Starting Points

Apr 8, 2010

The Nation - Hilda Solis: Labor's New Sheriff

Editor's Note: The mine explosion in West Virginia on April 5 is the worst since a 1984 accident at Wilberg, Utah. As a union safety expert, Joe Main was on the scene then; he's now the head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor, which under Hilda Solis is taking a tough stand on labor law violations.

In 1984, on the Wasatch Plateau in southern Utah, the Wilberg coal mine, a property of Emery Mining, exploded into flames. Witnesses described plumes of dark gray smoke billowing up into the heavens. Twenty-seven coal miners were trapped inside. By the following night it was clear none of them would make it out alive. "If hell existed," the Salt Lake Tribune reported, "it was down in the Wilberg mine."

David Lauriski was Emery's chief safety officer when Wilberg caught fire, an accident later attributed to numerous violations at the mine. The owners, it turned out, had been trying for a one-day production record. Seventeen years after the disaster, Lauriski became George W. Bush's first mine safety chief, a perch from which he halted a dozen new safety regulations initiated under Clinton, advocating instead a more "collaborative" approach with industry. His successor was also from private industry; during a stint as a state regulator, his lax enforcement played a role in another mining disaster, this one at the Quecreek Mine in Pennsylvania.

Now, for the first time in its history, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), a division of the Department of Labor (DoL), is headed by a union man, Joe Main. Main began his working life as a teenager in 1967, doing the precarious work of sinking a coal mine shaft in West Virginia. By 19 he was a mine safety committeeman, later joining the United Mine Workers' health and safety department, where he worked for decades. He was working for the union at the time of the Wilberg fire and rushed to the scene. He recalls spending four or five days there during the grueling rescue and recovery operation. "It took us a year to recover the last miner," he recalls, "and I dealt with the families a lot during that time. It's something that's stayed with me my whole life." Main was confirmed by the Senate in late October; six weeks later he launched a major national initiative to end black lung disease.

During the Bush years, the Department of Labor became a cautionary tale about what happens when foxes are asked to guard the henhouse. But since California Congresswoman Hilda Solis became labor secretary last winter, she has brought on board a team of lifelong advocates for working people--some of whom come from the ranks of organized labor--and has hired hundreds of new investigators and enforcers.

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President Obama calls Solis part of his economic team, but the truth is she's not part of the daily huddle at the White House with Summers and Geithner and Orszag. She's tapped instead as a lead voice in the "jobs, jobs, jobs" choir, advocating for Obama's latest stimulus package. She has tiptoed into the realm of financial regulation, organizing a joint hearing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the abysmal performance of target date retirement funds during the market crash, and she doles out hundreds of millions of dollars in job training funds, a decent chunk of which she has used to shape policy by channeling it to green industries. But Solis understands that her real influence lies in her power to enforce the nation's labor laws--the primary mission of the DoL. It's a role she embraced with relish at her swearing-in, where she announced with a grin, "To those who have for too long abused workers, put them in harm's way, denied them fair pay, let me be clear: there is a new sheriff in town."

Indeed, Solis threw her weight around on Capitol Hill when one key deputy, Labor Solicitor Patricia Smith, faced stiff opposition from business lobbies and the GOP. One of Smith's predecessors as labor solicitor--the nation's top enforcer of labor laws--was Eugene Scalia, son of the Supreme Court justice. Scalia's previous claim to fame was his successful campaign to block an ergonomics safety standard, using an industry-supported Astroturf group to question whether repetitive-motion injuries exist at all. As labor solicitor, he invoked the Taft-Hartley Act against West Coast longshoremen locked out by their employer (a former client) and made a habit of undermining his own agency, writing a brief supporting limits on whistleblower protections. After a one-year tour, he landed on the lush payroll of Gibson Dunn, a leading "union avoidance" firm, where he now serves as an expert on "downsizing" when not penning attacks on the Employee Free Choice Act for the Wall Street Journal.

Smith, on the other hand, has spent more than twenty years going to battle on behalf of vulnerable, low-wage workers, first at the New York State attorney general's office and then as the state's labor commissioner. "She turned it from a backwater agency to a national model in just three years," says Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. "In my career I've never seen an agency turned around so quickly." What Smith did in New York, according to labor officials, community advocates and business leaders, was to take a targeted approach not just to rogue players but to rogue industries, such as retail, residential construction and restaurants, where minimum-wage and safety violations were rampant.

She did high-profile investigations and carefully orchestrated surprise inspections, conducted special outreach to immigrant workers, and used the full arsenal of penalties, including criminal charges, to send a message to employers. Deborah Axt, legal director of Make the Road, a New York City community organization, recalls Smith doing a sweep of retail outlets in Bushwick, where investigators uncovered $200,000 in back wages owed at nineteen businesses on a single commercial strip. According to Axt, Smith was a master at leveraging her limited resources for maximum impact; her department quickly became a national model for community partnerships. And she did all this while maintaining warm relations with New York's business community. Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a leading business association, was so impressed by Smith's quick response to the tens of thousands of Wall Street layoffs in late 2008 that she wrote a letter to the Senate in support of Smith's nomination.

After Senate Republican Mike Enzi put a hold on her nomination for months, Smith was finally confirmed on February 4.

Or take OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Bush's final OSHA director was Edwin Foulke, a former partner at Jackson Lewis, another large unionbusting law firm, who was such a fan of voluntary compliance over enforcement that the New York Times called him an "antiregulatory ideologue." Shortly after joining OSHA in 2005, he began delivering a PowerPoint lecture, "Adults Do the Darndest Things," featuring images of workers near live power lines or on improper scaffolding, which he played for laughs.

Now, under the leadership of David Michaels and his deputy, Jordan Barab, OSHA's second-floor conference room features photographs of workers killed on the job. Staffers meet under the wide grin of Tyler Kahle, in his orange safety vest, who was crushed by a lift at 19, and the shy gaze of Erin Sperrey, who was beaten to death at 20 while working the night shift at a Tim Horton's. Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington University, is a lifelong expert on occupational health--he helped to found the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) in the 1970s--and on industry's use of fake science to undermine government regulations, the subject of his 2008 book, Doubt Is Their Product. In it, he is harshly critical of Bush's OSHA, writing that industry "alliances" and other forms of voluntary compliance "replaced any effort to strengthen weak standards and improve inspections." He writes witheringly of OSHA's handling of popcorn lung, once an extremely rare disease, which exploded in 2000 among workers exposed to diacetyl, used in buttery flavorings. The lungs of afflicted workers corroded so quickly, it was as if they had inhaled acid. Only now is OSHA finally developing a health standard on the safe use of diacetyl.

In early March, Michaels presided over a daylong forum called "OSHA Listens." At that event, industry was well represented, and Michaels gave prominent spots to speakers from the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, who complained that the department was "trying to scare employers by touting its enforcement agenda." But it was no accident that he scheduled them immediately after a panel of grieving women who broke down as they spoke about their husbands or sons or uncles dying in factory explosions, burns and falls.

Other tested activists are scattered throughout the department: Mary Beth Maxwell, a leader in the fight for labor law reform as head of American Rights at Work, was brought on as a senior adviser to Solis. Deborah Berkowitz, OSHA's new chief of staff, was health and safety director for the United Food and Commercial Workers. And Main's deputy for policy at MSHA, Greg Wagner, is a doctor who spent more than a decade treating miners with respiratory illnesses at a West Virginia clinic. "It's fair to say," says AFL-CIO legislative director Bill Samuel, "that some of the president's best appointments have been at the Department of Labor."

Yes, capital may reign at Government Sachs, where the shrunken paychecks of working people are tithed to subsidize the very Wall Street institutions that forced the country into recession. But in one forgotten corner of the administration, over on C Street and Constitution, at a department whose entire $1.5 billion enforcement budget couldn't pay for a single B-2 bomber, Solis has formed a rump group that's fighting on the right side of the class war.

Solis and her able deputies have inherited a Department of Labor in tatters. By the time they arrived in Washington, health and safety compliance had become all but voluntary, as had minimum wage and overtime pay. Within two months of taking office, Bush and his labor secretary, Elaine Chao, had rammed through Congress the repeal of a new ergonomics regulation that had been a decade in the making. "It was almost like PATCO [the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization] in terms of its symbolic importance," says NYCOSH director Joel Shufro, referring to Ronald Reagan's crushing of the union in 1981. "That sent employers a huge message." After that, the DoL didn't issue a single new regulation unless it was forced to by Congress or the courts. Chao not only imposed new restrictions on overtime pay; she produced guidance for employers on how to avoid paying it. She imposed onerous reporting requirements that applied only to labor unions. And she left behind a layer of like-minded middle managers who, AFGE Local 12 vice president Eleanor Lauderdale says, have yet to be replaced. (The new OSHA leadership recently fired a Bush-era dissident manager, Bob Whitmore, who'd been on administrative leave since 2007 for blowing the whistle on shoddy industry reporting.)

"It was eight years of neglect," says Samuel. "These were not people who believed in many of the statutes they were hired to enforce."

Facing badly depleted enforcement ranks, Solis hired 710 additional enforcement staff, including 130 at OSHA and 250 for the crucial wage-and-hour division, upping inspectors by more than a third. Another hundred will come on next year to staff a crackdown on the misclassification of millions of employees as "independent contractors"--a dodge to avoid paying taxes and benefits--a move that has set off enormous buzz on business blogs. Her team took a plunger to the stagnant regulatory pipeline, moving forward new rules on coal mine dust, silica, and cranes and derricks. She restored prevailing wages for agricultural guest workers and is poised to restore reporting rules on ergonomic injuries. She revoked Chao's union reporting requirements and countered with a proposed rule that employers who hire union avoidance firms must publicly report it, the sort of sunshine that could easily act as a deterrent. This latter measure hints at the sort of creative tactics being explored at the DoL, even as prounion legislation is stymied in Congress.

The real question, of course, is whether Solis and her dream team can do more than simply get DoL's engine humming again. To have a real impact on workers' rights, the department, despite its still token number of inspectors (it would take nearly 140 years for OSHA to visit every workplace in America) and the government's laborious rulemaking process, will have to tackle daunting tasks: tens of thousands of unregulated, potentially toxic chemicals; rampant wage theft; and an epidemic of ergonomic injuries.

Take wage theft. A recent large-scale study of low-wage workers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, the country's three largest cities, found that one in four (some 400,000 workers) is paid less than minimum wage; among those who work late, 76 percent are stiffed for the extra hours. This is corporate lawbreaking on a mind-boggling scale. How do a few hundred inspectors tackle that? Or look at the challenge of genuinely regulating toxic exposures: there are some 80,000 chemicals in use by American industry, which trigger hundreds of thousands of illnesses each year, yet OSHA has set exposure limits for fewer than 500, most of which are based on out-of-date science from the 1940s and '50s. Where to start? Or ergonomics. Lifting, twisting and repetitive motion stresses are the leading cause of workplace injuries, forcing a million Americans to lose time from work each year. Thousands of poultry workers are permanently crippled by carpal tunnel syndrome, while half of all nurses suffer chronic back pain, forcing many, at a time of acute nursing shortages, to leave the profession. And yet when Congress killed OSHA's ergonomic regulation in 2001, it also barred OSHA from writing a new one that was similar. How to escape that bind?

What's so striking about the new team at DoL is, just weeks or months on the job, they're already asking these big strategic questions.

At MSHA, Main has not only come out swinging on black lung; he's launched a big-picture safety campaign he calls Rules to Live By, which involves combing through the data to identify the top causes of miner deaths. First, Main says, he'll educate mining companies about the need to eliminate these risk factors; next will come "increased enforcement," with special attention to "serious" violations, which trigger the largest fines. For Main, there's a direct correlation between hefty fines and fewer deaths. "We'll provide assistance to the mine operators who do need it," he says, "but never as a replacement to the enforcement tools. There was some confusion about that in recent years. I'm not confused about that."

Even before Michaels was confirmed at OSHA, his deputy, Jordan Barab, a widely respected expert who once ran health and safety for the public sector union AFSCME, cracked down on Nevada's state program, which had looked the other way as fatal construction accidents surged on the Las Vegas strip. Barab also issued the largest fine in the history of the agency by a factor of four--$87 million against BP Products, for failing to remedy hazards that led to a massive explosion at a Texas oil refinery, which left fifteen dead and 170 injured. At "OSHA Listens," Michaels discussed coping with his tiny enforcement staff by requiring every workplace in America to have a plan in place to identify its own unique hazards and prevent them. As for chemical exposure, he told The Nation that "we can't proceed on the chemical-by-chemical path" and that he is coordinating with federal scientific agencies to develop a more ambitious approach. He also said he'd immediately start issuing ergonomics citations, rule or no rule, using OSHA's broad, but extremely underutilized, "general duty clause."

Even before being confirmed, Smith was credited with sparking the national enforcement drive against businesses that misclassify employees as contractors because of her success cracking down on such scofflaws in New York--a brilliant enforcement priority at a time of budget deficits, with the potential to bring in billions of dollars in unpaid taxes, unemployment insurance and Social Security payments. But she's known especially for her insight that, as Retail union organizer Jeff Eichler, who worked closely with Smith in New York, says, "to impact an entire sector had to involve working with groups outside the bureau." She used labor unions, churches and immigrant groups as her eyes and ears on the ground; they organized plaintiffs, served as liaisons with state investigators and translated big enforcement fines into long-term gains for workers by means of union contracts or sector-wide employer manuals.

In fact, it was these efforts to use community groups as a force multiplier that triggered a furious campaign by business front groups to block her nomination. Senator Enzi obtained reams of e-mails to produce an alarmist forty-page report about one small pilot program Smith had launched, Wage Watch, which trained community members to report wage violations. Conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Limited Government piled on, the latter issuing an alert that if her concept went national, "it could turn tens of thousands of 'community organizers' into raving vigilantes."

Nonetheless, at the new DoL, community partnerships are fast becoming standard operating procedure. Phil Tom, a leader with Chicago's Interfaith Worker Justice, was appointed head of the department's Office for Faith Based and Community Initiatives, which until recently was little more than a feeding trough for politically connected evangelicals. He's expected to use the office to engage the religious community on workers' rights. Likewise, OSHA is tapping labor and immigration groups to expand its enforcement reach. The agency is sponsoring a major Spanish-language conference on Latino workers' rights in April in Texas and joined local workers' rights organizations to plan a summit in Nebraska in March on safety violations in meatpacking.

Most of the DoL's new investigators are now on board, and they'll soon be in the field handing out citations. Severe GAO reports in the past two years on the failure to enforce at the wage and hour division and the undercounting of injuries at OSHA will provide political cover as these teams step up enforcement. But they are still working with antiquated tools. OSHA threw the book at Wal-Mart last May, several months after a Long Island worker was trampled to death on Black Friday--and yet the maximum fine was $7,000, pocket change to the massive retailer. The Protecting America's Workers Act would update those penalties to make them matter, including criminal culpability for top corporate officials. But the measure will face fierce resistance from the business community, as evidenced by Chamber of Commerce testimony at a hearing about the bill in mid-March claiming that its corporate accountability measures would provoke a "witch hunt." The Chamber also held a private strategy meeting in January to marshal forces against OSHA's proposed ergonomics reporting rule.

The department's new fervor for enforcement will be hobbled at every turn if the nation's most disenfranchised workers continue to feel unsafe reporting nonpayment of wages or workplace hazards. And that means immigration and labor law reform, the ultimate force multipliers. "In the end, it comes down to the power of a worker to say to a boss, This job is dangerous. I won't do it," says Joel Shufro. While Secretary Solis has sought to shift the conversation on undocumented workers from border security to exploitation, she has not yet used her bully pulpit to create a sense of urgency on moving immigration reform on Capitol Hill. She has also, so far, mostly held her tongue on the Employee Free Choice Act, which is unlikely to reappear on the embattled Democrats' legislative agenda without strong intervention by the administration.

It is an open question whether Obama will eventually unleash his feisty labor secretary to push Congress to upgrade the nation's moribund worker protections. But few observers have any doubt that the new team at the Department of Labor will do all it can with the broken laws and clunky regulatory powers at its disposal. "They know all the tricks of the trade," says Celeste Monforton, a veteran of OSHA and MSHA who is now at George Washington University's School of Public Health. "They know the Chamber of Commerce is going to come and say, This is going to kill jobs. None of that will surprise them, and none of that should make them blink."

About Esther Kaplan

Esther Kaplan is investigative editor at The Nation Institute, and author of With God on Their Side: George Bush and the Christian Right

A Withdrawal Plan for Afghanistan

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April 7, 2010

Two key antiwar critics, Senator Russ Feingold and Representative Jim McGovern, are expected to introduce legislation as early as next week calling for a "flexible timetable" for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. The proposal, now in final stages of preparation, was confirmed by McGovern and by Feingold's office.

The coordinated effort, the first of its kind during the Afghanistan war, is reminiscent of similar House-Senate proposals that eventually succeeded in winning majority support during the Vietnam War. During the Iraq War, resolutions calling for a timetable steadily advanced as well, until they became Obama's platform in 2008.

The new initiative will challenge the Obama administration and offer an organizing vehicle for the peace movement. The recent sixty-five votes for Representative Dennis Kucinich's antiwar resolution is not a true measure of antiwar sentiment in the Congress, McGovern told me, adding, "We haven't had our full debate on the war." Congressional restlessness is climbing over sacrificing American lives and dollars for a corrupt and recalcitrant Karzai government, he argues.

A Congressional letter from Feingold and McGovern questioning the current policy is expected shortly, to be followed by introduction of the legislation. McGovern also will introduce an updated version of last year's resolution requesting an exit plan from the administration. Last year's version had 100 House sponsors.

Image by Jayel Aheram via Flickr

Congressional attention will soon turn to the Pentagon's requests for $33 billion to fund the current Afghan escalation and $159 billion for Iraq-Afghanistan war funding in fiscal year 2011. Obama has spoken against open-ended funding and pledged to "begin" troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by summer 2011. Yet he has refused to agree to a date by which all troops will be withdrawn as he did during the Iraq war in 2008.

The Feingold-McGovern proposal could challenge the president if it achieves debate and a substantial, though minority, vote in favor. But it also will reveal a lack of Democratic unity in both houses. According to one ranking insider, "the mood...seems to be granting the administration some additional time as the new troops deploy. It may not be the right strategy but it suits most people politically."

A troop withdrawal deadline is seen by peace advocates as an incentive to draw the Taliban into peace talks, directly and indirectly. There are behind-the-scenes debates already underway over providing safe-passage documents which would enable Taliban leaders to enter Kabul or a third country for political negotiations, which Karzai favors. Former United Nations envoy Kai Eide supports negotiating with the Taliban too, but the US State Department and Pentagon are so far opposed both to negotiations and safe-passage documents.

Meanwhile, some Congressional staff and peace advocates are evaluating a menu of demands to make as possible amendments fleshing out an exit strategy in the budget battles ahead, among them:

§ ending the Iraq War according to agreements already supported by the Obama administration. Currently, existing Congressional budget language supports the timelines of (1) a US-imposed deadline of this August 3 for all US combat forces to be withdrawn, and (2) the US- Iraq pact's official December 31, 2011, deadline, when all remaining troops and contractors must leave Iraq, and bases shut down or handed over to the Iraqi government;

§ requiring all-party talks in Afghanistan leading to new internationally supervised elections, including elements of the Taliban, as a condition of funding;

§ conditioning further humanitarian and educational aid on protections for Afghan women's rights, and recognized human rights standards for detainees;

§ replacing ISAF troops in Afghanistan with peacekeepers from non- aligned countries, particularly from Islamic-majority ones;

§ challenging drone attacks as pre-emptive invasions of Pakistan's sovereignty to perform of secret extra-judicial killings, which result in large-scale civilian deaths and alienate the population.

The strongest peace movement argument would seem to be about budgetary impacts in a time of chronic recession. According to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will become a three-trillion-dollar war. The Congressional Research Service says that the direct costs now reach $1.08 trillion, including $748 billion for Iraq, $340 billion for Afghanistan and $29 billion for "enhanced security."

As McGovern points out, "there is a price to be paid, in roads falling apart, emergency rooms closing down, finite resources that should be invested in putting people to work, but instead going to two wars."

That will be weighed against Democratic concerns about opposing the president during an election year.

But the measure floated by Representative Barbara Lee to cut funding for the escalation may receive support from as few as fifty or sixty members. Spending taxpayers' money without end on unfunded wars of unknown duration doesn't sound like fiscal wisdom, but when it comes to the Long War, both parties are loaded with big spenders.

About Tom Hayden

Tom Hayden, a former California state senator, is the author, most recently, of The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Paradigm)

Discussions, but no decisions, on an Obama plan for Mideast peace

Image by Barack Obama via Flickr

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 8, 2010; A08

Senior Obama administration officials have discussed whether President Obama should propose his own solution to the intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, including in a recent meeting between the president and seven former and current national security advisers, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

But officials, confirming a report Wednesday on the March 24 session by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, said there has been no decision to offer such a plan, either in the coming months or later this year. Officials said a presidential peace plan -- as opposed to "bridging proposals" that would be offered during peace talks between the two sides -- has long been considered an option for Obama. But they said the administration, now locked in tense talks with Israel about making confidence-building overtures to the Palestinians, is focused on arranging indirect talks between the two sides.

Some officials said the notion that Obama could offer his own plan might undercut those nascent efforts, because it could lead to a backlash among Israel's supporters and encourage the Palestinians not to make any concessions to Israel. Israeli officials have long opposed the introduction of an unilateral American plan, while Arab officials have pressed hard for one, saying it is the only way to break the impasse.

Jordan's King Abdullah II, who will visit Washington next week, recently told the Wall Street Journal that he will push Obama to offer his own plan because "tremendous tension" in the region over the failure to resolve the conflict has resulted in a "tinderbox that could go off at any time."

Still, it is notable that Obama would attend a discussion of such a concept with outside advisers. The president had popped into a meeting that national security adviser James L. Jones regularly holds with six of his predecessors at the White House when the subject turned to the Middle East. Brent Scowcroft, a national security adviser to Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush, made the case for an American-designed proposal and was supported by other participants in the room, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton.

Obama, however, did not tip his hand on whether he supported the idea, participants said.

The basic parameters of a peace deal are well known and would probably closely resemble the "Clinton parameters," offered by Clinton 10 years ago in the waning days of his presidency: land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for much of the land taken by Jewish settlements in the West Bank; billions of dollars in compensation to the Palestinians for giving up the right to return to their homes in Israel; an Israeli capital in West Jerusalem and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, with an agreement on oversight of religious sites in the Old City.

Advocates of an American plan say the two parties are incapable of making such concessions themselves; the current Israeli government, for instance, won't halt Jewish construction in East Jerusalem despite intense U.S. pressure. But detractors say such a plan is only a recipe for putting pressure on Israel, while even some supporters caution that the timing must be right -- such as in the midst of viable peace talks -- or else the impact of the gesture might be wasted.

A major stumbling block to any peace plan is that 1.5 million people -- almost 40 percent of the Palestinian population -- live in the Gaza Strip, now controlled by the Hamas militant group, which rejects any peace talks as well as the very existence of Israel. That was not the situation when Clinton offered his proposal, which envisioned a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, joined by highways.

Resources of the Week: Voice of America Pronunciation Guide…and a few others « ResourceShelf

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By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

If you want to sound sophisticated and worldly — or just not embarrass yourself — when discussing current affairs, take a look at the VOA Pronunciation Guide. It’s a repository of pronunciation keys and audio files (mp3) for people and places in the news from around the world. The search form is easily understood — use the “Exact Search” box if you’re sure of how to spell the name, the “Near Search” box if you’re not sure, the “List Lookup” dropdown menu if you want to browse through the entire database, or the “Origin” dropdown menu to view names by country. A Help screen and a Pronunciation Key are available.

An addition resource at this site is a Nations and their Languages guide. This information is culled from the World Almanac and Book of Facts, the Information Please Almanac, and the CIA’s World Factbook.

A few other pronunciation guides we like:

+ Asian Names Pronunciation Guide, from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Native speakers who were/are Cal Poly Pomona students provided all sound samples (in .wav format) for Cambodian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Filipino, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese names.

Image by magdalar via Flickr

HearNames.com: The advanced search form is a gem. The dropdown “Category” menu presents a number of interesting options, such as U.S. Presidents, Armenian Surnames, Russian Names, etc. These are also available via the Name Categories link on the top navigation bar.

+ Pronounce Names: The Dictionary of Name Pronunciation

In today’s international business environment, it is exceedingly important to say your clients name correctly, you CANNOT afford to call Dumass, a Dumb-ass. The internet has removed international boundaries and people are making new friends via email and chat every second, would you not want your friends to be able to pronounce your name correctly?

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Pinky Thakkar (silent “h”), an engineer from Mumbai, started the Web site www.pronouncenames.com after she moved to San Jose, Calif., and mispronounced the “J” in “San Jose,” not giving it the “H” sound used in Spanish words. Properly pronouncing person and place names proved nearly impossible for Ms. Thakkar and her friends from abroad, she says.

More than 75,000 entries, including 38,000 audio files, have been submitted to Ms. Thakkar’s Web site since it launched in 2006. She manages the site with six other volunteers.

+ LanguageGuide.org: You’ll find a variety of volunteer-created resources here. The Pictorial Vocabulary Guides are especially charming. Select a language, choose a category, and then roll your cursor over a letter, number or picture to hear its name pronounced, such as the birds (os pássaros) in Brazilian Portuguese, or sea animals (umi no ikimono) in Japanese.

ANU E Press - Anomie and violence

Non-truth and reconciliation in Indonesian peacebuilding

John Braithwaite, Valerie Braithwaite, Michael Cookson, Leah Dunn.

ISBN 9781921666223 $29.95 (GST inclusive)
ISBN 9781921666230 (Online)
Published March 2010

Indonesia suffered an explosion of religious violence, ethnic violence, separatist violence, terrorism, and violence by criminal gangs, the security forces and militias in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By 2002 Indonesia had the worst terrorism problem of any nation. All these forms of violence have now fallen dramatically. How was this accomplished? What drove the rise and the fall of violence? Anomie theory is deployed to explain these developments. Sudden institutional change at the time of the Asian financial crisis and the fall of President Suharto meant the rules of the game were up for grabs. Valerie Braithwaite’s motivational postures theory is used to explain the gaming of the rules and the disengagement from authority that occurred in that era. Ultimately resistance to Suharto laid a foundation for commitment to a revised, more democratic, institutional order. The peacebuilding that occurred was not based on the high-integrity truth-seeking and reconciliation that was the normative preference of these authors. Rather it was based on non-truth, sometimes lies, and yet substantial reconciliation. This poses a challenge to restorative justice theories of peacebuilding.

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Apr 7, 2010

Ensnared by Error on Growing U.S. Watch List - NYTimes.com

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By MIKE McINTIRE

Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University doctoral student, arrived at San Francisco International Airport with her 14-year-old daughter for a 9 a.m. flight home to Malaysia. She asked for a wheelchair, having recently had a hysterectomy.

Instead, when a ticket agent found her name on the no-fly list, Ms. Ibrahim was handcuffed, searched and jailed amid a flurry of phone calls involving the local police, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. Two hours after her flight left, Ms. Ibrahim was released without explanation. She flew to Malaysia the next day.

But when she tried to return to the United States, she discovered that her visa had been revoked. And when she complained that she did not belong on a terrorist watch list, the government’s response came a year later in a form letter saying only that her case had been reviewed and that any changes warranted had been made.

Every year, thousands of people find themselves caught up in the government’s terrorist screening process. Some are legitimate targets of concern, others are victims of errors in judgment or simple mistaken identity.

Either way, their numbers are likely to rise as the Obama administration recalibrates the standards for identifying potential terrorists, in response to intelligence failures that let a would-be bomber fly to Detroit from Amsterdam last Christmas. On Friday, the administration altered rules for identifying which passengers flying to the United States should face extra scrutiny at the gate. And it is reviewing ways to make it easier to place suspects on the watch list.

“The entire federal government is leaning very far forward on putting people on lists,” Russell E. Travers, a deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a recent Senate hearing. Before the attempted attack on Christmas, Mr. Travers said, “I never had anybody tell me that the list was too small.”

Now, he added, “It’s getting bigger, and it will get even bigger.”

Even as the universe of those identified as a risk expands, the decision-making involved remains so secretive that people cannot be told whether they are on the watch list, why they may be on it or even whether they have been removed. The secrecy, government officials say, keeps terrorists off balance. But civil liberties advocates say it can hide mistakes and keep people wrongly singled out from seeking redress.

Now, five years after Ms. Ibrahim’s arrest at the United Airlines ticket counter, a lawsuit she filed is chipping away at that wall of secrecy. While judges have dismissed many similar cases, a federal appeals court let hers proceed, endorsing a new legal strategy for challenging placement on the watch list. In December, a federal judge scoffed at the government’s claim for secrecy and ordered it to release files on Ms. Ibrahim’s detention.

Ms. Ibrahim’s case has also raised legal questions about detaining people whose names appear on the no-fly list, and it casts light on the role of private contractors in deciding whether someone should be held. The police in San Francisco said they had acted on the instructions of a contractor working for the Homeland Security Department.

The government is fighting back, and there is no guarantee that Ms. Ibrahim, a 44-year-old mother of four, will ever learn more about what happened. However, an examination of her case, along with documents from other lawsuits, government audits and official testimony, offers some broad hints about the murky system.

The watch list is actually a succession of lists, beginning with the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, a centralized database of potential suspects. Mr. Travers said that about 10,000 names come in daily through intelligence reports, but that a large percentage are dismissed because they are based on “some combination of circular reporting, poison pens, mistaken identities, lies and so forth.”

Analysts at the counterterrorism center then work with the Terrorist Screening Center of the F.B.I. to add names to what is called the consolidated watch list, which may have any number of consequences for those on it, like questioning by the police during a traffic stop or additional screening crossing the border. That list, in turn, has various subsets, including the no-fly list and the selectee list, which requires passengers to undergo extra screening.

The consolidated list has the names of more than 400,000 people, about 97 percent of them foreigners, while the no-fly and selectee lists have about 6,000 and 20,000, respectively.

The standards for adding names to the lists have gone through a cycle of tightening, then relaxing. After the Sept. 11 attacks, hundreds of names were added with few guidelines, eventually leading to complaints that too many innocent travelers were being stopped. Two years ago, the government developed a reasonable suspicion standard and secret protocols for applying it; their last major revision was outlined in a 72-page memorandum in February 2009 that clarified the “minimum substantive derogatory criteria.”

A federal official involved in the process said that under those rules, associating with a known or suspected terrorist was not enough to warrant being listed; there had to be evidence that the person supported terrorism. The criteria also generally require more than a single source of “derogatory information,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss security matters.

A task force formed after the Christmas Day episode is considering changes to the process, including making it easier to label suspects extremists and giving greater weight to credible “single-source walk-ins,” the official said. The suspect in the attempted bombing, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was known to American intelligence analysts because his father, a banker in Nigeria, had reported him to the authorities, but he had not been placed on the watch list.

Putting United States citizens on the watch list requires more than just a single tip, although one tip could prompt an investigation that eventually leads to placement on the list. Local police officers are encouraged to file “suspicious activity reports” with the F.B.I. or the Homeland Security Department, which finances about 70 intergovernmental intelligence cooperatives nationwide.

While federal policies prohibit profiling, a wide range of innocent activities can be deemed suspicious. Guidelines distributed by several cooperatives advise landlords to be alert for tenants who prefer ground-floor apartments and have little furniture. Among the warning signs listed by one in Ohio are “immersion in a purely Muslim environment” and the “study of technical subjects” like engineering.

By such standards, Erich Scherfen could look suspicious. A veteran of the Persian Gulf war and a commercial pilot from Pennsylvania, Mr. Scherfen converted to Islam and married a Pakistani-born woman, Rubina Tureen, who runs a small business selling religious books. They have taken part in Islamic conferences and interfaith seminars.

In May 2006, a co-worker told the state police that Mr. Scherfen had retrofitted the family car to carry bombs, court records show. (He said he had simply removed a broken seat from his old Mazda.) Not long after, Mr. Scherfen and Ms. Tureen began being detained at airports, jeopardizing his job.

The couple filed a lawsuit, and his job was saved after a judge was given secret evidence that apparently indicated that Mr. Scherfen had been taken off the selectee list.

“I think some ill-informed people were putting the dots together and came to faulty conclusions,” Ms. Tureen said.

Their lawsuit cited rulings in Ms. Ibrahim’s case as precedents.

A Muslim who came to the United States to study civil engineering, Ms. Ibrahim impressed colleagues at Stanford. “Of all the people you could think of who might be on a list of terrorism suspects, she would be pretty close to the bottom,” said Raymond Levitt, one of her faculty advisers.

The judge presiding over her lawsuit appeared skeptical, too.

“It looks like to me it was a monumental mistake, and they identified the wrong person,” the judge, William H. Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco, said at a hearing in December. “I’m just guessing.”

The authorities will not say why they singled out Ms. Ibrahim. A week before her scheduled flight to Malaysia in January 2005, she was visited by two F.B.I. agents, said her lawyer, Marwa Elzankaly.

“They actually claimed they did not know why they were there to interview her,” Ms. Elzankaly said, “and basically just asked her a few background questions about herself, her family, her line of work, her travel plans and her education.”

When the airport ticket agent discovered her name on the no-fly list, he called the San Francisco police, who contacted the Transportation Security Administration in Washington. There, they reached a watch officer working for U.S. Investigations Services, one of several private contractors the agency has hired for its 24-hour operations center.

The contractors’ duties “include receiving telephone inquiries and providing direction as to how to handle passengers,” said Kristin Lee, an agency spokeswoman.

The police incident report says the watch officer told the police to “deny the flight to Ibrahim, contact the F.B.I. and detain her for further questioning.” She was driven to a police substation, where she was searched and placed in a holding cell. Eventually, an F.B.I. agent told the police to let her go, adding that she was being moved to the selectee list and could fly home.

Outraged, she decided to sue for wrongful arrest and to find out why she was on the list. But the law creating the T.S.A. made it virtually impossible to mount a legal challenge against it.

Instead, Ms. Ibrahim’s lawsuit focused on the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center, which does not have the same legal protections. After much of her case was thrown out, a divided United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated it.

“If your name or my name or anybody’s name in this courtroom were put on that list, we would suffer grievously,” the chief judge, Alex Kozinski, said at a hearing in April 2008. “And we want to have some way of going to our government and possibly to our courts and saying, ‘Look, I shouldn’t be on that list.’ ”

Another issue raised by Ms. Ibrahim’s case is whether inclusion on the no-fly list is sufficient grounds for arrest. At a hearing last December, government lawyers agreed that it was not, although the courts generally allow brief detentions for investigative purposes.

The police, as part of their defense, offered to explain why they detained Ms. Ibrahim, but the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security refuse to allow it.

Meanwhile, Ms. Ibrahim earned her doctorate from Stanford but has been unable to return to the United States to participate in the lawsuit. Her lawyers said in a court filing that when she applied for a new visa last September, American Embassy officials in Kuala Lumpur questioned her about the suit, asking what it would take to settle it.

Last month, Ms. Ibrahim accepted a $225,000 settlement from the San Francisco police and U.S. Investigations Services. But she is pursuing her claims against the federal government. None of the defendants’ lawyers would comment for this article.

At the December hearing, Judge Alsup showed his displeasure at the government, telling Justice Department lawyers that they were abusing the secrecy privilege.

“You’re holding onto this five-year-old information like, you know, like another 9/11 is going to happen if you somehow release it,” the judge said, according to a transcript. “That’s just baloney.”

Alexander Tikhomirov's life illustrates challenge radical Islam poses in Russia

Image by doodledubz collective via Flickr

By Philip P. Pan
Wednesday, April 7, 2010; A08

MOSCOW -- He had been a bright but lonely child from a sleepy city near the Mongolian border, in a Buddhist region of Russia far from the nation's Muslim centers. But by the time he was killed last month, thousands of miles away in the volatile North Caucasus, Alexander Tikhomirov had become the face of an Islamist insurgency.

After two young women blew themselves up on the Moscow subway last week, killing 40 people in the city's worst terrorist attack in years, investigators said they suspected that Tikhomirov had recruited and trained them, and perhaps dozens of other suicide bombers.

How the schoolboy whom neighbors called Sascha became the tech-savvy militant known as Sayid Buryatsky remains a question wrapped in rumor and speculation. But the outline of Tikhomirov's journey from the Siberian steppes to the mountains of Chechnya provides a sense of the challenge that radical Islam poses in Russia and the speed with which the insurgency in the nation's southwest is changing.

In less than two years with the rebels, Tikhomirov became their most effective propagandist, drawing in young Muslims with his fluent Russian, colloquial interpretations of Islam and mastery of the Internet. When security forces gunned him down last month at age 27, the guerrillas immediately cast him as a martyr.

Even in death, he remains influential. The rebel leader Doku Umarov has vowed fresh attacks in the Russian heartland by the brigade of suicide bombers that Tikhomirov helped revive. And he remains a digital legend, with his writings and videos preserved on the Web and his DVDs sold outside mosques across the former Soviet Union.

Neighbors in Ulan Ude, capital of the Siberian province of Buryatia, remember Tikhomirov as an awkward boy from a troubled family. His father was Buryat, an ethnic minority related to Mongols, and died soon after he was born. His mother, said to be an ethnic Russian, struggled to make ends meet at a local market.

One resident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of police scrutiny, said Tikhomirov's interest in Islam came after he was forced to drop out of high school and attend vocational school. Others traced it to a stepfather from the Caucasus.

But in a letter posted on a rebel Web site, Tikhomirov's mother said he was simply drawn in by a library copy of the Koran when he was 17. "That same year, he started to search for people who could tell him anything about Islam," she wrote.

Tikhomirov may have had an early brush with Islamic extremism and Russia's heavy-handed efforts to stamp it out. An Uzbek preacher named Bakhtiyar Umarov moved to his city about the time he converted, and Tikhomirov studied with him, acquaintances said. After Umarov caused a stir by trying to build a mosque, Russia deported the preacher to Uzbekistan, where he was jailed on charges of "terrorist propaganda." But his defenders insist that he is a moderate and could not have radicalized Tikhomirov.

In his late teens, Tikhomirov moved to Moscow, where he attended an Islamic college that the authorities later closed in a crackdown on suspected extremism. He then traveled to Cairo, where he studied Arabic and attended lectures by Muslim scholars, one of whom he cited years later to justify violence in the name of Islam.

In 2003, he returned to Moscow, telling friends that the Egyptian authorities had kicked him out for his religious activities. He took the Muslim name Sayid, calling himself Sayid Buryatsky.

But he seemed far from ready to join the rebels in the North Caucasus. Investigators say he took a job as a low-level assistant to the Russian Council of Muftis, which unites the nation's Muslim spiritual boards.

Suppressed by the czars and the Communists, Islam has enjoyed a fitful rebirth in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of the nation's estimated 20 million Muslims are ethnic minorities who adhere to a moderate branch of the faith. But radical views have made inroads, fueled by foreign proselytizers and frustration with state-backed spiritual leaders.

Acquaintances say Tikhomirov embraced a movement known as Salafism, which argues that Islam has been corrupted over the centuries and urges a return to the stricter practices of the earliest Muslims. The movement is popular among young Muslims in Russia, but the security forces often target its adherents as extremists.

Russia's traditional Islamic leaders have tried to steer young people toward moderate views, but a severe shortage of mosques, due in part to state limits, has made that difficult. In Moscow, six mosques serve as many as 3 million believers, the largest Muslim population of any city in Europe.

Aslam Ezhaev, director of an Islamic publishing house, said Tikhomirov voiced frustration with Muslim officialdom and eventually returned to Buryatia, where he took a job as a warehouse guard and offered to translate Arabic books for him.

Ezhaev suggested that Tikhomirov start a podcast for his Web site, Radio Islam. Tikhomirov proved be a talented preacher; his lectures were an immediate hit.

Ezhaev said he opposed violence and forbade Tikhomirov to discuss jihad. "It was easy for him to stay within the limits," he said. "I didn't see any signs of fanaticism."

On the Web, radicals criticized Tikhomirov for refusing to talk about Russia's brutal efforts to crush the insurgency in the Caucasus, where rebels in 2007 declared jihad to establish an Islamist emirate.

In the spring of 2008, Tikhomirov received a recruitment video from a senior rebel commander. "I considered it probably three or five seconds," he recalled in a video of his own, then concluded that God was challenging him to back up his sermons with action.

Because of his mixed ethnicity, he quickly became a powerful symbol for an insurgency trying to expand beyond Chechnya to the rest of the Caucasus. His sermons, which he filmed in combat gear, weaved scripture with sarcasm, striking a chord in an impoverished Muslim region brimming with resentment against the security forces.

Tikhomirov called the screams of injured enemies "music for the ears" and detailed his central role in the campaign of suicide bombings that began last summer with the revival of Riyad-us Saliheen, a brigade that once staged attacks across Russia.

"While I am alive," he wrote in December, "I will do everything possible so that the ranks of Riyad-us Saliheen are broadened and new waves of mujaheddin go on to martyrdom operations."

On March 2, when security forces surrounded him and other fighters in a village in Ingushetia, Tikhomirov recorded a final sermon on his mobile phone, officials said. The authorities recovered the phone, along with a 50-liter barrel of explosives.

Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By ETHAN BRONNER

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Senior Palestinian leaders — men who once commanded militias — are joining unarmed protest marches against Israeli policies and are being arrested. Goods produced in Israeli settlements have been burned in public demonstrations. The Palestinian prime minister has entered West Bank areas officially off limits to his authority, to plant trees and declare the land part of a future state.

Something is stirring in the West Bank. With both diplomacy and armed struggle out of favor for having failed to end the Israeli occupation, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, joined by the business community, is trying to forge a third way: to rouse popular passions while avoiding violence. The idea, as Fatah struggles to revitalize its leadership, is to build a virtual state and body politic through acts of popular resistance.

“It is all about self-empowerment,” said Hasan Abu-Libdeh, the Palestinian economy minister, referring to a campaign to end the purchase of settlers’ goods and the employment of Palestinians by settlers and their industries. “We want ordinary people to feel like stockholders in the process of building a state.”

The new approach still remains small scale while American-led efforts to revive peace talks are stalled. But street interviews showed that people were aware and supportive of its potential to bring pressure on Israel but dubious about its ultimate effectiveness.

Billboards have sprung up as part of a campaign against buying settlers’ goods, featuring a pointed finger and the slogan “Your conscience, your choice.” The Palestinian Ministry of Communications has just banned the sale of Israeli cellphone cards because Israeli signals are relayed from towers inside settlements. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is spending more time out of his business suits and in neglected villages opening projects related to sewage, electricity and education and calling for “sumud,” or steadfastness.

“Steadfastness must be translated from a slogan to acts and facts on the ground,” he told a crowd late last month in a village called Izbet al-Tabib near the city of Qalqilya, an area where Israel’s separation barrier makes access to land extremely difficult for farmers. Before planting trees, Mr. Fayyad told about 1,000 people gathered to hear him, “This is our real project, to establish our presence on our land and keep our people on it.”

Nonviolence has never caught on here, and Israel’s military says the new approach is hardly nonviolent. But the current set of campaigns is trying to incorporate peaceful pressure in limited ways. Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, just visited Bilin, a Palestinian village with a weekly protest march. Next week, Martin Luther King III is scheduled to speak here at a conference on nonviolence.

On Palm Sunday, the Israeli police arrested 15 Palestinians in Bethlehem who were protesting the difficulty of getting to Jerusalem because of a security closing. Abbas Zaki, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization, was arrested, prompting demonstrations the next day. Some Palestinians are also rejecting V.I.P. cards handed out by Israelis allowing them to pass quickly through checkpoints.

Palestinian political analysts say it is too early to assess the prospects of the nonviolent approach. Generally, they say, given the division between Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority here, nothing is likely to change without a political shakeup and unified leadership. Still, they say, popular resistance, combined with institution-building and international appeals, is gaining notice among Palestinians.

“Fatah is living through a crisis of vision,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Jerusalem. “How can they combine being a liberation movement with being a governing party? This is one way. The idea is to awaken national pride and fulfill the people’s anxiety and passion. Of course, Hamas and armed resistance still remain a real option for many.”

Khalil Shikaki, who runs the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, said: “The society is split. The public believes that Israel responds to suffering, not to nonviolent resistance. But there is also not much interest in violence now. Our surveys show support for armed resistance at 47 percent in March. In essence, the public feels trapped between failed diplomacy and failed armed struggle.”

Israeli military authorities have not decided how to react. They allow Mr. Fayyad some activity in the areas officially off limits to him, but on occasion they have torn down what he has built. They reject the term nonviolent for the recent demonstrations because the marches usually include stone-throwing and attempts to damage the separation barrier. Troops have responded with stun grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests. And the military has declared that Bilin will be a closed area every Friday for six months to halt the weekly marches there.

“We respect Salam Fayyad,” one military official said, speaking under the army’s rules of anonymity. “But we don’t want him to engage in incitement. Burning goods is incitement. Destroying the fence is incitement and is not nonviolent. They are walking a thin line.”

One reason a violent uprising remains unlikely for now, Palestinian analysts say, is that in the two years that Mr. Fayyad’s security forces and ministries have been functioning, daily life inside West Bank cities and their surroundings has taken on much greater safety and normality.

The police and the courts are functioning again after the intifada of 2000 that led to many deaths on both sides. Traffic tickets are now routinely handed out. Personal checks, long shunned, are increasingly in use.

Of course, the presence of Israeli forces outside the cities and at checkpoints, the existence of the barrier and continued building inside Israeli settlements send most Palestinians into despair and make them doubt that a sovereign state can be built.

One effort to increase a sense of hope is a new push to ban goods made in the settlements, symbols of occupation. A $2 million project called the Karama National Empowerment Fund, jointly financed by Palestinian businesses and the government, aims to spread the message through ads and public events.

Mr. Abu-Libdeh, the economy minister, said a law was likely to go into effect soon barring the purchase of settlers’ goods, a trade worth at least $200 million a year. Efforts to end Palestinian employment in settlements will not carry penalties, he said, because the government does not offer unemployment insurance and it is unclear whether the 30,000 Palestinians who work in settlements could find new jobs.

Palestinian industrialists have financed the settlers’ goods ban partly because they hope to replace the goods with their own. They do not single out other Israeli goods, which are protected under trade agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.

Mr. Fayyad, the prime minister, a political independent, said his notion was to build the makings of a state by 2011.

“It’s about putting facts on the ground,” he said in an interview. “The occupation is not transitional so we need to make sure our people stick around. If we create services, it gives people a sense of possibility. I feel we are on a path that is very appealing both domestically and internationally. The whole world knows this occupation has to end.”