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Aug. 26th, 2013 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyPrayer Plaza in Jerusalem for Both Sexes Ignites Uproar
http://nyti.ms/14vUb0O
Trying to calm months of intense wrangling over the Western Wall, Israeli officials on Sunday unveiled a new plaza where men and women can pray together. But the move was immediately denounced as discriminatory by the main group that has protested the rules at the holy site.
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs, said the new plaza, in an archaeological park known as Robinson’s Arch, was an interim solution until a more comprehensive — and contentious — plan for a mixed-prayer section could overcome bureaucratic hurdles and opposition from archaeologists, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Muslim authorities. Built for about $80,000, the 4,800-square-foot platform is a “compromise,” Mr. Bennett said, whose “goal is to unify all the walks of Jewish life.”
Instead, the announcement ignited new divisions. Leaders of the Conservative and Reform movements of Judaism offered cautious praise, while Women of the Wall, the group whose monthly prayer sessions have prompted arrests and mass demonstrations over the past year, started a 24-hour sit-in to protest it. The prime minister’s office distanced itself from the new plaza, releasing a statement saying the government had yet to reach a decision on the matter.
Anat Hoffman, the leader of Women of the Wall, called Mr. Bennett’s new plaza a “monstrosity” that “looks like a sunbathing deck” or a “rock-star stage.” She said she would continue to push for access to the women’s section of the main area. As the sun fell Sunday, she and about a dozen supporters chanted the afternoon prayer under an Israeli flag near the Western Wall, then settled in with study materials for a long night.
“They’ve taken the keys to the holiest site and just given them to one extremist group that uses violence,” said Ms. Hoffman, referring to the ultra-Orthodox, who have in recent months shouted and spat at the women’s group. “We have to be vigilant and fight for every centimeter. We are equal.”
The struggle over prayer at the wall is one of many battles about religious practice and identity in Israel, and it has attracted much attention from Jewish leaders abroad.
A remnant of the retaining wall of the ancient temple, the Western Wall is one of Judaism’s most sacred sites, and since Israel took control of it from Jordan in the 1967 war, it has been a pilgrimage site for foreign tourists and a place for the daily prayers of thousands of Orthodox Israelis. It is governed by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, with prayer areas segregated by sex, and women are required to dress modestly and refrain from singing aloud. Since the late 1990s, mixed prayer has been allowed at Robinson’s Arch, by appointment, during limited hours and for a fee.
After 25 years in which legislation and legal rulings barred women from wearing prayer shawls and phylacteries at the site, the activist group won a court victory this spring allowing members to pray as they wish. Over the past several months, thousands of ultra-Orthodox young people have crammed the site to prevent the women from using it, creating a new set of problems.
As outrage among American and other international Jews mounted, Israel’s prime minister asked Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, to find a solution. Mr. Sharansky proposed a new mixed-prayer area adjacent to the women’s section and accessible from the main entrance, unlike the current Robinson’s Arch.
He also spoke about changes to the main plaza behind the current prayer area, and a governing body for the mixed area that would include non-Orthodox leaders.
The plaza Mr. Bennett unveiled Sunday sits atop scaffolding but remains several dozen feet below the main Western Wall area. To get there, visitors must wind their way through an archaeological park and up and down many stairs. Equipped with Torah scrolls and tables, prayer shawls and prayer books, it is open around the clock, for free, just like the main site. No one was there Sunday evening as the women’s group commenced its protest a few hundred yards away.
“If it is, as is suggested, a temporary step on the longer journey toward the transformative plan, then it’s a very nice step,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism. “But it’s a very, very small step — very modest.”
Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, described the move as “important steps forward,” adding, “Unfortunately, the interim solution is not going to satisfy everybody.”
Golden Rice: Lifesaver?
http://nyti.ms/19PO8Z7
ONE bright morning this month, 400 protesters smashed down the high fences surrounding a field in the Bicol region of the Philippines and uprooted the genetically modified rice plants growing inside.
Had the plants survived long enough to flower, they would have betrayed a distinctly yellow tint in the otherwise white part of the grain. That is because the rice is endowed with a gene from corn and another from a bacterium, making it the only variety in existence to produce beta carotene, the source of vitamin A. Its developers call it “Golden Rice.”
The concerns voiced by the participants in the Aug. 8 act of vandalism — that Golden Rice could pose unforeseen risks to human health and the environment, that it would ultimately profit big agrochemical companies — are a familiar refrain in the long-running controversy over the merits of genetically engineered crops. They are driving the desire among some Americans for mandatory “G.M.O.” labels on food with ingredients made from crops whose DNA has been altered in a laboratory. And they have motivated similar attacks on trials of other genetically modified crops in recent years: grapes designed to fight off a deadly virus in France, wheat designed to have a lower glycemic index in Australia, sugar beets in Oregon designed to tolerate a herbicide, to name a few.
“We do not want our people, especially our children, to be used in these experiments,” a farmer who was a leader of the protest told the Philippine newspaper Remate.
But Golden Rice, which appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 2000 before it was quite ready for prime time, is unlike any of the genetically engineered crops in wide use today, designed to either withstand herbicides sold by Monsanto and other chemical companies or resist insect attacks, with benefits for farmers but not directly for consumers.
And a looming decision by the Philippine government about whether to allow Golden Rice to be grown beyond its four remaining field trials has added a new dimension to the debate over the technology’s merits.
Not owned by any company, Golden Rice is being developed by a nonprofit group called the International Rice Research Institute with the aim of providing a new source of vitamin A to people both in the Philippines, where most households get most of their calories from rice, and eventually in many other places in a world where rice is eaten every day by half the population. Lack of the vital nutrient causes blindness in a quarter-million to a half-million children each year. It affects millions of people in Asia and Africa and so weakens the immune system that some two million die each year of diseases they would otherwise survive.
The destruction of the field trial, and the reasons given for it, touched a nerve among scientists around the world, spurring them to counter assertions of the technology’s health and environmental risks. On a petition supporting Golden Rice circulated among scientists and signed by several thousand, many vented a simmering frustration with activist organizations like Greenpeace, which they see as playing on misplaced fears of genetic engineering in both the developing and the developed worlds. Some took to other channels to convey to American foodies and Filipino farmers alike the broad scientific consensus that G.M.O.’s are not intrinsically more risky than other crops and can be reliably tested.
At stake, they say, is not just the future of biofortified rice but also a rational means to evaluate a technology whose potential to improve nutrition in developing countries, and developed ones, may otherwise go unrealized.
“There’s so much misinformation floating around about G.M.O.’s that is taken as fact by people,” said Michael D. Purugganan, a professor of genomics and biology and the dean for science at New York University, who sought to calm health-risk concerns in a primer on GMA News Online, a media outlet in the Philippines: “The genes they inserted to make the vitamin are not some weird manufactured material,” he wrote, “but are also found in squash, carrots and melons.”
Mr. Purugganan, who studies plant evolution, does not work on genetically engineered crops, and until recently had not participated in the public debates over the risks and benefits of G.M.O.’s. But having been raised in a middle-class family in Manila, he felt compelled to weigh in on Golden Rice. “A lot of the criticism of G.M.O.’s in the Western world suffers from a lack of understanding of how really dire the situation is in developing countries,” he said.
Some proponents of G.M.O.’s say that more critical questions, like where biotechnology should fall as a priority in the efforts to address the root causes of hunger and malnutrition and how to prevent a few companies from controlling it, would be easier to address were they not lumped together with unfounded fears by those who oppose G.M.O.’s.
“It is long past time for scientists to stand up and shout, ‘No more lies — no more fear-mongering,’ ” said Nina V. Fedoroff, a professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and a former science adviser to the American secretary of state, who helped spearhead the petition. “We’re talking about saving millions of lives here.”
Precisely because of its seemingly high-minded purpose, Golden Rice has drawn suspicion from biotechnology skeptics beyond the demonstrators who forced their way into the field trial. Many countries ban the cultivation of all genetically modified crops, and after the rice’s media debut early in the last decade, Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmentalist, called it a “Trojan horse” whose purpose was to gain public support for all manner of genetically modified crops that would benefit multinational corporations at the expense of poor farmers and consumers.
In a 2001 article, “The Great Yellow Hype,” the author Michael Pollan, a critic of industrial agriculture, suggested that it might have been developed to “win an argument rather than solve a public-health problem.” He cited biotechnology industry advertisements that featured the virtues of the rice, which at the time had to be ingested in large quantities to deliver a meaningful dose of vitamin A.
But the rice has since been retooled: a bowl now provides 60 percent of the daily requirement of vitamin A for healthy children. And Gerard Barry, the Golden Rice project leader at the International Rice Research Institute — and, it must be said, a former senior scientist and executive at Monsanto — suggests that attempts to discredit Golden Rice discount the suffering it could alleviate if successful. He said, too, that critics who suggest encouraging poor families to simply eat fruits and vegetables that contain beta carotene disregard the expense and logistical difficulties that would thwart such efforts.
Identified in the infancy of genetic engineering as having the potential for the biggest impact for the world’s poor, beta-carotene-producing rice was initially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the European Union. In a decade of work culminating in 1999, two academic scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, finally switched on the production of beta carotene by adding daffodil and bacteria DNA to the rice’s genome. They licensed their patent rights to the agribusiness company that later became Syngenta, on the condition that the technology and any improvements to it would be made freely available to poor farmers in the developing world. With the company retaining the right to use it in developed countries, potentially as an alternative to vitamin supplements, Syngenta scientists later improved the amount of beta carotene produced by substituting a gene from corn for the one from daffodil.
If the rice gains the Philippine government’s approval, it will cost no more than other rice for poor farmers, who will be free to save seeds and replant them, Dr. Barry said. It has no known allergens or toxins, and the new proteins produced by the rice have been shown to break down quickly in simulated gastric fluid, as required by World Health Organization guidelines. A mouse feeding study is under way in a laboratory in the United States. The potential that the Golden Rice would cross-pollinate with other varieties, sometimes called “genetic contamination,” has been studied and found to be limited, because rice is typically self-pollinated. And its production of beta carotene does not appear to provide a competitive advantage — or disadvantage — that could affect the survival of wild varieties with which it might mix.
If Golden Rice is a Trojan horse, it now has some company. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is supporting the final testing of Golden Rice, is also underwriting the development of crops tailored for sub-Saharan Africa, like cassava that can resist the viruses that routinely wipe out a third of the harvest, bananas that contain higher levels of iron and corn that uses nitrogen more efficiently. Other groups are developing a pest-resistant black-eyed pea and a “Golden Banana” that would also deliver vitamin A.
Beyond the fear of corporate control of agriculture, perhaps the most cited objection to G.M.O.’s is that they may hold risks that may not be understood. The decision to grow or eat them relies, like many other decisions, on a cost-benefit analysis.
How food consumers around the world weigh that calculation will probably have far-reaching consequences. Such crops, Scientific American declared in an editorial last week, will make it to people’s plates “only with public support.”
Greenpeace, for one, dismisses the benefits of vitamin supplementation through G.M.O.’s and has said it will continue to oppose all uses of biotechnology in agriculture. As Daniel Ocampo, a campaigner for the organization in the Philippines, put it, “We would rather err on the side of caution.”
For others, the potential of crops like Golden Rice to alleviate suffering is all that matters. “This technology can save lives,” one of the petition’s signers, Javier Delgado of Mexico, wrote. “But false fears can destroy it.”
Where Sand Is Gold, the Reserves Are Running Dry
http://nyti.ms/1f9R67W
With inviting beaches that run for miles along South Florida’s shores, it is easy to put sand into the same category as turbo air-conditioning and a decent mojito — something ever present and easily taken for granted.
As it turns out, though, sand is not forever. Constant erosion from storms and tides and a rising sea level continue to swallow up chunks of beach along Florida’s Atlantic coastline. Communities have spent the last few decades replenishing their beaches with dredged-up sand.
But in South Florida — Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties — concerns over erosion and the quest for sand are particularly urgent for one reason: there is almost no sand left offshore to replenish the beaches.
In these communities, sand is far from disposable; it is a precious commodity. So precious, in fact, that it has set off skirmishes among counties and has unleashed an intense hunt for more offshore sand by federal, state and local officials who are already fretting over the next big storm. No idea is too far-fetched in this quest, not even a proposal to grind down recycled glass and transform it into beach sand. The once-shelved idea is now being reconsidered by Broward County.
The situation is so dire that two counties to the north — St. Lucie and Martin — are being asked to donate their own offshore sand in the spirit of neighborliness.
“You have counties starting wars with each other over sand,” said Kristin Jacobs, the Broward County mayor, who has embraced the recycled glass idea as a possible stopgap. “Everybody feels like these other counties are going to steal their sand.”
St. Lucie and Martin Counties are none too keen to sacrifice their sand for the pleasures of South Florida. The last time the idea was mentioned, in 2006, it engendered accusations of subterfuge and raised so much ire that it was dropped. If recent public meetings on the issue held by the Army Corps of Engineers are any measure, little has changed, despite a new study by the corps that says the two counties have enough offshore sand for at least 50 years.
“What happens in 50 years when all that sand is gone?” asked Frannie Hutchinson, a St. Lucie County commissioner. “Where are we supposed to go then? I told them to take their sand shovels and sand buckets and go home and come up with a better plan.”
In a state where the lure of pristine beaches is pivotal to a robust economy, hoarding sand is not unlike stocking the basement with toilet paper, water and peanut butter. One never knows when the next storm could sweep away a beach and wreak havoc on beach communities.
“When we got hit with back-to-back hurricanes, we had no beach in front of our infrastructures: A1A was wiped out,” Ms. Hutchinson said, referring to storms that engulfed a busy beachfront road.
The reason for all this agitation is straightforward: Miami-Dade County is officially out of offshore sand, which is environmentally sound and easily accessible. The last piles will be depleted in February, when sand replenishment is completed on the beach of the affluent village of Bal Harbour.
Broward County is not much better off; its offshore sand is nearly depleted. And Palm Beach County’s stocks are dwindling rapidly.
The reasons for the disappearing supply of sand are various. For one, these counties have been refurbishing their beaches for decades. The problem has also been worsened by sea-level rise and the number of jetties, or cuts to build seaports, that have proliferated, which causes sand to pile up on one side of the jetty but not the other.
The scarcity of sand is also a function of geography. There are three reef tracks running alongside Miami-Dade and Broward, which make dredging difficult. And the continental shelf narrows greatly here, meaning the ocean gets too deep too quickly.
So while erosion is a problem along all beaches on the Eastern Seaboard, other counties and states to the north have large areas of ocean they can use to dredge sand. In South Florida, the slice is relatively minuscule.
“We are just limited in the actual amount of sand that’s available to us,” said Stephen Blair, who is in charge of beach restoration for Miami-Dade. “They have a much bigger area in which to look for sand.”
In South Florida, offshore sand has been essential in bolstering constantly eroding beaches, and healthy beaches are vital to tourism. Guests who routinely pay $400 a night for a Miami Beach hotel room come with expectations. One of them is sand to frolic on.
“They are not inclined to come if there are no beaches to lay on,” said Jason Harrah, the Army Corps project manager overseeing Miami-Dade beach restoration.
Broward County faces the same problem. “There is pressure from everybody — governments, the chambers of commerce,” said Eric Myers, who is in charge of Broward County beach restoration.
Beaches also safeguard the health of the high-priced cities and towns that abut them. Wide beaches, preferably with dunes and vegetation, protect buildings and roads by serving as buffers to waves churned up by large storms.
“These beaches, people think they are recreational, but they are storm damage reduction,” Mr. Harrah said. “They are meant to sacrifice themselves for the loss of property or life. In the event we have that kind of storm, we wouldn’t have the means to replenish them.”
Offshore sand has always been the first choice to counter beach erosion. It is inexpensive and does not disrupt reefs or marine life. This is why the Army Corps and the state are hoping that Martin and St. Lucie Counties will come around and free up some of their sand, which could then be dredged and shipped farther south.
The only other option at the moment is buying sand from mines in Central Florida and trucking it in, which is what Broward County is doing for a stretch of its beaches. Doing so is more expensive, reserved for low-volume projects, logistically difficult and largely disliked.
“There would be 20,000 trucks going through South Beach in tourist season, so you can imagine that,” Mr. Harrah said.
A third option is buying sand from countries in the Caribbean, possibly the Bahamas. Under United States law, the Army Corps must show that domestic sand is not available for economic or environmental reasons before it can use foreign sand.
Broward County is exploring the cost of recycling glass to fill small gaps in its beaches — it is more costly than offshore sand, but it is not yet clear by how much. Broward would also have to find a nearby facility to process the glass and complete the final phase of its environmental study. Other states have used recycled glass, but mostly for small projects like golf courses.
For now, the idea remains on the table. It is creative, said Ms. Jacobs, the Broward County mayor. It could promote a market for glass, she added.
Broward is looking to finance the last part of its environmental study, and will weigh the costs. The sand has so far proved an excellent mimic of regular sand, which is used to produce glass, after all. “If we could generate our own sand,” Ms. Jacobs said, “it would be fantastic.”
Can Cities Adjust to a Retreating Coastline?
http://nyti.ms/1dMqlZ8
I won't stick that one under a cut, it's full of links.
In Paper War, Flood of Liens Is the Weapon
http://nyti.ms/13N0luO
One of the first inklings Sheriff Richard Stanek had that something was wrong came with a call from the mortgage company handling his refinancing.
“It must be a mistake,” he said, when the loan officer told him that someone had placed liens totaling more than $25 million on his house and on other properties he owned.
But as Sheriff Stanek soon learned, the liens, legal claims on property to secure the payment of a debt, were just the earliest salvos in a war of paper, waged by a couple who had lost their home to foreclosure in 2009 — a tactic that, with the spread of an anti-government ideology known as the “sovereign citizen” movement, is being employed more frequently as a way to retaliate against perceived injustices.
Over the next three years, the couple, Thomas and Lisa Eilertson, filed more than $250 billion in liens, demands for compensatory damages and other claims against more than a dozen people, including the sheriff, county attorneys, the Hennepin County registrar of titles and other court officials.
“It affects your credit rating, it affected my wife, it affected my children,” Sheriff Stanek said of the liens. “We spent countless hours trying to undo it.”
Cases involving sovereign citizens are surfacing increasingly here in Minnesota and in other states, posing a challenge to law enforcement officers and court officials, who often become aware of the movement — a loose network of groups and individuals who do not recognize the authority of federal, state or municipal government — only when they become targets. Although the filing of liens for outrageous sums or other seemingly frivolous claims might appear laughable, dealing with them can be nightmarish, so much so that the F.B.I. has labeled the strategy “paper terrorism.” A lien can be filed by anyone under the Uniform Commercial Code.
Occasionally, people who identify with the movement have erupted into violence. In Las Vegas this week, the police said that an undercover sting operation stopped a plot to torture and kill police officers in order to bring attention to the movement. Two people were arrested. In 2010, two police officers in Arkansas were killed while conducting a traffic stop with a father and son involved in the movement.
Mostly, though, sovereign citizens choose paper as their weapon. In Gadsden, Ala., three people were arrested in July for filing liens against victims including the local district attorney and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. And in Illinois this month, a woman who, like most sovereign citizens, chose to represent herself in court, confounded a federal judge by asking him to rule on a flurry of unintelligible motions.
“I hesitate to rank your statements in order of just how bizarre they are,” the judge told the woman, who was facing charges of filing billions of dollars in false liens.
“The convergence of the evidence strongly suggests a movement that is flourishing,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League. “It is present in every single state in the country.”
The sovereign citizen movement traces its roots to white extremist groups like the Posse Comitatus of the 1970s, and the militia movement. Terry L. Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombing conspirator, counted himself a sovereign citizen. But in recent years it has drawn from a much wider demographic, including blacks, members of Moorish sects and young Occupy protesters, said Detective Moe Greenberg of the Baltimore County Police Department, who has written about the movement.
The ideology seems to attract con artists, the financially desperate and people who are fed up with bureaucracy, Mr. Pitcavage said, adding, “But we’ve seen airline pilots, we’ve seen federal law enforcement officers, we’ve seen city councilmen and millionaires get involved with this movement.”
Sovereign citizens believe that in the 1800s, the federal government was gradually subverted and replaced by an illegitimate government. They create their own driver’s licenses and include their thumbprints on documents to distinguish their flesh and blood person from a “straw man” persona that they say has been created by the false government. When writing their names, they often add punctuation marks like colons or hyphens.
Adherents to the movement have been involved in a host of debt evasion schemes and mortgage and tax frauds. Two were convicted in Cleveland recently for collecting $8 million in fraudulent tax refunds from the I.R.S. And in March, Tim Turner, the leader of one large group, the Republic for the united States of America, was sentenced in Alabama to 18 years in federal prison. (His group does not capitalize the first letter in united.)
Sovereign citizens who file creditor claims are helped by the fact that in most states, the secretary of state must accept any lien that is filed without judging its validity.
The National Association of Secretaries of State released a report in April on sovereign citizens, urging state officials to find ways to expedite the removal of liens and increase penalties for fraudulent filings. More than a dozen states have enacted laws giving state filing offices more discretion in accepting liens, and an increasing number of states have passed or are considering legislation to toughen the penalties for bogus filings.
The Eilertsons, who were charged with 47 counts of fraudulent filing and sentenced in June to 23 months in prison, were prosecuted under a Minnesota law that makes it a felony to file fraudulent documents to retaliate against officials. John Ristad, an assistant Ramsey County attorney who handled the case, said he believed the Eilertsons were the first offenders to be prosecuted under the law. “It got me angry,” he said, “because at the end of the day, these two are bullies who think they can get their way by filing paper.”
The liens were filed against houses, vehicles and even mineral rights. In an affidavit, the Hennepin County examiner of titles said that in a conversation with the Eilertsons about their foreclosure, one of them told her, “We’re gonna have to lien ya.” The examiner later found that a lien for more than $5.1 million had been placed on her property.
If the purpose was to instill trepidation, it worked. Several county and state officials said in interviews that they worried that they might once again find themselves in the crosshairs. One state employee said it was scarier to engage with offenders who used sovereign citizen tactics than with murderers, given the prospect of facing lawsuits or fouled credit ratings.
Like many who identify with the ideology, the Eilertsons learned the techniques of document filing online from one of many sovereign citizen “gurus” who offer instruction or seminars around the country.
In hours of recorded conversation found by the authorities on their computer, the Eilertsons consulted with a man identified on the recordings as Paul Kappel, learning what he called “death by a thousand paper cuts.”
Mr. Eilertson, interviewed at the state prison in Bayport, Minn., denied being anti-government or belonging to any movement. But he was familiar with the names of some figures associated with sovereign citizen teachings, including an activist named David Wynn Miller, who Mr. Eilertson said was “ahead of his time.” (Mr. Miller writes his name as David-Wynn: Miller.)
Mr. Eilertson, who had no previous criminal record, said his actions were an effort to fight back against corrupt banks that had handed off the couple’s mortgage time after time and whose top executives never faced consequences for their actions.
“It seemed like we were being attacked every day,” he said. “We needed some way to stop the foreclosure.
“We tried to do our part with as much information as we had available,” he said, though he conceded that “it kind of got out of control eventually.”
Race Equality Is Still a Work in Progress, Survey Finds
http://nyti.ms/14YbeUA
August 22, 2013
Race Equality Is Still a Work in Progress, Survey Finds
By SAM ROBERTS
Fewer than one in three black Americans and not even half of whites say the United States has made “a lot” of progress toward achieving racial equality in the half-century since the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared he had “a dream” that one day freedom, justice and brotherhood would prevail and that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
As the nation is poised to observe the 50th anniversary next week of the March on Washington that Dr. King led, the poll and an analysis of racial disparities by the Pew Research Center conclude that while five decades’ progress has been palpable on some fronts, Dr. King’s goal remains elusive on others.
Blacks and whites generally agree that the two races get along well, but about 7 in 10 blacks and more than 1 in 4 whites also concur that blacks are treated unequally by the criminal justice system. A majority of blacks also say they are treated less fairly than whites in public schools and in the workplace. Fully 1 in 3 blacks, 1 in 5 Hispanic Americans and 1 in 10 whites said they were treated unfairly within the last year because of perceptions of their race.
Though gaps in life expectancy and high school graduation rates have all but been eliminated, disparities in poverty and homeownership rates are about the same. Compared with five decades ago, imbalances in household income and wealth, marriage and incarceration rates have widened.
Rich Morin, an author of the Pew report, said he was struck by the disparity in perceptions of progress by race and political affiliation. “Whites and blacks view their communities very differently in terms of how blacks are treated,” Mr. Morin said. Over all, he said, “we’re clearly headed in the right direction.”
“People saw progress,” he said, “but they want more.”
The average three-member black household makes about 59 percent of what a similar white household makes — up from 55 percent in 1967 — but the income gap in actual dollars widened to $27,000 from $19,000. (The gap has widened between whites and Hispanic people, too.)
The median net worth of white households is 14 times that of black households, and blacks are nearly three times as likely to be living below the federal poverty threshold. The disparity in homeownership rates is the widest in four decades. As the Pew study noted, those realities are not lost on most Americans, only 1 in 10 of whom said the average black person is better off financially than the average white person (although more than 4 in 10 white and Hispanic respondents said the average black is about as well off as the average white).
Though marriage rates have generally declined over all, about 55 percent of whites and 31 percent of blacks 18 and older are married, compared with 74 percent of whites and 61 percent of blacks in 1960, a reflection, in part, of differences in educational attainment.
The gap in college completion rates rose to 13 percentage points from 6 (although the black completion rate, as a percentage of the white rate, has improved to 62 percent from 42 percent. The Hispanic rate remains at 42 percent).
In 1960, black men were five times as likely as white men to be in local, state or federal prison. Fifty years later, black men are six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated and Hispanic men three times as likely.
The historic disparity in voter turnout evaporated in 2012 with the re-election of President Obama, yet euphoria over his election has faded. Both blacks and whites were much less likely this year to say black people were better off than five years earlier than they did in a 2009 Pew survey after Mr. Obama’s first election. The latest nationwide survey of 2,200 adults was conducted this month after the Supreme Court in June effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, freeing nine states to change their election laws without advance federal approval.
“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
Not so much, though, that nearly half of all Americans — 49 percent in all, or 44 percent of whites, 48 percent of Hispanics and 79 percent of blacks — said a lot more progress needed to be made to achieve Dr. King’s vision of a colorblind society. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe there has been racial progress. Fully 80 percent of all Americans say at least some more needs to be done.
http://nyti.ms/14vUb0O
Trying to calm months of intense wrangling over the Western Wall, Israeli officials on Sunday unveiled a new plaza where men and women can pray together. But the move was immediately denounced as discriminatory by the main group that has protested the rules at the holy site.
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs, said the new plaza, in an archaeological park known as Robinson’s Arch, was an interim solution until a more comprehensive — and contentious — plan for a mixed-prayer section could overcome bureaucratic hurdles and opposition from archaeologists, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Muslim authorities. Built for about $80,000, the 4,800-square-foot platform is a “compromise,” Mr. Bennett said, whose “goal is to unify all the walks of Jewish life.”
Instead, the announcement ignited new divisions. Leaders of the Conservative and Reform movements of Judaism offered cautious praise, while Women of the Wall, the group whose monthly prayer sessions have prompted arrests and mass demonstrations over the past year, started a 24-hour sit-in to protest it. The prime minister’s office distanced itself from the new plaza, releasing a statement saying the government had yet to reach a decision on the matter.
Anat Hoffman, the leader of Women of the Wall, called Mr. Bennett’s new plaza a “monstrosity” that “looks like a sunbathing deck” or a “rock-star stage.” She said she would continue to push for access to the women’s section of the main area. As the sun fell Sunday, she and about a dozen supporters chanted the afternoon prayer under an Israeli flag near the Western Wall, then settled in with study materials for a long night.
“They’ve taken the keys to the holiest site and just given them to one extremist group that uses violence,” said Ms. Hoffman, referring to the ultra-Orthodox, who have in recent months shouted and spat at the women’s group. “We have to be vigilant and fight for every centimeter. We are equal.”
The struggle over prayer at the wall is one of many battles about religious practice and identity in Israel, and it has attracted much attention from Jewish leaders abroad.
A remnant of the retaining wall of the ancient temple, the Western Wall is one of Judaism’s most sacred sites, and since Israel took control of it from Jordan in the 1967 war, it has been a pilgrimage site for foreign tourists and a place for the daily prayers of thousands of Orthodox Israelis. It is governed by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, with prayer areas segregated by sex, and women are required to dress modestly and refrain from singing aloud. Since the late 1990s, mixed prayer has been allowed at Robinson’s Arch, by appointment, during limited hours and for a fee.
After 25 years in which legislation and legal rulings barred women from wearing prayer shawls and phylacteries at the site, the activist group won a court victory this spring allowing members to pray as they wish. Over the past several months, thousands of ultra-Orthodox young people have crammed the site to prevent the women from using it, creating a new set of problems.
As outrage among American and other international Jews mounted, Israel’s prime minister asked Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, to find a solution. Mr. Sharansky proposed a new mixed-prayer area adjacent to the women’s section and accessible from the main entrance, unlike the current Robinson’s Arch.
He also spoke about changes to the main plaza behind the current prayer area, and a governing body for the mixed area that would include non-Orthodox leaders.
The plaza Mr. Bennett unveiled Sunday sits atop scaffolding but remains several dozen feet below the main Western Wall area. To get there, visitors must wind their way through an archaeological park and up and down many stairs. Equipped with Torah scrolls and tables, prayer shawls and prayer books, it is open around the clock, for free, just like the main site. No one was there Sunday evening as the women’s group commenced its protest a few hundred yards away.
“If it is, as is suggested, a temporary step on the longer journey toward the transformative plan, then it’s a very nice step,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism. “But it’s a very, very small step — very modest.”
Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, described the move as “important steps forward,” adding, “Unfortunately, the interim solution is not going to satisfy everybody.”
Golden Rice: Lifesaver?
http://nyti.ms/19PO8Z7
ONE bright morning this month, 400 protesters smashed down the high fences surrounding a field in the Bicol region of the Philippines and uprooted the genetically modified rice plants growing inside.
Had the plants survived long enough to flower, they would have betrayed a distinctly yellow tint in the otherwise white part of the grain. That is because the rice is endowed with a gene from corn and another from a bacterium, making it the only variety in existence to produce beta carotene, the source of vitamin A. Its developers call it “Golden Rice.”
The concerns voiced by the participants in the Aug. 8 act of vandalism — that Golden Rice could pose unforeseen risks to human health and the environment, that it would ultimately profit big agrochemical companies — are a familiar refrain in the long-running controversy over the merits of genetically engineered crops. They are driving the desire among some Americans for mandatory “G.M.O.” labels on food with ingredients made from crops whose DNA has been altered in a laboratory. And they have motivated similar attacks on trials of other genetically modified crops in recent years: grapes designed to fight off a deadly virus in France, wheat designed to have a lower glycemic index in Australia, sugar beets in Oregon designed to tolerate a herbicide, to name a few.
“We do not want our people, especially our children, to be used in these experiments,” a farmer who was a leader of the protest told the Philippine newspaper Remate.
But Golden Rice, which appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 2000 before it was quite ready for prime time, is unlike any of the genetically engineered crops in wide use today, designed to either withstand herbicides sold by Monsanto and other chemical companies or resist insect attacks, with benefits for farmers but not directly for consumers.
And a looming decision by the Philippine government about whether to allow Golden Rice to be grown beyond its four remaining field trials has added a new dimension to the debate over the technology’s merits.
Not owned by any company, Golden Rice is being developed by a nonprofit group called the International Rice Research Institute with the aim of providing a new source of vitamin A to people both in the Philippines, where most households get most of their calories from rice, and eventually in many other places in a world where rice is eaten every day by half the population. Lack of the vital nutrient causes blindness in a quarter-million to a half-million children each year. It affects millions of people in Asia and Africa and so weakens the immune system that some two million die each year of diseases they would otherwise survive.
The destruction of the field trial, and the reasons given for it, touched a nerve among scientists around the world, spurring them to counter assertions of the technology’s health and environmental risks. On a petition supporting Golden Rice circulated among scientists and signed by several thousand, many vented a simmering frustration with activist organizations like Greenpeace, which they see as playing on misplaced fears of genetic engineering in both the developing and the developed worlds. Some took to other channels to convey to American foodies and Filipino farmers alike the broad scientific consensus that G.M.O.’s are not intrinsically more risky than other crops and can be reliably tested.
At stake, they say, is not just the future of biofortified rice but also a rational means to evaluate a technology whose potential to improve nutrition in developing countries, and developed ones, may otherwise go unrealized.
“There’s so much misinformation floating around about G.M.O.’s that is taken as fact by people,” said Michael D. Purugganan, a professor of genomics and biology and the dean for science at New York University, who sought to calm health-risk concerns in a primer on GMA News Online, a media outlet in the Philippines: “The genes they inserted to make the vitamin are not some weird manufactured material,” he wrote, “but are also found in squash, carrots and melons.”
Mr. Purugganan, who studies plant evolution, does not work on genetically engineered crops, and until recently had not participated in the public debates over the risks and benefits of G.M.O.’s. But having been raised in a middle-class family in Manila, he felt compelled to weigh in on Golden Rice. “A lot of the criticism of G.M.O.’s in the Western world suffers from a lack of understanding of how really dire the situation is in developing countries,” he said.
Some proponents of G.M.O.’s say that more critical questions, like where biotechnology should fall as a priority in the efforts to address the root causes of hunger and malnutrition and how to prevent a few companies from controlling it, would be easier to address were they not lumped together with unfounded fears by those who oppose G.M.O.’s.
“It is long past time for scientists to stand up and shout, ‘No more lies — no more fear-mongering,’ ” said Nina V. Fedoroff, a professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and a former science adviser to the American secretary of state, who helped spearhead the petition. “We’re talking about saving millions of lives here.”
Precisely because of its seemingly high-minded purpose, Golden Rice has drawn suspicion from biotechnology skeptics beyond the demonstrators who forced their way into the field trial. Many countries ban the cultivation of all genetically modified crops, and after the rice’s media debut early in the last decade, Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmentalist, called it a “Trojan horse” whose purpose was to gain public support for all manner of genetically modified crops that would benefit multinational corporations at the expense of poor farmers and consumers.
In a 2001 article, “The Great Yellow Hype,” the author Michael Pollan, a critic of industrial agriculture, suggested that it might have been developed to “win an argument rather than solve a public-health problem.” He cited biotechnology industry advertisements that featured the virtues of the rice, which at the time had to be ingested in large quantities to deliver a meaningful dose of vitamin A.
But the rice has since been retooled: a bowl now provides 60 percent of the daily requirement of vitamin A for healthy children. And Gerard Barry, the Golden Rice project leader at the International Rice Research Institute — and, it must be said, a former senior scientist and executive at Monsanto — suggests that attempts to discredit Golden Rice discount the suffering it could alleviate if successful. He said, too, that critics who suggest encouraging poor families to simply eat fruits and vegetables that contain beta carotene disregard the expense and logistical difficulties that would thwart such efforts.
Identified in the infancy of genetic engineering as having the potential for the biggest impact for the world’s poor, beta-carotene-producing rice was initially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the European Union. In a decade of work culminating in 1999, two academic scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, finally switched on the production of beta carotene by adding daffodil and bacteria DNA to the rice’s genome. They licensed their patent rights to the agribusiness company that later became Syngenta, on the condition that the technology and any improvements to it would be made freely available to poor farmers in the developing world. With the company retaining the right to use it in developed countries, potentially as an alternative to vitamin supplements, Syngenta scientists later improved the amount of beta carotene produced by substituting a gene from corn for the one from daffodil.
If the rice gains the Philippine government’s approval, it will cost no more than other rice for poor farmers, who will be free to save seeds and replant them, Dr. Barry said. It has no known allergens or toxins, and the new proteins produced by the rice have been shown to break down quickly in simulated gastric fluid, as required by World Health Organization guidelines. A mouse feeding study is under way in a laboratory in the United States. The potential that the Golden Rice would cross-pollinate with other varieties, sometimes called “genetic contamination,” has been studied and found to be limited, because rice is typically self-pollinated. And its production of beta carotene does not appear to provide a competitive advantage — or disadvantage — that could affect the survival of wild varieties with which it might mix.
If Golden Rice is a Trojan horse, it now has some company. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is supporting the final testing of Golden Rice, is also underwriting the development of crops tailored for sub-Saharan Africa, like cassava that can resist the viruses that routinely wipe out a third of the harvest, bananas that contain higher levels of iron and corn that uses nitrogen more efficiently. Other groups are developing a pest-resistant black-eyed pea and a “Golden Banana” that would also deliver vitamin A.
Beyond the fear of corporate control of agriculture, perhaps the most cited objection to G.M.O.’s is that they may hold risks that may not be understood. The decision to grow or eat them relies, like many other decisions, on a cost-benefit analysis.
How food consumers around the world weigh that calculation will probably have far-reaching consequences. Such crops, Scientific American declared in an editorial last week, will make it to people’s plates “only with public support.”
Greenpeace, for one, dismisses the benefits of vitamin supplementation through G.M.O.’s and has said it will continue to oppose all uses of biotechnology in agriculture. As Daniel Ocampo, a campaigner for the organization in the Philippines, put it, “We would rather err on the side of caution.”
For others, the potential of crops like Golden Rice to alleviate suffering is all that matters. “This technology can save lives,” one of the petition’s signers, Javier Delgado of Mexico, wrote. “But false fears can destroy it.”
Where Sand Is Gold, the Reserves Are Running Dry
http://nyti.ms/1f9R67W
With inviting beaches that run for miles along South Florida’s shores, it is easy to put sand into the same category as turbo air-conditioning and a decent mojito — something ever present and easily taken for granted.
As it turns out, though, sand is not forever. Constant erosion from storms and tides and a rising sea level continue to swallow up chunks of beach along Florida’s Atlantic coastline. Communities have spent the last few decades replenishing their beaches with dredged-up sand.
But in South Florida — Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties — concerns over erosion and the quest for sand are particularly urgent for one reason: there is almost no sand left offshore to replenish the beaches.
In these communities, sand is far from disposable; it is a precious commodity. So precious, in fact, that it has set off skirmishes among counties and has unleashed an intense hunt for more offshore sand by federal, state and local officials who are already fretting over the next big storm. No idea is too far-fetched in this quest, not even a proposal to grind down recycled glass and transform it into beach sand. The once-shelved idea is now being reconsidered by Broward County.
The situation is so dire that two counties to the north — St. Lucie and Martin — are being asked to donate their own offshore sand in the spirit of neighborliness.
“You have counties starting wars with each other over sand,” said Kristin Jacobs, the Broward County mayor, who has embraced the recycled glass idea as a possible stopgap. “Everybody feels like these other counties are going to steal their sand.”
St. Lucie and Martin Counties are none too keen to sacrifice their sand for the pleasures of South Florida. The last time the idea was mentioned, in 2006, it engendered accusations of subterfuge and raised so much ire that it was dropped. If recent public meetings on the issue held by the Army Corps of Engineers are any measure, little has changed, despite a new study by the corps that says the two counties have enough offshore sand for at least 50 years.
“What happens in 50 years when all that sand is gone?” asked Frannie Hutchinson, a St. Lucie County commissioner. “Where are we supposed to go then? I told them to take their sand shovels and sand buckets and go home and come up with a better plan.”
In a state where the lure of pristine beaches is pivotal to a robust economy, hoarding sand is not unlike stocking the basement with toilet paper, water and peanut butter. One never knows when the next storm could sweep away a beach and wreak havoc on beach communities.
“When we got hit with back-to-back hurricanes, we had no beach in front of our infrastructures: A1A was wiped out,” Ms. Hutchinson said, referring to storms that engulfed a busy beachfront road.
The reason for all this agitation is straightforward: Miami-Dade County is officially out of offshore sand, which is environmentally sound and easily accessible. The last piles will be depleted in February, when sand replenishment is completed on the beach of the affluent village of Bal Harbour.
Broward County is not much better off; its offshore sand is nearly depleted. And Palm Beach County’s stocks are dwindling rapidly.
The reasons for the disappearing supply of sand are various. For one, these counties have been refurbishing their beaches for decades. The problem has also been worsened by sea-level rise and the number of jetties, or cuts to build seaports, that have proliferated, which causes sand to pile up on one side of the jetty but not the other.
The scarcity of sand is also a function of geography. There are three reef tracks running alongside Miami-Dade and Broward, which make dredging difficult. And the continental shelf narrows greatly here, meaning the ocean gets too deep too quickly.
So while erosion is a problem along all beaches on the Eastern Seaboard, other counties and states to the north have large areas of ocean they can use to dredge sand. In South Florida, the slice is relatively minuscule.
“We are just limited in the actual amount of sand that’s available to us,” said Stephen Blair, who is in charge of beach restoration for Miami-Dade. “They have a much bigger area in which to look for sand.”
In South Florida, offshore sand has been essential in bolstering constantly eroding beaches, and healthy beaches are vital to tourism. Guests who routinely pay $400 a night for a Miami Beach hotel room come with expectations. One of them is sand to frolic on.
“They are not inclined to come if there are no beaches to lay on,” said Jason Harrah, the Army Corps project manager overseeing Miami-Dade beach restoration.
Broward County faces the same problem. “There is pressure from everybody — governments, the chambers of commerce,” said Eric Myers, who is in charge of Broward County beach restoration.
Beaches also safeguard the health of the high-priced cities and towns that abut them. Wide beaches, preferably with dunes and vegetation, protect buildings and roads by serving as buffers to waves churned up by large storms.
“These beaches, people think they are recreational, but they are storm damage reduction,” Mr. Harrah said. “They are meant to sacrifice themselves for the loss of property or life. In the event we have that kind of storm, we wouldn’t have the means to replenish them.”
Offshore sand has always been the first choice to counter beach erosion. It is inexpensive and does not disrupt reefs or marine life. This is why the Army Corps and the state are hoping that Martin and St. Lucie Counties will come around and free up some of their sand, which could then be dredged and shipped farther south.
The only other option at the moment is buying sand from mines in Central Florida and trucking it in, which is what Broward County is doing for a stretch of its beaches. Doing so is more expensive, reserved for low-volume projects, logistically difficult and largely disliked.
“There would be 20,000 trucks going through South Beach in tourist season, so you can imagine that,” Mr. Harrah said.
A third option is buying sand from countries in the Caribbean, possibly the Bahamas. Under United States law, the Army Corps must show that domestic sand is not available for economic or environmental reasons before it can use foreign sand.
Broward County is exploring the cost of recycling glass to fill small gaps in its beaches — it is more costly than offshore sand, but it is not yet clear by how much. Broward would also have to find a nearby facility to process the glass and complete the final phase of its environmental study. Other states have used recycled glass, but mostly for small projects like golf courses.
For now, the idea remains on the table. It is creative, said Ms. Jacobs, the Broward County mayor. It could promote a market for glass, she added.
Broward is looking to finance the last part of its environmental study, and will weigh the costs. The sand has so far proved an excellent mimic of regular sand, which is used to produce glass, after all. “If we could generate our own sand,” Ms. Jacobs said, “it would be fantastic.”
Can Cities Adjust to a Retreating Coastline?
http://nyti.ms/1dMqlZ8
I won't stick that one under a cut, it's full of links.
In Paper War, Flood of Liens Is the Weapon
http://nyti.ms/13N0luO
One of the first inklings Sheriff Richard Stanek had that something was wrong came with a call from the mortgage company handling his refinancing.
“It must be a mistake,” he said, when the loan officer told him that someone had placed liens totaling more than $25 million on his house and on other properties he owned.
But as Sheriff Stanek soon learned, the liens, legal claims on property to secure the payment of a debt, were just the earliest salvos in a war of paper, waged by a couple who had lost their home to foreclosure in 2009 — a tactic that, with the spread of an anti-government ideology known as the “sovereign citizen” movement, is being employed more frequently as a way to retaliate against perceived injustices.
Over the next three years, the couple, Thomas and Lisa Eilertson, filed more than $250 billion in liens, demands for compensatory damages and other claims against more than a dozen people, including the sheriff, county attorneys, the Hennepin County registrar of titles and other court officials.
“It affects your credit rating, it affected my wife, it affected my children,” Sheriff Stanek said of the liens. “We spent countless hours trying to undo it.”
Cases involving sovereign citizens are surfacing increasingly here in Minnesota and in other states, posing a challenge to law enforcement officers and court officials, who often become aware of the movement — a loose network of groups and individuals who do not recognize the authority of federal, state or municipal government — only when they become targets. Although the filing of liens for outrageous sums or other seemingly frivolous claims might appear laughable, dealing with them can be nightmarish, so much so that the F.B.I. has labeled the strategy “paper terrorism.” A lien can be filed by anyone under the Uniform Commercial Code.
Occasionally, people who identify with the movement have erupted into violence. In Las Vegas this week, the police said that an undercover sting operation stopped a plot to torture and kill police officers in order to bring attention to the movement. Two people were arrested. In 2010, two police officers in Arkansas were killed while conducting a traffic stop with a father and son involved in the movement.
Mostly, though, sovereign citizens choose paper as their weapon. In Gadsden, Ala., three people were arrested in July for filing liens against victims including the local district attorney and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. And in Illinois this month, a woman who, like most sovereign citizens, chose to represent herself in court, confounded a federal judge by asking him to rule on a flurry of unintelligible motions.
“I hesitate to rank your statements in order of just how bizarre they are,” the judge told the woman, who was facing charges of filing billions of dollars in false liens.
“The convergence of the evidence strongly suggests a movement that is flourishing,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League. “It is present in every single state in the country.”
The sovereign citizen movement traces its roots to white extremist groups like the Posse Comitatus of the 1970s, and the militia movement. Terry L. Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombing conspirator, counted himself a sovereign citizen. But in recent years it has drawn from a much wider demographic, including blacks, members of Moorish sects and young Occupy protesters, said Detective Moe Greenberg of the Baltimore County Police Department, who has written about the movement.
The ideology seems to attract con artists, the financially desperate and people who are fed up with bureaucracy, Mr. Pitcavage said, adding, “But we’ve seen airline pilots, we’ve seen federal law enforcement officers, we’ve seen city councilmen and millionaires get involved with this movement.”
Sovereign citizens believe that in the 1800s, the federal government was gradually subverted and replaced by an illegitimate government. They create their own driver’s licenses and include their thumbprints on documents to distinguish their flesh and blood person from a “straw man” persona that they say has been created by the false government. When writing their names, they often add punctuation marks like colons or hyphens.
Adherents to the movement have been involved in a host of debt evasion schemes and mortgage and tax frauds. Two were convicted in Cleveland recently for collecting $8 million in fraudulent tax refunds from the I.R.S. And in March, Tim Turner, the leader of one large group, the Republic for the united States of America, was sentenced in Alabama to 18 years in federal prison. (His group does not capitalize the first letter in united.)
Sovereign citizens who file creditor claims are helped by the fact that in most states, the secretary of state must accept any lien that is filed without judging its validity.
The National Association of Secretaries of State released a report in April on sovereign citizens, urging state officials to find ways to expedite the removal of liens and increase penalties for fraudulent filings. More than a dozen states have enacted laws giving state filing offices more discretion in accepting liens, and an increasing number of states have passed or are considering legislation to toughen the penalties for bogus filings.
The Eilertsons, who were charged with 47 counts of fraudulent filing and sentenced in June to 23 months in prison, were prosecuted under a Minnesota law that makes it a felony to file fraudulent documents to retaliate against officials. John Ristad, an assistant Ramsey County attorney who handled the case, said he believed the Eilertsons were the first offenders to be prosecuted under the law. “It got me angry,” he said, “because at the end of the day, these two are bullies who think they can get their way by filing paper.”
The liens were filed against houses, vehicles and even mineral rights. In an affidavit, the Hennepin County examiner of titles said that in a conversation with the Eilertsons about their foreclosure, one of them told her, “We’re gonna have to lien ya.” The examiner later found that a lien for more than $5.1 million had been placed on her property.
If the purpose was to instill trepidation, it worked. Several county and state officials said in interviews that they worried that they might once again find themselves in the crosshairs. One state employee said it was scarier to engage with offenders who used sovereign citizen tactics than with murderers, given the prospect of facing lawsuits or fouled credit ratings.
Like many who identify with the ideology, the Eilertsons learned the techniques of document filing online from one of many sovereign citizen “gurus” who offer instruction or seminars around the country.
In hours of recorded conversation found by the authorities on their computer, the Eilertsons consulted with a man identified on the recordings as Paul Kappel, learning what he called “death by a thousand paper cuts.”
Mr. Eilertson, interviewed at the state prison in Bayport, Minn., denied being anti-government or belonging to any movement. But he was familiar with the names of some figures associated with sovereign citizen teachings, including an activist named David Wynn Miller, who Mr. Eilertson said was “ahead of his time.” (Mr. Miller writes his name as David-Wynn: Miller.)
Mr. Eilertson, who had no previous criminal record, said his actions were an effort to fight back against corrupt banks that had handed off the couple’s mortgage time after time and whose top executives never faced consequences for their actions.
“It seemed like we were being attacked every day,” he said. “We needed some way to stop the foreclosure.
“We tried to do our part with as much information as we had available,” he said, though he conceded that “it kind of got out of control eventually.”
Race Equality Is Still a Work in Progress, Survey Finds
http://nyti.ms/14YbeUA
August 22, 2013
Race Equality Is Still a Work in Progress, Survey Finds
By SAM ROBERTS
Fewer than one in three black Americans and not even half of whites say the United States has made “a lot” of progress toward achieving racial equality in the half-century since the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared he had “a dream” that one day freedom, justice and brotherhood would prevail and that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
As the nation is poised to observe the 50th anniversary next week of the March on Washington that Dr. King led, the poll and an analysis of racial disparities by the Pew Research Center conclude that while five decades’ progress has been palpable on some fronts, Dr. King’s goal remains elusive on others.
Blacks and whites generally agree that the two races get along well, but about 7 in 10 blacks and more than 1 in 4 whites also concur that blacks are treated unequally by the criminal justice system. A majority of blacks also say they are treated less fairly than whites in public schools and in the workplace. Fully 1 in 3 blacks, 1 in 5 Hispanic Americans and 1 in 10 whites said they were treated unfairly within the last year because of perceptions of their race.
Though gaps in life expectancy and high school graduation rates have all but been eliminated, disparities in poverty and homeownership rates are about the same. Compared with five decades ago, imbalances in household income and wealth, marriage and incarceration rates have widened.
Rich Morin, an author of the Pew report, said he was struck by the disparity in perceptions of progress by race and political affiliation. “Whites and blacks view their communities very differently in terms of how blacks are treated,” Mr. Morin said. Over all, he said, “we’re clearly headed in the right direction.”
“People saw progress,” he said, “but they want more.”
The average three-member black household makes about 59 percent of what a similar white household makes — up from 55 percent in 1967 — but the income gap in actual dollars widened to $27,000 from $19,000. (The gap has widened between whites and Hispanic people, too.)
The median net worth of white households is 14 times that of black households, and blacks are nearly three times as likely to be living below the federal poverty threshold. The disparity in homeownership rates is the widest in four decades. As the Pew study noted, those realities are not lost on most Americans, only 1 in 10 of whom said the average black person is better off financially than the average white person (although more than 4 in 10 white and Hispanic respondents said the average black is about as well off as the average white).
Though marriage rates have generally declined over all, about 55 percent of whites and 31 percent of blacks 18 and older are married, compared with 74 percent of whites and 61 percent of blacks in 1960, a reflection, in part, of differences in educational attainment.
The gap in college completion rates rose to 13 percentage points from 6 (although the black completion rate, as a percentage of the white rate, has improved to 62 percent from 42 percent. The Hispanic rate remains at 42 percent).
In 1960, black men were five times as likely as white men to be in local, state or federal prison. Fifty years later, black men are six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated and Hispanic men three times as likely.
The historic disparity in voter turnout evaporated in 2012 with the re-election of President Obama, yet euphoria over his election has faded. Both blacks and whites were much less likely this year to say black people were better off than five years earlier than they did in a 2009 Pew survey after Mr. Obama’s first election. The latest nationwide survey of 2,200 adults was conducted this month after the Supreme Court in June effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, freeing nine states to change their election laws without advance federal approval.
“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
Not so much, though, that nearly half of all Americans — 49 percent in all, or 44 percent of whites, 48 percent of Hispanics and 79 percent of blacks — said a lot more progress needed to be made to achieve Dr. King’s vision of a colorblind society. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe there has been racial progress. Fully 80 percent of all Americans say at least some more needs to be done.
