así como Alia Sonissi, Drew Sullivan y Brian Tomasi, entre otros, se solidarizaron con el plantón pacífico contra Rusty Childress, “porque es injusto que se trate a la comunidad inmigrante como criminales.

Estamos aquí porque queremos decirle al mundo que los inmigrantes son gente decente, trabajadora y respetable. Exigimos respeto a los derechos humanos de estas personas y seguiremos su lucha porque la consideramos justa”, fueron algunas de las expresiones de los anglosajones presentes en la protesta.

Defensa casa por casa

Linda Brown, quien pertenece a organizaciones como la Red de Abogados de Arizona, Unidos en Arizona y del Foro Hispano, anunció que una red de ciudadanos estadounidenses se dará a la tarea de ir casa por casa diciendo la verdad sobre las mentiras que gente como Rusty Childresss, Rusell Pearce y otros “destacados” antiinmigrantes, han venido repitiendo sobre el fenómeno migratorio y las consecuencias para el estado y el país.

Además, criticó el hecho de que estos personajes nunca hablen de la otra parte del problema, que es el efecto devastador de las políticas económicas que Estados Unidos aplica en los países pobres, que generan el éxodo, la salida de la gente de sus lugares de origen para venirse a la Unión Americana a ganar la vida y salvar a su familia del hambre y la marginación.

“De eso nunca hablan, porque no les daría ningún resultado positivo en sus carrreras políticas. Por eso es que vamos a solidarizarnos y luchar unidos con los hispanos en la defensa de sus derechos”, coincidieron Alia Sonissi y Drew Sullivan, jóvenes anglosajones involucrados en la defensa cívica la comunidad hispana.

Mientras tanto, el presidente de la Asociación de Ciudadanos Hispanos de Mesa, Phillip Austin, quien también participó en la protesta, dijo que nadie debe quedarse al margen de la lucha contra leyes y actitudes antiinmigrantes.

Agregó que es urgente unirse a todas aquellas manifestaciones de protesta que impliquen acciones concretas contra el avance del racismo en el estado. Advirtió que sin la unidad no hay fortaleza, por lo que se ha iniciado un movimiento que será capaz de involucrar a toda la comunidad inmigrante, hispanos y de otras nacionalidades, en la lucha contra el racismo manifestado ya en leyes aprobadas por legisladores republicanos estatales.

Dijo que se debe insistir ante el Congreso federal para que sea aprobada la reforma migratoria, mediante la que se lograría solucionar de una vez por todas este problema.

No quieren hablar

Nadie de la empresa Childress Automall, ni el mismo Rusty Childress quisieron dar sus impresiones de la protesta realizada el pasado fin de semana por cientos de personas.

Vía telefónica se intentó contactar a Childress, se le dejó un mensaje solicitándole una entrevista para que diera su versión de los hechos, pero nunca contestó ni devolvió la llamada.

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how do you spell government taxes and $revenue$? 15 mph school zones. its not about safety! its about $revenue$. but i am sure that the readers from south of the border understand this fact much better then the american who actually beleive that the government is protecting their children with these silly laws that protect no one other then to raise money for government rulers

http://www.prensahispanaaz.com/index.asp?id=3586

Automovilistas ignoran límite de velocidad en zonas escolares

A pesar de los señalamientos que indican que el límite de velocidad en zonas escolares es de 15 millas por hora, muchos automovilistas lo exceden, provocando una situación de riesgo para los estudiantes.

De acuerdo con el oficial John Williams, de la Policía de Mesa, exceder el límite de velocidad en zonas escolares puede recaer en multas de hasta el triple del costo por cometer la misma infracción en otras zonas de la ciudad.

El costo de la multa por exceder el límite de velocidad es de 105 dólares. En zonas escolares éste puede ser de hasta 400 dólares, dependiendo de otros factores como la falta de seguro de auto y de licencia.

Pero de acuerdo con el oficial Williams, lo más grave no es la multa sino la tragedia que pudiera ocasionarse a raíz de esa omisión.

Para prevenir accidentes, oficiales de la Policía mantienen operativos especiales en las escuelas para supervisar la llegada y salida de los estudiantes.

Sin embargo, hace falta más conciencia en la población para disminuir el peligro de accidentes, enfatizó.

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f*ck prop 200! f*ck the racists at childress buick who helped pass the law! f*ck Rusty Childress the person who runs childress buick!

http://www.azcentral.com/lavoz/front/articles/101105childress-CR.html.html

Protestan por apoyo a la 200

Por Valeria Fernández

La Voz

Octubre 12, 2005

Cientos de personas sitiaron el perímetro del negocio automotriz de Rusty Childress, ubicado sobre Camelback y la Avenida 24, en señal de protesta por su apoyo económico a la Proposición 200.

La manifestación pacífica ha sido una de las más grandes realizadas hasta el momento de una serie organizada por el grupo “Emigrantes sin Fronteras”.

Más que protestar una ley que ya se aprobó la idea fue enviar el mensaje de que “a todos los comerciantes que estén financiando medidas contra los inmigrantes les vamos a atacar en el bolsillo”, dijo Elías Bermúdez, líder del grupo.

El activista subrayó que la importancia de protestas como estas radica en la unión de los latinos para pedir una reforma migratoria.

“Ya no vamos a llorar sobre la leche derramada”, subrayó.

Bermúdez acusó a Childress de haber invertido más de 100 mil dólares en la campaña para apoyar la ley 200. Sin embargo, una revisión del record público del Comité Protect Arizona Now sólo indicó que el negociante contribuyó con mil dólares.

Un visible anuncio instalado en la entrada del negocio que leía “Se habla español” brilló por su ausencia durante la protesta, ya que Childress decidió quitarlo.

“¿Por qué dicen que hablan español y tienen carros para los hispanos? Si no le gustan los hispanos tampoco queremos que les guste nuestro dinero”, protestó Magdalena Swartz, una de las activistas.

A la convocatoria asistieron cerca de mil personas, entre estas familias con carteles de “No a la 200”, y algunos por primera vez se animaban a gritar: “somos muchos y seremos más”.

Jesús Betancur, gerente de una compañía de soldadura que lleva 20 años viviendo en Estados Unidos, fue a protestar indignado de que lo acusen de vivir de los demás.

“En realidad mucha gente trabaja y pocos son los que reciben el dinero de sus impuestos. ¿Cómo dicen ellos que nosotros somos una carga pública?”, protestó.

Los conductores y hasta una estación de radio en una compañía de colchones ayudó a darle visibilidad a la protesta demostrando su apoyo.

En un punto las mismas alarmas de los autos fueron activadas por los ruidos del tumulto.

“Mucha gente por el temor cuando necesitaban servicios médicos de emergencia no los aprovechaban (por la 200)”, opinó José Robles, representante de ministerios hispanos de la Diócesis de Phoenix que también se sumó a la protesta.

Al evento tampoco faltaron negociantes de la otra cara del debate migratorio como Julian Nabozny, dueño de un McDonalds en el sur de Phoenix.

“Un boicot económico da resultados parciales, lo importante es informar al votante”, subrayó Nabozny. “Este país necesita la mano de obra que no existe”.

Apoyando a Childress

Childress, quien empezó como tesorero de la organización Protect Arizona Now en julio de 2003 cuando se iniciará la campaña de la 200, también tuvo quien lo apoyara.

“La 200 ya pasó hace un año, es hora de que lo superen”, opinó Donna Neil, representante de la asociación de vecindario Westwood.

Neil denunció el impacto negativo de un boicot en esa zona y defendió a Childress por haber apoyada la 200.

Sin embargo, el comerciante se mofó de la protesta asegurando que más que alejar a los clientes los atrajeron por los cientos de faxes y correos electrónicos que recibió de ciudadanos expresándole su apoyo.

“Este evento sólo sirvió para molestar al millón de personas que votaron por la 200”, respondió a una interrogante de La Voz.

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how do you spell $revenue$ and taxes? shaking down people with out of state license plates is how you spell revenue in arizona!!! but on the other hand i suspect the state of arizona steals much less then the mexican government does when they tax your car. perhaps kevin and laro can ask some latinos how much it costs to register a car in mexico. many years ago i though that cars cost two or three times in mexico because of the taxes government theives put on them.

http://www.azcentral.com/lavoz/front/articles/101105placas-CR.html.html

Multas por no usar placas de Arizona

Por Valeria Fernández

Octubre 12, 2005

Autoridades del Departamento de Motores y Vehículos (MVD, por sus siglas en inglés) continúan sus esfuerzos para implementar una ley que desde hace 20 años obliga a las personas que residen y trabajan en Arizona a registrar sus vehículos en el estado.

Con el rápido incremento de la población se ha comenzado a detectar autos con placas de otros estados y de estados fronterizas como Sonora, México, con mayor frecuencia, dijo Cydney DeModica, portavoz de MVD.

Si una persona vive, trabaja e incluso tiene a sus hijos inscritos en una escuela de Arizona, tiene que llevar una placa del estado, un seguro y una licencia, subrayó la funcionaria.

“Mucha gente piensa que hay un período de gracia de 30 a 60 días para hacer estos cambios, pero no lo hay”, agregó DeModica.

No obstante las leyes en el estado contemplan una excepción para los turistas y los visitantes que vienen de otros estados a pasar los meses de invierno en Arizona.

La multa por no tener una placa del estado asciende a 350 dólares, pero puede llegar a 500 si se incluyen costos extras en las cortes.

MVD cuenta con 200 oficiales a nivel estatal que se encargan de la implementación de esta y otras regulaciones patrullando estacionamientos de compañías.

Durante los meses de julio y agosto esa dependencia recaudó cerca de 5 millones de dólares en multas, 2 millones de éstas fueron por tener el registro expirado y el resto por no contar con placas de Arizona.

El dinero que se obtiene de los registros de automóviles se invierte en el mantenimiento de autopistas y carreteras del estado.

“Para poder seguir al día con las demandas del crecimiento de la población, tenemos que asegurarnos que todo el mundo pague la parte que le corresponde”, subrayó DeMonica.

Vehículos de México

Aunque algunos lo hacen a propósito, no todo el mundo está informado sobre las demandas de esta ley.

Luis Ortega, un inmigrante con visa de trabajo, reside en Arizona desde hace casi 10 meses pero tiene un auto de México con placas de Sonora.

Ortega no está seguro si puede registrar en el estado su vehículo extranjero.

De acuerdo a DeModica, si el auto es de otro país todo depende de si fue manufacturado para la exportación. Para determinar esto la persona debe llevar su vehículo a una inspección sin costo en cualquier oficina del MVD.

Si el vehículo no puede ser registrado no será confiscado, subrayó DeModica. Para registrarlo, el dueño del vehículo tiene que presentar el título del automóvil, u otras documentos que acrediten su propiedad. El registro se paga anualmente y tiene un costo promedio de 150 a 160 dólares que puede variar basándose en el valor del auto.

“Este es un problema enorme principalmente con gente de otros estados (de la nación)”, dijo el sargento Tony Morales, del Departamento de Policía de Phoenix.

Es común que los oficiales en las patrullas tengan que multar a los conductores por no traer placas de Arizona cuando se sabe que trabajan aquí, agregó.

Para obtener información sobre la ubicación de la oficina de MVD más próxima se puede llamar al 602-255-0072, o al 1-800-251-5866.

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arizona is a police state and you need a stinking government issued photo id to vote. well almost you do need id to vote and arizona is a police state

http://www.azcentral.com/lavoz/front/articles/101105ID-CR.html

Exigirán una identificación

Por Valeria Fernández

La Voz

Octubre 12, 2005

El uso de una identificación en los comicios para poder votar será obligatorio en las elecciones de 2006 gracias a una decisión del Departamento de Justicia (DOJ, por sus siglas en inglés).

Las personas que no lleven un documento de identidad podrán votar con una boleta provisional, según estos reglamentos.

Para que el voto cuente deberán comprobar su identidad en un plazo máximo de cinco días después, si se trata de una elección general, o tres si es elección primaria, dijo Kevin Tyne, portavoz de la Secretaría de Estado.

Los cambios, que forman parte de las disposiciones de la Proposición 200, fueron ampliamente discutidos por la gobernadora Janet Napolitano, el procurador Terry Goddard y la secretaria de estado Jan Brewer, antes de ser enviados al DOJ para su aprobación final.

Los críticos de esta medida aseguran que se prestará para el uso de perfiles raciales y discriminación contra las minorías en los recintos de votantes ya que muchas personas no cuentan con los documentos necesarios como una licencia de conducir.

Yvone Reed, portavoz de la Oficina de Registro de Votantes del Condado Maricopa, aseguró que los trabajadores en los comicios serán entrenados para que cumplan con los reglamentos de forma pareja.

Es posible que votar por correo se convierta en una de las formas más sencillas de votar, sugirió Reed.

Hasta ahora no se ha determinado en dónde se recibirá a las personas que tengan que presentar su voto.

Algunos activistas políticos, como el ex senador Alfredo Gutiérrez, opositor de la 200, sostienen que estos cambios no representarán mayor problema para las comunidades latinas ya que muchos usan identificación a diario para cualquier servicio.

Para poder votar, los electores tendrán que presentar una forma de identificación con fotografía como una licencia de conducir que cuente con el domicilio vigente de la persona. Otra alternativa será presentar dos documentos sin foto como los recibos de la luz y el agua, la tarjeta de registro de votantes, o una tarjeta de seguro del auto.

Los nuevos reglamentos no se implementarán en las elecciones de noviembre de 2005 en el Condado Maricopa, confirmó Reed.

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i read about this effort by the feds to remove arsenic from water in popular science or popular mechanics maybe a year ago. this new water law to remove arsenic from water will cost millions, probably billions. the law will prevent maybe one or two cancer deaths a year. most normal people would think thats a pretty sh*tty investment but the feds think its great!

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1017arsenic17.html

New water rule costing communities

Jahna Berry

The Arizona Republic

Oct. 17, 2005 12:00 AM

Cities and private water companies across the state are under the gun to build plants and install systems that will make Arizona's water safer.

The large municipal water plants run by Valley cities, treating surface water and some groundwater, are shelling out millions to meet a new federal requirement to cut arsenic that begins Jan. 23.

But rural Arizona will be hit the hardest. There, hundreds of small private water companies pump only groundwater, which tends to have more arsenic. Those firms have less cash to treat water than a big city operation and will be more likely to pass the cost on, regulators and industry experts say.

In 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency slashed the federal standard for arsenic in water from 50 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion to protect the public against the cancer-causing substance.

But that's little comfort to small-town residents who may have to dig deeper to pay for water.

"I heard if they have to put in more equipment, they will have to raise the bills," said Leroy Hunter, a 70-year-old Camp Verde resident, who pays $68 a month for water in the summer. "The people on fixed incomes can't afford the increases."

When the January deadline rolls around, most large cities will be ready, but some water taps would still have higher levels of arsenic, state officials predict.

But municipal and private water systems will have a little extra time to comply.

Even though the change starts Jan. 23, the water systems are tested for contaminants on a pre-set cycle, and the new arsenic rule will be rolled into those existing tests. The state won't determine if a utility's surface water complies with the tougher arsenic rules until December 2006, groundwater in December 2007.

"We want to make sure that everyone is on the road to compliance," said Steve Owens, director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Owens' agency and industry groups are educating small companies about the rule and lower-cost arsenic technology.

"Our hope is that through our efforts, we can identify those systems that are not going to make it."

The penalty for violators is high. Under the worst-case scenario, a water company can be charged up to $25,000 a day for violating federal drinking-water standards or could be shut down.

That's why the state has focused on helping small companies comply, Owens said. Shuttering a utility could devastate a small town with no alternate water source.

The new rule has big cities feeling the pain, too. Scottsdale, which has 23 wells affected by the new rule, expects to spend $85 million on water system improvements. Chandler is spending more than $16 million, Phoenix $24 million and Mesa nearly $8 million for upgrades.

"It's been a huge financial hit," said Catherine Connolly, executive director of the League of Arizona Cities and Towns.

Those municipal water customers should see their bills creep up gradually over time, city officials predicted.

The tap water most Valley consumers drink is surface water from the Salt River Project or Central Arizona Project Canal. Groundwater is a backup source during peak summer periods.

So even if all of Mesa's city wells don't meet the tougher standards this winter, water from faucets should be fine, said Alan Martindale, Mesa's water quality supervisor.

The tough new arsenic guidelines may force Mesa to take some of their wells offline permanently, which means the city has less breathing room during a crisis. This past January, Mesa leaned on its wells during the water-quality scare, Martindale said.

"We relied on every well we had during the Val Vista turbidity scare," he said. "We won't have the luxury next year."

It's a different story in small cities. Tucked at the feet of the Bradshaw Mountains, Prescott budgeted $23 million to treat water for its 20,000 customers.

"Up here in rural Arizona, we are groundwater dependent," said Carol Johnson, a Prescott water official.

Arizona Water Co., which serves 76,000 customers from Coolidge to Sedona, expects to spend $30 million on plant construction and water treatment to meet the federal arsenic guidelines, President William Garfield said.

"It's a rush to get them done as soon as possible," he said.

Some towns, such as Sedona, won't see dramatic changes in their water bills. But customers in nearby Rim Rock, which has higher arsenic levels in its groundwater, could see their water bills double, Garfield said.

In Arizona, the new federal arsenic rule is a political sore spot. Naturally occurring arsenic is more common here than in other parts of the country, so reaching the new standard is a bigger challenge.

The state originally resisted the move for tougher arsenic rules but seems to be implementing the new standard, said Sandy Bahr, conservation outreach director for the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club.

"Whether you get your water from a big system or a small system, your water should be safe," she said. "This is about public health."

While many studies link arsenic to cancer, there has been a debate about what is a safe level for human consumption.

"From an epidemiological standpoint, you can't say that Arizona has ever been affected," said Paul Westerhoff, an associate professor in Arizona State University's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

While the standard was 50 parts per billion for years, "new health data suggested that the level should be lower," he said.

One part per billion is similar to a drop of liquid from an eyedropper in an Olympic-size swimming pool, according to state officials.

In Western states, where arsenic is more prevalent, some have argued that the tougher rules create a huge expense without significant health benefits. Now that the January deadline looms, everyone's focus has shifted, utilities say.

"We will conform to the new standard," said Garfield, who belongs to a coalition assisting small utilities to meet the federal guideline. "It's not for us to debate at this point."

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cities asking tenants to snitch on your landlord so the cities can collect more revenue. what the cities are not saying is that if you snitch our your landlord the end result is you will end up paying more taxes. the Arizona Department of Real Estate also is asking asking real estate agents to snitch on fellow real estate agents who dont register. and last the arizona department of real estate is asking real estate agents to snitch on their clients who may be disobeying the law. isnt that a conflict of interest? and doesnt arizona resemble nazi germany where the nazi thugs asked children to report their neighbors? and one other lame excuse for this is it will make it easy for the government to catch messy yard criminals!

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1017rentals17side.html

Landlords ignoring law on registration

Edythe Jensen

The Arizona Republic

Oct. 17, 2005 12:00 AM

Arizona is the only state in the nation to require rental-property registration, but Maricopa County officials suspect that more than half of the Valley's landlords aren't obeying the law.

Since most Valley cities collect sales tax on rent and look to the registration for tax audits, many are encouraging homeowners to snitch on their rental neighbors as the number of investor-owned properties increases.

The problem is so widespread that the Arizona Department of Real Estate is asking agents to report associates who encourage investor clients to hide rental status by lying on property documents.

The 6-year-old state rental-registration law is designed to prevent blight, identify owners and agents and ease tax collections. But Joan Blackburn, support-services manager for the Maricopa County assessor, said that among about 780,000 residential parcels in the county, 100,300 are registered as rentals. She suspects that as many as 160,000 others are unregistered, based on differences between properties' addresses and mailing addresses of owners. And she admits to reporting unregistered rentals in her own Glendale neighborhood.

County Assessor Keith Russell has said his office doesn't have the staff to check individual sales to be sure the addresses of buyers match that of the property and to determine that occupants aren't family members of owners, not renters.

Cities, not the county, stand to lose sales tax revenues on unreported rentals, and many are taking on the burden of discovering them.

Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe and Glendale have programs that audit county property records and scout neighborhood "for rent" signs. They also urge residents to call to report rentals they suspect are unregistered.

Terry Feinberg, president of the Phoenix-based Arizona Multihousing Association, which represents rental owners, said out-of-state investors might be in violation out of ignorance, not intention. That's because Arizona is the only state with mandatory rental registration. However, "I don't doubt there are some intentional tax-evasion strategies," he said.

Landlords are also challenged by different rental-tax rules in the Valley's cities, said Steve Urie, a property manager and Gilbert Town Councilman. Some, like Chandler, require taxes on the first rental; others, including Phoenix and Mesa don't tax rent until an investor owns three or more rentals in Arizona.

The state Department of Real Estate is starting a drive to stem criticism of investors and increase compliance with rental-registration laws, said spokeswoman Amy Bjelland.

Earlier this year it issued a plea to agents to turn in counterparts who encourage clients to lie to avoid rental taxes. The agency threatened to discipline such agents, but no action has been taken, files show.

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tempe to give $20,000 in corporate welfare out to business along light rail path. first the idiots in tempe government approve the light rail construction which will cause many of these businesses to go bankrupt, then the city of tempe decides to give each business 20 grand in welfare to make up for the mistake. and of course us tax payers pay for it all.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1014t-railcredit14-ON.html

Loan program could ease light rail woes for Tempe businesses

Katie Nelson

The Arizona Republic

Oct. 14, 2005 02:00 PM

Light-rail construction is barely under way, but some Tempe business owners say they are already struggling.

Backhoes and orange construction signs are clogging traffic on Apache Boulevard, down the road from Abbas Naini's auto sales and repair shop. He says they are the reason business is bad.

"It's been devastating," he said, looking around Auto Club, filled only with a few employees. If it keeps going like this until the rail actually opens, "we're going to have to shut down. It's just killing us."

Help could be on the way for Naini and some 300 other Tempe businesses along the light-rail route. November marks the kick off of a new city-sponsored loan program put together by the Tempe Chamber of Commerce and the Tempe Schools Credit Union. Pre-qualified businesses could receive a $20,000 line of credit.

Long-term, $20,000 might not be much. But it could mean the difference between losing and keeping some customers, said Michael Monti. His steakhouse on the north end of Tempe's downtown is the first business to sign up for the program.

"Customers are creatures of habit," Monti said. "Anything that breaks their routine affects our business. There's just something about orange barricades and flashing yellow lights that creates a reflex response."

Monti's La Casa Vieja steakhouse will likely use the money for advertising, to tell diners how to circumvent the construction, Monti said.

Only certain businesses are eligible for the program: They must be along the line, independently owned and open for at least two years. The owner must agree to keep accounts with, or move them to, the Tempe Schools Credit Union.

In exchange they'll get a credit line set at 1 percent over prime, for 48 months.

About 150 businesses potentially meet the criteria, said Dutch Vander Laan, who is helping facilitate the program.

"It's not going to bail them out, but it's certainly going to help when the tractors are in front of their business," Vander Laan said.

And, if the businesses eventually need more money, that could be arranged, said Stephen Hazel, president of the credit union.

"Any help is better than no help," said Sonny Nguyen, a manager of the Khai Hoan Vietnamese restaurant on Apache Boulevard. "We have to do something. With the construction decrease we've seen so far, we might not be open by the time the train opens."

Reach the reporter at katie.nelson@arizonarepublic.com

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sounds like a jobs program for government nannies!!! the carnie food vendors have to deal with a alice in wonderland set of regulations where something that is required in arizona is illegal in another state or vise verse.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/1017ruelas17.html

Inspectors keep State Fair treats 'healthy'

Oct. 17, 2005 12:00 AM

About 15 minutes before the Arizona State Fair opened for business Friday, a squadron of Maricopa County health inspectors, metal clipboards in hand, miniature thermometers stuck in their pockets, spilled out of four fleet cars parked in the lot behind the Ferris wheel. Their mission: examine every hot-dog-on-a-stick, turkey leg, fried Twinkie and funnel cake stand by day's end.

Gregory Epperson, one of the unit's supervisors, broke the fair down into manageable segments: Midway, the Avenue of Flags, Grandstand and Veterans Coliseum. He assigned four people to each area.

Each inspection takes about a half-hour. It takes that long to check off each of the items on the standard pink and white form titled the "Maricopa County Food Safety Evaluation Report."

It was Epperson's seventh fair. It's a time of year that brings lots of dread for Epperson. Although it's not his dread. It's the sympathetic dread others have for him, imagining he has his hands full making sure stands selling fry bread and deep-fried cheesecake pass muster.

"I tell people I'm going to be at the State Fair," Epperson said, "and they say, 'Oh, the State Fair.' But really, it's not that bad."

The temporary food booths at the fair actually end up getting closer scrutiny than a restaurant down the street. Maricopa County gets to each dining establishment at least twice a year. Each food booth at the State Fair will get that many visits within the three weeks the fair is open.

First stop was the Philly Steak and Cheese stand by the Wallace and Ladmo Stage. Epperson climbed up into the trailer and stuck his thermometer into a vat of cooked chicken resting on a hot grill. The temperature read 168 degrees, well above the required 130.

A customer outside ordered a $6 brat. Epperson noted that the employee put on gloves before handling the bun. "You're supposed to do that for ready-to-eat items," he said.

Outside, Epperson checked the freezers. He opened the largest one, careful not to spill the packs of cigarettes resting on it, and the inner lid hung loose. "Yeah, that's like a minor violation," Epperson said. The freezer was still holding a cold-enough temperature. "If it was fixed, it might hold better," Epperson told the stand's operator. Since the stand is one of the few set up on grass, Epperson also suggested a tarp or mat to keep down the dust.

Wayne McGlothen, starting his third year of serving up cheesesteaks and gyros at the State Fair, said the inspections become routine. His kitchen on wheels moves to a new city every few weeks, and each stop brings a government official. "Some states, it's every day," he said. "You get to know all the rules and regulations, try to remember them all."

The inspectors, technically called environmental specialists, aren't concerned with how the food is prepared. All they check is that foods in refrigerators or freezers are kept below 41 degrees and that hot, ready-to-serve foods, like pork chops or pizza, are kept above 130 degrees.

Sometimes, ingredients can come into play. Last year, at a fried Twinkie stand, Epperson noted the batter was made with eggs. That meant it had to be kept adequately chilled. "That could be a hazard," he said.

Epperson walked into the trailer housing Felini's Pizza on the Avenue of Flags, near the commercial exhibit building. The instant thermometer he stuck into a tub of hot dogs floating in water read 148 degrees, well above the requirement.

"See, perfect?" said the booth's operator, Eduardo Horamina, who also operates a hot dog stand outside the Maricopa County Courthouse and has developed a keen sense of media savvy. He spoke like he knew his words might end up in the newspaper and lovingly displayed his food for a photographer.

Epperson stuck a tiny testing strip into a can holding sanitized water. The strip turned black, indicating the solution had a tad too much bleach. "That's potentially toxic," Epperson said.

"Oh, no, don't put that down," Horamina said to me, then turning to Epperson, added, "I tell them to just put in a capful, but they probably put in more."

The concentration of bleach in the water was 200 parts per million, acceptable in some states, but twice the level allowed in Arizona. Epperson left Horamina with some testing strips so he could get the mix right.

"You tell the people, come on down," Horamina said to me. "Don't be afraid. We work hard to please all tastes."

All the booths Epperson checked out were fine, with only a few violations. But that wasn't the case for the rest of the fair. Epperson huddled with two of his inspectors who were along the Avenue of Flags.

Behind the Western Barbeque stand, a plumber was working on a stopped drain. It wasn't the fault of the booth operators themselves, Epperson said, but it would need to get fixed.

Another booth down the way, serving grilled turkey legs, didn't have hot water. Probably the breaker blew that served their hot-water heater. If it wasn't fixed within a day, Epperson would have to shut it down. He also wasn't sure if they had the right permit.

The two inspectors said they'd circle back to make sure all was fine with the hot water and the drain, then got back to work. One headed toward a fry bread stand; the other inspected a lemonade booth housed in giant lemon.

Epperson headed back to his car to get some paperwork for the turkey leg booth. On his way, he dropped by a caramel apple stand to hand out a permit. He had trouble finding it. "After a while, it gets to where they all look alike," he said.

The rest of the day he would be "passing out permits and putting out fires," he said.

All in the name of making sure all those fried Snickers bars, pizza rolls and cotton candy wads wouldn't make anybody sick.

Well, at least not right away.

Reach Ruelas at (602) 444-8473 or richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com.

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a while ago somebody stole a car and drove it on to the take off and landing area at sky harbor airport. as a result of that the government nannies put up these barriers. i bet sky harbor airport is the only airport in the country that does this. i suspect that other airports that have the same security flaw wont have this done. -- unless some idiot steal a car and drives it on to the flight path of that airport.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1017security17.html

Permanent barriers to go up at airport

Ginger D. Richardson

The Arizona Republic

Oct. 17, 2005 12:00 AM

PHOENIX - The city plans to spend more than $70,000 on new concrete barriers to shore up the perimeter fence at Sky Harbor International Airport.

Officials set up hundreds of the blockades along portions of the fence line after a June security breach in which a man in a stolen truck drove onto the airfield.

However, many of those walls were rented in order to get them in place quickly. The city has now opted to buy new blockades that could be put in place permanently.

The City Council will vote Wednesday on the proposed contract with Pre-Cast Manufacturing Co.

Officials say it will cost the same amount of money to buy the barriers as it does to rent them for one month.

Altogether, Phoenix could spend nearly $16 million on improvements. A panel charged with evaluating the fence line also has recommended new cable restraints and guardrails, as well as the installation of a hydraulic barrier that could be raised in an instant if a vehicle tried to break through a gate.

The proposed changes are a result of the June incident in which a man drove through an open gate into a fire station parking lot and smashed through a wrought-iron fence to get onto the taxiway. He sped past several passenger-filled airplanes before crashing into a second fence west of Terminal 2. More than 50 flights were delayed. The suspect was indicted in July on charges of auto theft, aggravated assault and unlawful flight.

Reach the reporter at ginger.richardson@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-2474.

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the government nannies that rule us want to be paid more money to micromanage our lives

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=50766

Pay hike pushed for state workers

By Dennis Welch, Tribune

October 17, 2005

State employees are falling behind their counterparts across the country and state officials are pushing for bigger paychecks.

recent study by the Arizona Department of Administration shows that employee salaries rank among the lowest in the country, 22 percent below the national average for state workers.

Now, the department and some legislative leaders want an across-theboard pay raise for the state’s 36,000 workers that would cost more than $586 million over the next five years.

Officials with the Department of Administration, one of the largest agencies in the state, say the pay hike would help retain workers defecting to jobs in the private sector and municipal governments simply because they pay more.

"We’ve become the Arizona training facility," said Sen. Jay Tibshraeny, R-Chandler, who was cochairman of a committee charged with looking at state salaries.

Tibshraeny said pay raises should be a priority for lawmakers in the coming year and that they would be embarrassed if an across-the-board pay hike didn’t pass.

Besides hitting taxpayers in the pocketbook, high attrition rates affect services provided by the state as experienced employees leave for higher paying jobs, he said.

Tibshraeny said he faced the same problem when he was mayor of Chandler in the late 1990s.

To keep that city’s employees from jumping ship, Tibshraeny said that he and Chandler’s City Council were forced to raise salaries.

Nearly half of the money would come out of the state’s General Fund with federal and nonappropriated money covering the rest, said Kathy Peckardt, director of human resources at the Department of Administration.

Currently, the average salary of a state employee is a $32,897, nearly 22 percent below the national average, according to the department’s study.

The proposed hike would lift employees closer to market value, but not all the way.

Peckardt said employees do not need full market value because the state benefits package makes it competitive in the workplace.

If the plan is approved, a state employee making $33,000 per year would be lifted to nearly $45,300 by the end of fiscal year 2011, said Alan Ecker, a spokesman for the Department of Administration.

But the proposed raise would help the state save on recruiting and training costs, officials said.

The state must fill more than 600 positions each month and officials estimate the attrition rate, which hovers at just over 17 percent, is costing about $50 million a year.

Not all state lawmakers favor across-the-board pay hikes.

Last week, Sen. John Huppenthal, R-Chandler, said a portion of any raise should be performance based.

And other lawmakers say they’re not convinced that all state jobs are below their market value.

In the recent study, state salaries were compared with other public employers across the country.

Last week, a legislative panel looking into employee salaries stopped short of adopting the Department of Administration’s proposal.

Sen. Ken Cheuvront, D-Phoenix, said he wouldn’t mind performance-based raises, but only after an across-the-board hike is approved.

Three years ago, Cheuvront called for state employees to rally against the Legislature after lawmakers killed a proposed pay raise.

"It is imperative that we bring pay up for our employees who are so underpaid," he said last week.

That committee is required to make a recommendation to the Department of Administration by Dec. 1.

Representatives with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 97, which represents state workers, did not return phone calls during the week seeking comment on the proposal.

Contact Dennis Welch by email, or phone (480) 898-6573

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some fake libertarian news from john semmens

http://www.azconservative.org/Column_Archives.htm

http://www.azconservative.org/Semmens1.htm

JOHN SEMMENS: Semi-News

Louisiana Pork

October 12, 2005

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.) has requested $250 billion in federal reconstruction funds for Louisiana. That's more than $50,000 per person in the state. This money would come in addition to $62 billion that Congress has already appropriated for emergency relief and payouts from businesses, national charities and insurers.

"All the money will be for the benefit of Louisiana and Louisianans," said Landrieu. "All expenditures for machinery, materials, labor and special handling fees will go to Louisianans. All we are asking is for someone else to pay for it."

The items on Landrieu's list include: $5 billion to fund ads promoting Louisiana seafood, $10 billion to fund Viagra for alligator breeding, $20 billion to replace liquor and drugs lost or stolen during the hurricane, $40 billion for substandard building materials, $100 billion for shoddy workmanship and $75 billion in assorted consulting fees and service charges.

Democrats Attack Bill to Boost Refineries

A new Republican-crafted energy bill, prompted by hurricane devastation and high fuel prices, came under sharp attack from Democrats. Supporters argue the measure is needed to spur construction of new refineries. In 1981, the United States had 325 refineries capable of producing 18.6 million barrels a day. Today there are fewer than half that number, producing 16.9 million barrels daily. No refineries have been built in the United States since 1976.

One outspoken critic of the proposed legislation is Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass). "It does nothing to curb unwarranted automobile travel," said Markey. "We need high gas prices to encourage more people to stay home."

Among the groups trying to kill the bill are the National League of Cities, nine state attorneys general, most environmental organizations and groups representing state officials in charge of implementing federal clean air requirements. They said the bill would hinder their ability to engage in litigation aimed at blocking energy production.

"Soaring fuel prices open an opportunity for Americans to get back to a more natural way of living," said Nathan Greenpants, spokesman for Earth First, an environmental lobbying organization. "We should be tending organic gardens or gathering fruits and nuts in the forest, not racing down concrete freeways at 80 mph. Katrina has sent us a wake-up call. We should listen."

Embryonic Cells without an Embryo

Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch of M.I.T. and Dr. George Daley of Harvard Medical School have started some unusual and difficult experiments.

Stem cells, a type of universal cell in early embryos, can in theory grow into any of the body's tissues and organs. But embryonic stem cells are drawn from human embryos that are destroyed in the process. The moral objection has been that this is destroying human life.

So, Dr. Daley and Dr. Jaenisch have tried to get stem cells another way by creating aberrant cell clusters that contain stem cells. The idea is to produce embryonic cells without the embryos and make everyone happy.

Not everyone is happy, though. Planned Parenthood was quick to condemn the proposed research. “Harvested stem cells are an important revenue source that helps keep our birth control clinics going,” said Amy Nought, director of communications for the organization. “Creating artificial stem cells is an affront to natural processes. It would be a step toward a Frankenstein culture that we find abhorrent.”

The organization says it will lobby Congress to outlaw the proposed research.

Sheehan Urges Governor Schwarzenegger to March on Washington

Vacaville mother and anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan is asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to send California's National Guard troops to Washington to arrest President Bush.

Sheehan wants to deliver a letter to the governor. The letter reads, in part: "California should exploit the element of surprise by attacking Washington while the president is preoccupied with Iraq. After California troops depose the Bush regime, you could declare yourself president."

The governor's office acknowledged the implied vote of confidence Ms. Sheehan has expressed for the governor, but rebuffed her suggestion calling it "infeasible and probably illegal."

Willey and Broaddrick to Tour Clinton Library

Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, two of the women assaulted by former president Bill Clinton plan to visit his presidential library.

Broaddrick alleges that then-Governor Clinton raped her during a conference in Arkansas in 1978, and Willey says that Clinton fondled her when she worked in the White House in 1993. Both also charge that Clinton’s inner circle—including wife Hillary Rodham Clinton—subsequently attempted to pressure and intimidate them into silence.

Broaddrick expressed eagerness to see the wax version of Monica Lewinski squatting in the knee hole of the presidential desk and the sink where Clinton reputedly "finished himself off." Willey says she hopes to purchase one of the souvenir cigars and perhaps a copy of the famous blue dress, if they're not too expensive.

Terrorists Sabotage Relief Work in Kashmir

There has been no letup in terrorist activity in Kashmir despite the earthquake. This was evident from the unabated violence by terrorists since Saturday when the tragedy struck people on both sides of the Line of Control.

Terrorists killed 10 members of two families by slitting their throats and robbing them. The terrorists are reported to be from the Pakistan-based Hizbul Mujahideen.

In an audio tape sent to the media, a spokesman for Hizbul Mujahideen promised more strikes against the enemies of Islam. “The earthquake is a message from Allah,” said the voice on the tape. “Death will be visited upon all who do not believe the words of the Prophet. Those that Allah does not strike down himself will feel our knives on their throats.”

The tape also offered to sell videos of the recent murders for $29.95 plus postage and handling.

Bush, Blair ‘War Criminals’

A former chief UN weapons inspector has compared British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George Bush to the Nazi war criminals who started World War II.

Scott Ritter, a former U.S. marine, said the U.S. and Britain's "aggressive warfare" in Iraq was similar to German actions in Europe 66 years ago.

"Both these men could be pulled up as war criminals for engaging in actions that we condemned Germany in 1946 for doing the same thing," he said. "Tony Blair and George Bush are guilty of the crime of planning and committing aggressive warfare."

He described pre-war Iraq as a “peace-loving” nation. “Saddam Hussein never hurt anyone,” said Ritter. “The Iraqi people revered him and repeatedly re-elected him by a huge margin.”

But he said the aim of the U.S. Government was to exterminate the Iraqis. “Abu Graib was a death camp,” Ritter asserted. George Bush is the Middle Eastern equivalent of Adolf Hitler."

Ritter called for the removal of U.S. and British troops from Iraq and the hanging of the war criminals.

Europe facing age 'time-bomb'

A low birthrate combined with increased longevity is placing severe stresses on the welfare state. The president of the European Central Bank, Henri Gaspaud, warned Eurozone governments that drastic measures may have to be taken.

Officials in Brussels reputedly are looking into an idea first broached in a movie called “Soylent Green.”

John Semmens got his start writing about politics for his college newspaper. Since then, he has written more than 400 articles that have been published. In addition to "Semi-News," John writes a recurring column for the East Valley Tribune.

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what is the world coming to. this judge is telling prosecutors and cops that they are not allowed to commit perjury and lie in a federal court. isnt that the standard way the police  have opperated for years. whats wrong with this judge!!!! well you know im joking. the systems f*cked up and after all these years a judge actually has the balls to yell at government goons for committing perjury

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1017hellsangels-ON.html

Judge threatens to dismiss Hell Angels' indictments

Dennis Wagner

The Arizona Republic

Oct. 17, 2005 05:29 PM

A U.S. District judge is expected to take federal prosecutors to task this week for making false and legally incorrect statements in a racketeering and murder case against the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.

Judge David Campbell called for Friday's hearing in a sharply worded order suggesting that indictments against members of the biker organization might be dismissed if the U.S. Attorney's Office fails to abide by due-process rules.

Campbell described his order as "an extraordinary step of requiring the chief of the criminal division of the United States Attorney's Office . . . to appear in court and personally certify that the government has complied with its disclosure obligations . . .

"Statements made to the court by counsel for the government have been inaccurate, inconsistent and sometimes legally incorrect," the judge wrote. "The court has concluded . . . that a higher level of attention is necessary if this case is to be brought to trial."

Prosecutors apparently responded in a memorandum, but it was filed under seal. A spokeswoman in U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton's office declined to comment.

In July 2003 federal agents and Valley police raided Hells Angels' homes, businesses and chapter houses, arresting 16 club members and associates under a federal grand jury indictment for murder, gunrunning, drug-dealing, racketeering and other crimes.

The undercover probe known as Operation Black Biscuit netted three Hells Angel chapter presidents in the state. Agents seized 600 firearms, plus stolen vehicles, drugs, club records and paraphernalia.

As part of the sting, undercover investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives infiltrated the club and were invited to become members.

Similar cases are being tried against dozens of Hells Angels in Nevada, California and other states.

Defense attorneys have complained about misconduct by undercover operatives in the Arizona case, and about the prosecution's failure to disclose evidence that must be shared under federal justice rules.

Joe Abodeely, counsel for defendant Craig T. Kelly, filed a motion for dismissal this week based on prosecutors' conduct during 20 months and 10 hearings.

"It is painfully clear that the government has not and does not intend to comply with its legal requirements in keeping with due process, fair play and with this court's orders," Abodeely wrote.

In another court filing, Patricia Gitre, attorney for defendant Kevin Augustiniak, noted that the government employed three paid informers with backgrounds of violence and drug abuse.

One of them failed to tell investigators that he participated in a murder that is integral to the case. A second informer concealed the fact that, while working undercover, he used methamphetamine and beat people up. A third operative was arrested and removed from the probe after state police caught him with methamphetamines.

Gitre claims those "snitches" made the government's case, yet prosecutors have withheld volumes of information that raises doubt about their credibility. She argues that all three operatives have motive to lie for the government, which has given them money, plea deals and protection in return for cooperation.

Keith Vercauteren, the prosecutor, contends in legal filings that the government has only withheld materials that are irrelevant, unavailable or not yet subject to release under court rules. In some cases, Vercauteren argues, the defense wants information that would jeopardize ongoing investigations or the safety of informers.

Judge Campbell stopped short of finding that prosecutors have acted in "bad faith," but warned that the government must provide an "unequivocal confirmation" that defendants are getting all required information.

Campbell included an exhaustive review of the two-year battle over pre-trial evidence, noting that prosecutors claimed in January 2004 that they had "given all of the discovery" to defense lawyers. Since then, the government has produced thousands of additional documents, wiretap tapes, video recordings and other evidence.

The sixteen defendants are scheduled for trial in February. A key issue appears to be whether the Hells Angels is a criminal racketeering enterprise.

HAMC members and attorneys claim there is no statewide hierarchy for the biker gang, just independent clubs whose members sometimes break the law.

Federal investigators say the Hells Angels organization is a violent criminal gang that operates as a syndicate, dealing in guns, drugs and theft for profit.

Reach the reporter at dennis.wagner@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8874.

<#==#>

hmmmmm.... the government thugs have a double standard when it comes to shanking down people for revenue

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AZ_MVD_COMPLIANCE_AZOL-?SITE=AZMES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Oct 17, 2:43 PM EDT

No MVD crackdown in Yuma

YUMA, Ariz. (AP) -- The state Motor Vehicle Division has been cracking down on unregistered vehicles around the state but not in Yuma.

Statewide, nearly $5 million of additional taxes and fees have been collected, but George Lamb, program manager for the MVD's registration compliance enforcement program, said compliance efforts are difficult to conduct in Yuma because of the transient population.

Without a specific complaint, it's difficult to do enforcement given the number of winter visitors, seasonal workers, out-of-state students and Marines, he said. Marines are generally considered exempt from registering their vehicles in state.

Information from: The Sun, http://www.yumasun.com

<#==#>

lifes tough when your a government ruler and part of the american royality. i would have trouble making ends meet if i only made $165,200 a year

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AZ_CONGRESS_PAY_RAISE_AZOL-?SITE=AZMES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Oct 17, 7:22 PM EDT

Senator says lawmakers should turn down pay increase

By JIM ABRAMS

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senators should do their part in reducing federal spending by turning down a pay raise, Sen. Jon Kyl said Monday.

Under Kyl's amendment to a spending bill covering federal workers, senators would forgo the estimated 1.9 percent cost-of-living increase that will automatically go into effect unless the Senate votes to reject it.

The pay increase, also applicable to House members, would boost the salary for rank-and-file lawmakers by $3,100 to $165,200.

The $2 million in savings would take care of about three minutes of the year's deficit.

The House earlier approved a similar spending bill with only one lawmaker speaking out against the pay increase, but House conservatives have recently revived the issue in a package of proposals to cut federal spending in light of the mounting costs of rebuilding after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

"One way that we might encourage others to come forth with potential savings is to demonstrate that we ourselves are willing to forgo this COLA," said Kyl, R-Ariz. "It's a gesture that members of the Senate ought to make."

Republicans froze salaries for several years after gaining the majority in 1995, but in seven of the past eight years lawmakers have accepted cost-of-living increases, usually with little or no debate.

A vote on Kyl's amendment could take place later this week. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who for years has tried without success to freeze lawmaker pay, is co-sponsoring the amendment.

<#==#>

kevin finally gets a slave labor assignment.

http://www.azcorrections.gov/cgi-bin/IWorkProgram.cgi/1583533737112051016

Work Program

Inmate: 197573 WALSH, KEVIN

Eval Date  Assignment          Type     *Rating*     Hrs     Rate DI     SP

10/13/2005 CLEANUP/JANITORIAL  WIPP     0 0 0 0      0       .34 NEW     ASSI

Page 1 of 1

<#==#>

mayor phil gordon is real good at giving away tax dollars collected by the city of phoenix to the state of arizona. here mayor gordon promises to give the U of A $115 million

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1018uamedOLP18a1.html

Gordon pledges millions for UA med school

Mike Cronin

The Arizona Republic

Oct. 18, 2005 12:00 AM

Rain pelted their suits, skirts and shoes. Soaked within seconds. And still they stayed.

The constant impact of falling water couldn't match the impact of Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon's words.

For the first time, supporters of the University of Arizona College of Medicine's Phoenix campus learned that what has so far been a trickle of money for the school could now become a cascade. advertisement

During an outdoor news conference Monday, Gordon told a crowd of about two dozen that the city has given the school $25 million. And he promised he will attempt to come up with $90 million more.

That could bring the medical school a new education facility, with classrooms, labs and student and business services. And by the 2014-15 academic year, the school would be larger than its counterpart in Tucson, injecting new research, physicians and economic benefits into the Valley.

The $25 million comes in the form of a loan that is part of a federal program designed to help underdeveloped areas. The downtown site qualifies because the medical school is occupying renovated buildings that might otherwise be torn down. Gordon said he also will seek the additional $90 million from the Phoenix Community Development and Investment Corp.

The loan will be paid back from the school's lease payments. The school already is receiving $7 million a year in state money approved by the Legislature and Gov. Janet Napolitano. That money will allow UA to begin and operate its program starting in 2007 with 24 first-year students.

Keith Joiner, dean of UA's College of Medicine, said the school will continue to search for other sources of money through legislative requests, private fund-raising and grants.

As more funding emerges, ultimately 150 students will be assured of having the choice of becoming doctors in Tucson, UA's traditional medical base, or in Phoenix, where the campus will tie into a biotech complex.

Despite opposition from some state legislators, proponents of a downtown Phoenix medical school insist it will bring a number of benefits, including more choices for students, additional doctors and new jobs for the state, and cutting-edge research.

Student choices

Fourth-year students and Phoenix natives Tony Petelin and Gina Carter would have chosen to remain in their hometown if they'd had that option.

Now, all Arizona medical students spend their first two years in Tucson for traditional academic classroom instruction. Students can decide to remain in Tucson or move to Phoenix to finish the final two years, which focus more on clinical instruction.

"It would be ideal to have those two steps combined in the same city," said Petelin, 28. "There would be a greater sense of community."

Carter, 26, said her life would have been easier had she been able to stay in Phoenix. She would have saved money by living with her parents and been closer to friends.

"And there are so many hospitals here, they could easily take more students," she said. Carter said she was often the only medical student on her clinical rotation team.

"That allows for more teaching," she said.

There are 28 acute-care hospitals in the Phoenix area, with an additional six under construction, said Adda Alexander, an Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association spokeswoman. "And it seems like there's a new proposal for one every month."

More doctors

That's good news for those who want the Phoenix medical campus to address Arizona's severe doctor shortage. A study by Arizona State University and UA researchers released in June showed that the state boasts only 208 physicians per 100,000 people, compared with the national average of 283.

Joiner said it is critical that UA educate more medical students.

"We currently train seven physicians per 100,000 people," he said. "That puts us last in the country of all states with medical schools. The national average is 22. We're not even a third of that."

By having a medical school here, it will be possible build a medical infrastructure, Petelin said. That would increase the number of residencies, the three- to seven-year training periods when medical school graduates become doctors in their chosen fields.

"But you can't do it without a medical school," Petelin said.

Increasing residency spots is crucial for Arizona because doctors are likely to settle in the areas they do their residencies.

"If I have to go to another city to do my training, am I more likely to set up shop and work in that city? Yes," Petelin said.

A July study by Tripp-Umbach found that a downtown medical school would generate $2.1 billion annually in economic impact, adding 24,000 jobs by 2025. It could also bring $80 million a year to the state, with a yield of $2 for every $1 the state invests .

"Academic health centers are financial engines," Joiner said. "In general, a medical school and its related facilities yield a return of $3.11 for every $1 spent on the research side of things. It's such a sure bet, that there should just be no doubt that this is a great investment."

Yet several legislators, including Majority Leader Stephen Tully, R-Phoenix, wonder if that's true.

"It hasn't been thoughtfully done, and it hasn't been done correctly," Tully said.

Tully doesn't believe university officials proposed the medical school to meet a lack of physicians.

"They simply desired a medical school in Phoenix and came up with the doctor shortage and jump-starting the downtown Phoenix core after the fact," he said. "Maybe their instinct is correct. The problem is when we started asking questions that we're required to at the Legislature, we got a lot of resistance and not a lot of answers."

Top research

Joiner's goal for the school includes top-notch faculty, which will do research that benefits both students and the local community.

"We're going to have faculty who are world-renowned investigators," Joiner said.

"The best teachers have an understanding of the basic science of medicine. We want to build a research-intensive facility to complement the clinical training we'll give our physicians."

Dr. Jeffrey Singer, a general surgeon who works in Phoenix and north Scottsdale, said campus-scientist research and the campus medical library will prove valuable to the Valley's physicians.

"We'll have access to doctors who work full-time in academia," he said.

"We'll be able to get information and data as well as attend conferences and symposia the campus will host."

Rep. Laura Knaperek, R-Tempe, also cites the public benefits the school and its research would provide.

Joiner specifies cancer treatment as the specialty he wants the medical school to be renowned for, in the same way Boston's Joslin Diabetes Center is for that disease.

"We'll have a comprehensive program," he said, "where the clinical, educational and research areas will link in such a way that an individual with any type of cancer will consider us as the destination for out-of-state care."

<#==#>

george w hitler is losing popularity. hey kevin isnt this the same george w hitler that had his secrets service goons illegally declare you as being insane because you said that you "wished he were dead" and lock you up in jail for using your first amendment right of free speach?

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1018bush-poll18.html

Poll: 39% approval rate is lowest ever for Bush

Richard Benedetto

USA Today

Oct. 18, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Beset by political and economic troubles at home and a difficult war in Iraq, President Bush's job approval rating has slipped to 39 percent, the lowest measure of his presidency, according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll.

Bush, whose approval rating hit 55 percent shortly after he was re-elected last November, has been below 50 percent approval since May. But this marks the first time he has fallen below 40 percent, a level that until now had been his floor.

Bush hit 40 percent, his previous low, twice: in mid-August - when Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, began an anti-war vigil on the road to the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch - and again in mid-September, when he was under fire for a slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina. advertisement

Analysts attribute the latest erosion to multiple factors:

• The continued problems of managing the recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

•  The possible indictment of top White House aides in a grand-jury inquiry into the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.

•  The furor among some conservatives over Bush's nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

•  High gasoline prices.

•  Public perception of a lack of progress in stabilizing Iraq.

Bush's fall in public approval, down from 45 percent in late September, is largely due to a drop in support among independents and Democrats.

Bush's approval among independents declined to 32 percent from 37 percent since the last USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Sept. 26 through 28.

Approval among Democrats fell to 8 percent from 15 percent in that period.

Hess says that loss among independents "bodes ill" for Republicans in the 2006 elections.

However, Bush's approval among his Republican base continues to hold steady. It was 85 percent in the previous poll and 84 percent now.

That steady GOP support is preventing him from falling lower.

How long that GOP base holds remains a key question, Edmonds says.

The poll of 1,012 adults, taken Oct. 13 through 16, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

<#==#>

FBI Doctor says the FBI doesnt torture people (but they do fly them off to other countries and have other countries question them under questionable condictions ... but they say trust us we NEVER  torture people) nope those marks on his back are not whip scars they are acne scars.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1152AP_Bush_Plot.html

Monday, October 17, 2005 · Last updated 4:47 p.m. PT

Doctor disputes defendant's torture claims

By MATTHEW BARAKAT

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- An FBI doctor testified Monday that he found no significant scars on the back of a U.S. citizen who claims that Saudi police whipped and tortured him into falsely confessing he joined al-Qaida and plotted to assassinate President Bush.

Prosecutors allege Ahmed Omar Abu Ali joined al-Qaida in 2002 while enrolled in a college in Saudi Arabia. They say he confessed to plotting Bush's assassination along with other terrorist acts, including plans to establish an al-Qaida cell in the United States and to rescue of Muslim prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Defense lawyers are scheduled to begin presenting their case Tuesday in the pretrial hearing at which U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee must decide whether Abu Ali's confession to the Saudis is admissible at trial.

His attorneys want the confession thrown out. They argue that the 24-year-old falsely confessed after being tortured and whipped by the Saudis, and they say U.S. authorities were complicit in the torture.

Prosecutors deny Abu Ali, of Falls Church, was mistreated.

Richard Schwartz, a doctor contracted by the FBI, testified at a pretrial hearing that he examined Abu Ali in February, when he was brought to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia to face charges.

Schwartz said he saw three or four lines of "increased pigmentation" on Abu Ali's upper back when he conducted his physical exam.

The marks "appeared somewhat inconsequential," Schwartz said, and he did not include them in his written report. But he acknowledged on cross-examination that they could have been caused by a flogging.

Schwartz said he specifically asked Abu Ali if he had been mistreated, and Abu Ali said no.

Abu Ali, at his initial court appearance in the U.S. in February, told a magistrate that he had been tortured and offered to show the judge the scars on his back. Several of his previous lawyers also signed affidavits saying they had seen the scars.

Abu Ali alleges that the torture occurred in the first few days after the Saudis arrested him in June 2003. Schwartz, the first American to examine him, did not do so until February 2005.

A nurse at the Alexandria jail also testified Monday that she did not notice the scars when she examined him in February. Merry Brinkley said she noticed only a few pimples and acne scars.

http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/1005/269590.html

FBI Disputes Falls Church Man's Torture Claims

 Monday October 17, 2005 9:04pm

Alexandria, Va. (AP) - An FBI doctor is disputing a Falls Church man's claim that Saudi police tortured him into saying he joined al-Qaida and plotted to assassinate President Bush.

The doctor's  testimony against 24-year-old Ahmed Omar Abu Ali came in a northern Virginia courtroom Monday. Abu Ali is accused of joining the terror organization in 2002, while a college student in Saudi Arabia.

Abu Ali's lawyers are asking a federal judge to dismiss the government's prosecution, arguing he was whipped into giving the confession. They say U.S. officials acted in concert with the Saudis.

But Richard Schwartz said he examined Abu Ali in February, when officials brought the man to the United States from Saudi Arabia to face charges.

He said little more than acne scarring appeared on the Abu Ali's back and that Abu Ali told him he wasn't mistreated.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/17/AR2005101701873.html

Doctor Testifies on Torture Issue

Marks Were Observed on Student's Back but Cause Unclear

By Jerry Markon

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, October 18, 2005; Page A16

A U.S. government doctor saw marks on the back of a Virginia student charged in a plot to kill President Bush but could not conclude that the lines came from physical abuse, the doctor testified at a hearing yesterday.

The testimony is significant, because attorneys for Ahmed Omar Abu Ali claim that their client was tortured while in Saudi custody and that a confession that forms the crux of the government's case was coerced. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is accused of plotting to kill President Bush. (AP)

The four "linear marks" were seen on Abu Ali's upper back as he was flown to Northern Virginia in February to face charges of plotting with al Qaeda to kill Bush, according to the doctor, Richard Schwartz. Schwartz, chairman of emergency medicine at the Medical College of Georgia and an FBI contractor, examined Abu Ali during the flight.

Under cross-examination from defense lawyers, Schwartz acknowledged that the marks could have been a result of whipping. Abu Ali's claim of torture is the subject of a hearing continuing this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.

Schwartz also testified that the marks could have come from old scarring or could have been self-inflicted. "It's rather inconclusive what caused them. . . . Based on his history and physical, they did not seem consequential," he said. "I examine many, many patients every day, and I see marks like this on many people. It's one of those things that can occur in life."

Schwartz added that he did not mention the marks in his two-page report -- which was based on his 10- to 15-minute exam -- and did not ask Abu Ali where they came from or tell anyone about them at the time.

The doctor's testimony came on the third day of the hearing, which is examining whether Abu Ali's confession to taking part in the alleged al Qaeda plot was extracted through torture. Prosecutors deny that Abu Ali, 24, was tortured and have presented testimony from FBI agents and State Department officers who saw him in Saudi Arabia and said he never raised the subject with them and seemed healthy.

Two other doctors who examined Abu Ali found evidence that he was tortured in Saudi Arabia and said scars on his back were consistent with his having been whipped, defense attorneys have said in court papers. If a judge accepts the defense arguments, he could throw out much of the government's evidence.

The hearing began last week and is scheduled to last through Thursday. The defense's doctors are scheduled to testify later this week.

Abu Ali is charged with conspiracy to assassinate Bush and other terrorism counts in connection with the alleged plot, which prosecutors say also envisioned a Sept. 11-style attack inside the United States. Prosecutors say that Abu Ali has admitted his participation and that he planned to shoot Bush or blow him up with a car bomb. He admitted that the plan never got past the idea stage, prosecutors have said in court papers.

During the hearing last week, prosecutors introduced a 13-minute videotape in which Abu Ali said he joined the al Qaeda plot while in Saudi Arabia because of his disgust with U.S. support for Israel.

Yesterday, FBI agent Barry Cole testified that when he interrogated Abu Ali in Saudi Arabia in September 2003, the Falls Church man said he had been subjected to "mental torture" but did not mention physical abuse.

FBI agents followed up on the mental torture allegation, but Abu Ali refused to answer, Cole testified. "He just told us to forget about it," Cole said. "[He said] we wouldn't understand, because it was a Muslim thing.'

<#==#>

another government??? site asking you to snitch on your neighbors

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=50859

Web site tracking school crime reports

By Hayley Ringle, Tribune

October 18, 2005

Students and parents can now anonymously report a school crime or a problem by text messaging or sending an e-mail.

By visiting a local, nonprofit Web site, www.alertrecall.com, reports can be made on everything from bullying and drugs, to sexual abuse and vandalism.

"Kids want to be safe on campus," said Cecil Jackson, the site co-founder and a school resource officer at Washington High School in Glendale.

"They want to do the right thing. But they don’t want to be labeled as a ‘snitch’ or a ‘rat’ and want to be safe in reporting any problems they may have," he said.

The Web site went online March 27, and last month received 70,000 e-mails and text messages from across the country. Certain key words alert volunteers to severe issues for quick responses.

Gwen Rusk is a parentvolunteer at Jane Dee Hull Elementary School in the Chandler Unified School District. She said although her fourth-grade daughter, Devon, has never had any problems at her school, and she has no problems talking to the school principal, she would feel comfortable using the Web site if needed.

However, she said if the reports are made anonymously she would like to see the complaints validated.

When filling out the form online the person reporting the problem is asked whether they are "very sure" the crime has been committed, or whether it’s "just a rumor."

Jackson said this weeds out people trying to report a false crime.

To report a problem

• Text message alert@alertrecall.com or call (602) 980-5887. Include school name, state, severity of action with one being most severe and five being least severe, the problem or crime, and how sure you are that the crime occurred or will occur.

• Go to www.alertrecall.com

Contact Hayley Ringle by email, or phone (480)-898-6301

<#==#>

the nazis at this snitch site put on seminars to teach school officials how to violate their students rights it might be interesting to attend one. the ad follows. to attend send an email to Seminars@alertrecall.com

School Administrators:

Empower your staff with the tools to be proactive, rather than reactive

In our seminars you will learn:

* Effective and best methods in the introduction and use of “AlertRecall” in your school

* Appropriate and effective ways to conduct an investigation of student allegations

* Appropriate and effective ways to conduct a search

* Appropriate and effective ways to deal with allegations of “bullying”

* What all staff members need to know about breaking up fist fights and assaults

* Methods to build a relationship of trust with your student body

To receive more information or to sign up for a seminar, contact us at Seminars@alertrecall.com

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=50859

Web site tracking school crime reports

By Hayley Ringle, Tribune

October 18, 2005

Students and parents can now anonymously report a school crime or a problem by text messaging or sending an e-mail.

Related Links

News

By visiting a local, nonprofit Web site, www.alertrecall.com, reports can be made on everything from bullying and drugs, to sexual abuse and vandalism.

"Kids want to be safe on campus," said Cecil Jackson, the site co-founder and a school resource officer at Washington High School in Glendale.

"They want to do the right thing. But they don’t want to be labeled as a ‘snitch’ or a ‘rat’ and want to be safe in reporting any problems they may have," he said.

The Web site went online March 27, and last month received 70,000 e-mails and text messages from across the country. Certain key words alert volunteers to severe issues for quick responses.

Gwen Rusk is a parentvolunteer at Jane Dee Hull Elementary School in the Chandler Unified School District. She said although her fourth-grade daughter, Devon, has never had any problems at her school, and she has no problems talking to the school principal, she would feel comfortable using the Web site if needed.

However, she said if the reports are made anonymously she would like to see the complaints validated.

When filling out the form online the person reporting the problem is asked whether they are "very sure" the crime has been committed, or whether it’s "just a rumor."

Jackson said this weeds out people trying to report a false crime.

To report a problem

• Text message alert@alertrecall.com or call (602) 980-5887. Include school name, state, severity of action with one being most severe and five being least severe, the problem or crime, and how sure you are that the crime occurred or will occur.

• Go to www.alertrecall.com

Contact Hayley Ringle by email, or phone (480)-898-6301

<#==#>

This web site allows your children to become government snitches and snitch on the activities of their friends, parents, and other loved ones.

    www.alertrecall.com

The site is a non-profit 501-C1 Arizona corporation so all the information about the people who created this wonderful site which will allow Arizona to become a lot like Nazi Germany is on the web site of the Arizona Corporation Commission at:

   http://www.cc.state.az.us/corp/disclaimer.htm

Go there then click on the item under

   Annual Reports

That says

   Forms - search by corporate name for reports to be filed

So you don’t have to do the search here are the details about this wonderful company Alert Recall which is trying to make Arizona look a lot like Nazi Germany. Their File Number with the Arizona Corporation is 1191583-8.

Their business address is:

Alert Recall

4030 W BEVERLY LN

PHOENIX,  AZ  85053

(602)980-5887

The wonderful people that incorporated the company and run it are:

Bruce Frankie

4030 W BEVERLY LN

PHOENIX,  AZ  85053

(602) 439-4588

(602) 439-5887

Diane Frankie

4030 W BEVERLY LN

PHOENIX,  AZ  85053

(602) 439-4588

(602) 439-5887

Cecil Jackson

16726 N 50 Way

Scottsdale, Az 85254

Roger Fuss

8203 W Oraibi Drive #1115

Peoria, Az

85282

The Statutory Agent is:

Michael F Patterson

TITUS BRUECKNER AND BERRY PC

7373 N Scottsdale Road, B-252

Scottsdale, Az 85254

Here is a newspaper article about this great company that is trying to turn Arizona into a world class place like Nazi Germany, Red China, or the Soviet Union:

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=50859

Web site tracking school crime reports

By Hayley Ringle, Tribune

October 18, 2005

Students and parents can now anonymously report a school crime or a problem by text messaging or sending an e-mail.

By visiting a local, nonprofit Web site, www.alertrecall.com, reports can be made on everything from bullying and drugs, to sexual abuse and vandalism.

"Kids want to be safe on campus," said Cecil Jackson, the site co-founder and a school resource officer at Washington High School in Glendale.

"They want to do the right thing. But they don’t want to be labeled as a ‘snitch’ or a ‘rat’ and want to be safe in reporting any problems they may have," he said.

The Web site went online March 27, and last month received 70,000 e-mails and text messages from across the country. Certain key words alert volunteers to severe issues for quick responses.

Gwen Rusk is a parentvolunteer at Jane Dee Hull Elementary School in the Chandler Unified School District. She said although her fourth-grade daughter, Devon, has never had any problems at her school, and she has no problems talking to the school principal, she would feel comfortable using the Web site if needed.

However, she said if the reports are made anonymously she would like to see the complaints validated.

When filling out the form online the person reporting the problem is asked whether they are "very sure" the crime has been committed, or whether it’s "just a rumor."

Jackson said this weeds out people trying to report a false crime.

To report a problem

• Text message alert@alertrecall.com or call (602) 980 5887. Include school name, state, severity of action with one being most severe and five being least severe, the problem or crime, and how sure you are that the crime occurred or will occur.

• Go to www.alertrecall.com

Contact Hayley Ringle by email, or phone

(480)-898-6301

<#==#>

hmmm.... 25% of phoenix police pursuits cause traffic accidents. and one person a day nationwide dies in a traffic accident caused by a police pursuit.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/1019phxpursuits19.html

Phoenix police are restricting car chases

Focus is safety of bystanders

Judi Villa

The Arizona Republic

Oct. 19, 2005 12:00 AM

Phoenix police no longer will chase fleeing drivers on the city's roadways unless the person is wanted for a violent crime.

The Phoenix Police Department joins a growing number of law enforcement agencies in the Valley and nationwide that are restricting pursuits in an attempt to safeguard the public from unintended car crashes and deaths.

The new policy forbids pursuits for traffic violations, stolen vehicles, misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. It also tells police to refrain from starting or continuing pursuits when the fleeing driver exhibits "reckless disregard" for public safety.

The policy mirrors a nationwide trend to end the days of police barreling down the streets in pursuit of drivers who overwhelmingly are not violent felons.

"The bottom line is pursuits are risky, and what you get at the end of the day isn't worth raising the risk for my family or your family," said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina.

"When the bad guy has the upper hand, sometimes you have to let them go and get them another day. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you'll get another day."

Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris said even though his department's new pursuit policy is "very restrictive," it doesn't mean police will simply let the bad guys get away.

Instead, Phoenix police will be trained to rely more heavily on aircraft and undercover units to follow suspects and to lead patrol officers to them when they get out of their cars.

"The goal is still to arrest them, just in a different, safer way," Harris said.

Phoenix's new policy was unveiled Tuesday to the City Council's Public Safety Subcommittee. It has been in the works since late 2003 and comes on the heels of a study analyzing 423 pursuits in 2002.

Only 43 of those pursuits resulted in arrests for violent felonies. At the same time, 25 percent ended in traffic collisions.

"It all goes back to community safety for us," Phoenix police Cmdr. Joe Yahner said. "It's in everybody's best interest for us to have a policy like this. . . . We're in an urban environment with lots of cars. There's like 1,200 red-light signals in the city of Phoenix. That's 1,200 opportunities for this to end badly."

Policies at other Valley agencies, including the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and Tempe, Peoria and Glendale police, already have changed to limit who can be chased.

Nationwide, one person dies every day as a result of a police pursuit, according to an FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin issued three years ago. Innocent third parties constitute 42 percent of people killed or injured in pursuits. And one of every 100 high-speed pursuits results in a death.

"There's no doubt that getting an innocent civilian killed for a traffic violation or even a stolen car isn't worth it," said Phoenix City Councilman Dave Siebert, chairman of the Public Safety Subcommittee.

Over the past few years, the department had already begun to not go after some suspects if it was deemed too dangerous. Between 2002 and 2004, pursuits fell more than 65 percent in Phoenix.

"This is stuff that happens very quickly, and it's very fluid, and it poses an extreme danger to the public," Yahner said. "It can end tragically in a heartbeat. We just don't want that to happen."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/18/AR2005101801663.html

Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color Printers

By Mike Musgrove

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, October 19, 2005; Page D01

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn't. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.

Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that printouts from many color laser printers contained yellow dots scattered across the page, viewable only with a special kind of flashlight. The article quoted a senior researcher at Xerox Corp. as saying the dots contain information useful to law-enforcement authorities, a secret digital "license tag" for tracking down criminals.

The content of the coded information was supposed to be a secret, available only to agencies looking for counterfeiters who use color printers.

Now, the secret is out.

Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco consumer privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible bar code of sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as the date and time a document was printed.

With the Xerox printers, the information appears as a pattern of yellow dots, each only a millimeter wide and visible only with a magnifying glass and a blue light.

The EFF said it has identified similar coding on pages printed from nearly every major printer manufacturer, including Hewlett-Packard Co., though its team has so far cracked the codes for only one type of Xerox printer.

The U.S. Secret Service acknowledged yesterday that the markings, which are not visible to the human eye, are there, but it played down the use for invading privacy.

"It's strictly a countermeasure to prevent illegal activity specific to counterfeiting," agency spokesman Eric Zahren said. "It's to protect our currency and to protect people's hard-earned money."

It's unclear whether the yellow-dot codes have ever been used to make an arrest. And no one would say how long the codes have been in use. But Seth Schoen, the EFF technologist who led the organization's research, said he had seen the coding on documents produced by printers that were at least 10 years old.

"It seems like someone in the government has managed to have a lot of influence in printing technology," he said.

Xerox spokesman Bill McKee confirmed the existence of the hidden codes, but he said the company was simply assisting an agency that asked for help. McKee said the program was part of a cooperation with government agencies, competing manufacturers and a "consortium of banks," but would not provide further details. HP said in a statement that it is involved in anti-counterfeiting measures and supports the cooperation between the printer industry and those who are working to reduce counterfeiting.

Schoen said that the existence of the encoded information could be a threat to people who live in repressive governments or those who have a legitimate need for privacy. It reminds him, he said, of a program the Soviet Union once had in place to record sample typewriter printouts in hopes of tracking the origins of underground, self-published literature.

"It's disturbing that something on this scale, with so many privacy implications, happened with such a tiny amount of publicity," Schoen said.

And it's not as if the information is encrypted in a highly secure fashion, Schoen said. The EFF spent months collecting samples from printers around the world and then handed them off to an intern, who came back with the results in about a week.

"We were able to break this code very rapidly," Schoen said.

http://www.scoopt.org/article20652-government-tracking-you.html

Government Tracking You with Secret Code in Color Printers

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document. The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known. "We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

Source: Technology News Daily

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=14041&hed=Printers+Sport+Hidden+Codes

Printers Sport Hidden Codes

The Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges some color printers can help track consumer information through hidden codes.

October 18, 2005

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a consumer privacy and digital rights organization, alleged Tuesday that there are codes embedded in printouts made by some color laser printers that can be used to track the origin of a printed document.

The codes are ostensibly a part of anti-counterfeiting measures developed by government agencies to curb the creation of fake currency but could have serious implications for consumer privacy, according to privacy advocates.

A research team led by the EFF said that it has broken the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

“We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said Seth David Schoen, staff technologist at EFF.

According to Mr. Schoen, the dots are yellow, less than one millimeter in diameter, and are typically repeated over each page of a document. The pattern is visible under blue light with the help of a magnifying glass or a microscope, the foundation said.

 ‘What other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?’

 -Lee Tien,

 Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF and its partners began their project to break the printer code with the Xerox DocuColor line. Researchers compared dots from test pages, noting similarities and differences in their arrangement, and then found a simple way to read the pattern, the foundation said.

“So far, we’ve only broken the code for Xerox DocuColor printers,” said Mr. Schoen. “But we believe that other models from other manufacturers include the same personally identifiable information in their tracking dots.”

EFF has said that the tracking data is used by government agencies, especially the United States Secret Service, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters.

A Secret Service spokesperson, Jonathan Cherry, said the organization does work with other government agencies and “industry partners on preventive technological countermeasures designed to discourage the illegal use of printers and copiers in the production of counterfeit currencies.”

Mr. Cherry declined to elaborate on the technology or the countermeasures. “They are specific and limited to the reproduction of currency and in no way track or affect the use of personal computer hardware and software,” he said.

Printer manufacturer Xerox said that the company would not elaborate on the codes but said that it has and will cooperate with government agencies. “We do work, as any manufacturer does, with any investigating agency as requested,” said Xerox spokesperson Bill Mckee. “But it is important to note that we do not routinely give customer information to anyone.”

Mr. Mckee said that Xerox’s cooperation is limited to technologies involved in color printing and copying.

Privacy Concerns

This is not the first time that the issue of tracking codes embedded in color printers has raised the hackles of privacy advocates.

Nearly six years ago, Lauren Weinstein, moderator of the Privacy Forum and the co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility, said he met with Xerox officials to discuss the issue.

Mr. Weinstein said that there were rumors of hidden codes for a long time. Though often dismissed as an urban legend, Mr. Weinstein said that he spoke to a Xerox official in 1999 who confirmed the presence of the codes as a measure against possible counterfeiting attempts.

Printers also include other anti-counterfeiting measures, such as dumping extra cyan toner onto images when the unit believes it has detected an attempt to specifically copy currency, said Mr. Weinstein.

But the attempts bring into spotlight the issue of consumer rights and privacy, he said, because few consumers know about the codes and there are no laws to control the use of the information gleaned from the codes.

“As the technology has gotten better, the Secret Service is understandably concerned that not just crooks but ordinary people can print counterfeit currency as a one-off thing,” said Mr. Weinstein. “But then this becomes an example of data creep, which is when you have something implemented for one purpose but ends up morphing into other things because there are no controls.

The EFF has said that the latest discovery calls for greater transparency in the workings between the technology industry and the government.

“It shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment like printers,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. “The logical next question is: What other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?”

The EFF has released a complete list of printers where dots on color printers can be seen on its web site.

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http://www.azcentral.com/community/scottsdale/articles/1020sr-fhmcmahan20Z8.html

Ftn. Hills councilman gets day in jail

McMahan enters guilty plea to DUI

Jessica Coomes

The Arizona Republic

Oct. 20, 2005 12:00 AM

FOUNTAIN HILLS - Town Councilman Keith McMahan will spend at least one day in jail after pleading guilty to driving under the influence.

A judge waived nine more days in jail if McMahan completes an alcohol education and treatment program at Dynamic Living Counseling, according to his plea agreement.

The councilman, who represented himself in court, also was ordered to pay more than $1,000 in fees and fines.

"I just said, 'That's it. Let's get it over with and get on,' " McMahan said of his plea agreement.

He plans to turn his experience into something positive by starting a taxi fund-raiser program after the holidays.

People who have too much to drink could give a donation to a community service club in exchange for a ride home, McMahan said Wednesday.

"It'd be a nice program, and it'd save a lot of problems," McMahan said.

The misdemeanor DUI charge came after a Maricopa County Sheriff's Office deputy pulled McMahan over June 28 for driving his Pontiac Grand Am erratically in downtown Fountain Hills.

His blood-alcohol content was 0.126 to 0.132 percent, according to an incident report. It is illegal to drive with a blood-alcohol content of 0.08 percent or higher.

The case was transferred to Scottsdale from Fountain Hills to avoid conflicts of interest.

McMahan originally entered a not guilty plea but then changed it.

Two related charges were dismissed in the plea agreement, including failure to drive on the right side of the road.

McMahan said he's going to set up his jail date and counseling times next week.

Fountain Hills Mayor Wally Nichols is out of town but said in July that Fountain Hills doesn't require dismissal of a council member who is convicted of a crime.

The 73-year-old was elected May 2004 in a close race.

He was one of the first residents of Fountain Hills when he came to the new development 1973.

For two decades he worked in advertising for McCulloch Properties, the company that started developing Fountain Hills. He now owns his own advertising and communications company.

Reach the reporter at jessica.coomes@scottsdale republic.com or (602) 444-6848.

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Dear ??????,

This morning I served the warden with your papers. She was a little pissed, but not particularly upset. Hell, she probably gets sued every other day! Anyway, at best she knows her mail room clowns are not completely at liberty to destroying mail.

Not much else to report. I’m a third of the way through my 3rd draft of my book – Nature of Religion (  about 350 pages) – Hopefully there will only be one more draft – will see. But, the work is looking good & I stay busy.

Give my best to Laro; & take care of  yourself.

Good luck in all your endeavors.

Your Friend

Marc

A while ago I asked Marc if he would be willing to server the warden with my lawsuit which will sue here for messing with the mail I sent Marc and Laro. He mailed me back and said he would be glad to.

After I made the final draft of the lawsuit I made three copies of it and sent one to the warden, one to Laro, and one to Marc. Marc probably thought that copy was me asking him to serve the warden. It wasn’t. I have to file the lawsuit before the warden can be served with it and I have not filed the lawsuit yet.

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