http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/opinion/25sun3.html?th&emc=th
A Chilling Departure From the Capitol NY Timed Editorial: December 25, 2005 One of the shabbiest shell games of the year was played out in the closing hours of Congress in its now-you-see-it, now-you-don't offering of some badly needed winter heating aid to the nation's working poor. The climactic moment occurred when Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, huckstering his most treasured goal, tried to sell oil drilling in his state's pristine wildlife preserve by promising it would help finance a long list of shoppers' bonuses for his colleagues: extra money for flu vaccine, hurricane reconstruction, first-responder radios and - if you vote yes right away - $2 billion in extra heating aid for the poor this cold winter. Mr. Stevens's cunning warning was that all those extras would die on the vine unless Alaska drilling was approved. His cynical flimflammery was deservedly rebuffed as enough opponents stood firm against the oil drilling. And soon enough the word went round that things like flu vaccine and hurricane aid were not endangered after all. Not so the extra fuel aid for low-income families. There was a heating supplement tied to the Alaska proposal, as Mr. Stevens promised. But there was also a separate $2 billion appropriated for the same purpose elsewhere in the legislation - unconnected to the Alaska floor machinations - that somehow was struck from the final bill as lawmakers rushed to recess. Malice? Who can say? Obviously the poor can't afford a campaign donation PAC to catch Congress's attention for an answer. The government's home heating supplement now stands at a half or less of what the poor will need if predictions of a harsh winter pan out and fuel bills increase 25 percent. Various studies have established that, in a pinch, the poor scrimp on food purchases in order to meet heating bills. Yet Congress's stinginess is being compounded by the administration's recent decision to reject a request from New York and several other states to increase food stamp outlays to the poor as fuel bills mount. Lawmakers insist that the $2 billion supplement technically had to be cut - but may be restored yet again next month. Believe that and we have an oil derrick to sell you in Alaska. *** http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122405Z.shtml Christmas in New Orleans By Fatima Shaik In These Times Thursday 22 December 2005 Picture Santa's sled with a rolling kitchenette attached and you have some idea about the size of a FEMA trailer. I came across a yard of them when I got lost on the highway near Baton Rouge, where most of my family evacuated out of New Orleans. The trailers are not the double-wides I imagined - but some are festooned with lights and an artificial Christmas tree outside the door as in a Bobbie Ann Mason short story. A FEMA trailer is more like a camper that you'd attach with a hitch to your four-wheeler when you want to get out of the city for the weekend. Tiny, but nonetheless a gift. As the rest of the country, children and adults alike, envision Christmas with piles of presents from their favorite electronic and clothing stores, the people of the Katrina diaspora are waking up daily with thoughts of clean underwear, one comfortable chair and not being home for the holidays. But they are trying to make it. In the town of Baker, the trailers sit row after incalculable row on a dusty field isolated from the sleepy community. Baker is a town where Main Street sits along the railroad tracks and leads from the interstate past the chemical plant and the playground to the church and two roads named Magnolia. An estimated 1,700 people live on the Baker plain. It is a good mile from any shopping or familiar community life. The FEMA park is named Renaissance Village, for the RVs as much as the hopes of their occupants. Other evacuees stay in temporary apartments and pile into houses around Baton Rouge. One of my cousins hosted 70 people in her home in the days after the hurricane. Now, life means close quarters, small irritations and long hugs with too many memories of home. Evacuees send e-mails to each other with Christmas poetry wistful for beignets, king cakes and burgers at Port of Call. People who lived for their front porches and pecan trees are getting used to seeing a clear, cold night sky. Like children making their wish lists to Santa, the evacuees are hoping hard and wondering if they will ever regain shelter, sanity and a decent future. The Christmas commerce that exists in the welcoming malls of the North is a harsh contrast to the stores and hotels of New Orleans, that were boarded up for protection and to keep out Katrina's homeless. People joke about spending food stamps on Christmas candy or presents or seafood for gumbo, and the reasons not to hoard instant noodles and canned goods. The suddenly indigent now recognize the delicate balance between entitlement and nutrition. The jokes these days are edgy. Once voting for governor was a choice between the Klansman and the Crook. (Vote for the Crook, my folks advised everyone.) Now, the joke is "Where's Waldo?," with bank officers and city and government officials hard to find. Best friends and neighbors whose family connections extend for generations now meet fleetingly before traveling to jobs in one city or another. Relatives lose precious phone numbers and castigate themselves for doing everything wrong. Those who escaped Katrina have not escaped worry and longing. Going home for the holidays are mostly the elderly and infirm. Their homecomings take place in downtown New Orleans at one of the three St. Louis cemeteries, which hold some of the city's most permanent residents. Still, the survivors talk openly to strangers in crowded meeting halls. People with dedication and sympathetic hearts are working and planning. As in New Orleans' early days, crooks and futurists are finding commonalities in notions of a new frontier. Individuals are washing their houses by cup and spoon. They are teaching their children that kindness is sharing a bottle of water and self-sufficiency is keeping some. When the nation emerges from its pile of gifts on Christmas morning and picks up the newspaper or moves to the television, will Americans still attend to the people of New Orleans? Or will Katrina's poor folk move back toward the invisibility where they existed for so many years? The people of south Louisiana may accept their lot or maybe disappointments will fester. Let us hope that they bear no bitterness if America moves on. In poor Louisiana, the community of Katrina survivors is looking for miracles. At this time of the year, they are finding a parallel to their tragedy and hardship from long ago: There was no room at the inn for the first Christmas and few places to rest their heads now for the people of New Orleans. Fatima Shaik is the author of four books set in Louisiana and a former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. She currently teaches at Saint Peter's College and is completing a non-fiction book about the Societe d'Economie, a black benevolent association that worked in her neighborhood for more than 100 years. *** http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051224/BETH LEHEM24/Front/Idx Globe and Mail Saturday, December 24, 2005 Page A1 Wall casts shadow over Bethlehem By Mark MacKinnon Bethlehem, West Bank -- These should be the most festive of times in what is, for many, among the holiest of places. Instead, the mood in Bethlehem in the lead-up to Christmas has had a pall cast over it by the latest growth in what residents here loathingly refer to as "the wall." "Look around. It's just a few days before Christmas and there's not 10 people in Bethlehem," sighed Naser Alawy, a souvenir vendor, waving his hand around a deserted Manger Square. After four consecutive holiday seasons blighted by the bloody intifada, residents here had been hoping for an influx of tourists this Christmas season to boost the city out of its prolonged economic slump. Tourism across the quasi-border in Israel has increased dramatically this year as the violence ebbs, and Bethlehem was beginning to see the benefits of that in recent months. More and more pilgrims were making the 15-minute drive south from Jerusalem to the city where, according to the Bible, Jesus Christ was born. But on Nov. 15, Israel sealed one of the last remaining gaps in the eight-metre-high concrete wall it is building along Bethlehem's northern border. Pilgrims trying to reach the holy city were directed to cross through a new system of passport checks, iron turnstiles and metal detectors. Individual travellers are now often forbidden from taking their vehicles inside Bethlehem, and are forced instead to cross on foot through a massive bunker that resembles a bomb shelter in shape, before hailing a taxi on the other side. Tour groups on buses only have to show their passports to enter, but upon returning to Israel must cross on foot through the bunker and pass the airport-style security. There's no apparent wheelchair accessibility. "If Mary and Joseph were here today, they would go through the checkpoint just like everybody else," Sister Erica, a nun, complained to a reporter last week after making the crossing. Based on anecdotal evidence, tourism in Bethlehem, already at a low ebb, has taken a fresh hit since the new checkpoint began operating. Many shop owners in the city said last week that business was so bad that they wouldn't bother opening until right before Christmas Day. Hotel owners complained that tourists who had made reservations to stay overnight in the city were returning to Jerusalem ahead of schedule, worried they would have trouble crossing back into Israel if they stay too long. "It's a tragedy. People shouldn't be building walls here, they should be building bridges," said Xavier de Dumast, a 45-year-old French pilgrim who recently visited the Church of the Nativity. "I was here five years ago, and it was alive, people were everywhere. Now it's completely dead. It's a prison." The checkpoint is actually situated well inside the Bethlehem governorate, slicing about 750 acres of agricultural land away from the city. Everything on the other side, including thick olive groves that numerous Bethlehemites depended on for their livelihoods, is now considered by Israel to be part of an expanded Jerusalem. A section of the security barrier juts deep into Bethlehem so that Rachel's Tomb, a site holy to Judaism as the resting place of Jacob's wife, is on the Israeli side of the wall, making it easily accessible to tourists and effectively annexing it to Israel. Under the 1994 Oslo Accords, Rachel's Tomb and the entire Bethlehem governorate were supposed to be under full Palestinian control. The Bethlehem security terminal is the first to open of 16 such crossings that Israel plans to build in the highly controversial, 680-kilometre-long West Bank barrier. The others are supposed to be ready by early 2006. Israel says the new security measures are necessary because, although Bethlehem has a reputation as one of the quieter parts of the West Bank, suicide bombers from other parts had taken advantage of the old, relatively loose crossing at Bethlehem to reach Israeli cities. Highlighting that the city is not as calm as it often seems, masked gunmen last week took over Bethlehem city hall, which sits right on Manger Square, in a dispute over unpaid salaries. "The reason why we have the security fence and the crossing there is strictly for security alone. A much lower level of attacks has come from Bethlehem since the fence was built there," said Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenthal. However, under pressure from Christian groups and tour operators -- and aware that they risked a public-relations disaster -- the Israeli military announced on Dec. 19 that it was temporarily easing the crossing by requiring only randomly selected tourists to go through the new terminal. The lighter regime would apply only until the end of the Christmas season, an army spokesman said, when the stricter rules would be re-applied. The Vatican was among those who complained. In his traditional pre-Christmas press conference, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land, said the wall around Bethlehem had turned the city into a "big prison." A Palestinian Authority official keeping tabs on the number of foreign tourists in town said less than 100 people passed through the church's three-foot-high front entrance on the day Mr. de Dumast was there, well below the normal daily range of 200 to 800 tourists. Jack Elias, owner of the Star Hotel in Bethlehem, blames the new security measures for the loss of a group of 70 Czech tourists that left his hotel just four days into a seven-day reservation. He said his guests told him they felt uncomfortable feeling so sealed off from Jerusalem and the airport in Tel Aviv. "In the future, tourists will only visit for the day. They will not stay overnight in Bethlehem," Mr. Elias predicted. On the main shopping street connecting Manger Square to the Milk Grotto chapel, only two of 25 souvenir stores on one stretch were open on the same afternoon. Nearly every family in Bethlehem is in some way reliant on the tourist trade for income, so the economic blow has been a heavy one for the city's 30,000 residents. Despite the gloom, Manger Square was nonetheless decked out with glowing stars and images of Santa Claus. The mayor said he is planning a celebration in spite of it all. "This is for the citizens of Bethlehem, so that they enjoy Christmas like anywhere else, and to tell the tourists to come to Bethlehem and enjoy the holy city," said Mayor Victor Batarseh. But for all his attempts at good cheer, he confessed the situation was becoming increasingly desperate. "We need tourists, we need pilgrims to come to Bethlehem," he said plaintively. "We need them to break this wall, not with violence, but with their mass crossings." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> For $25, 15 Afghan women can learn to read. 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