Justice Department Sets Up Hotline for Foes of Alabama’s Immigration Law

Published October 13, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Opponents of Alabama’s new immigration law can now call the Justice Department directly to make complaints about the state’s effort to crack down on illegal immigrants.

The Justice Department has set up a hotline and email for the public “to report potential civil rights concerns related to the impact of Alabama’s immigration law.”

The Justice Department is seeking to block the enforcement of the law, which is widely considered the toughest in the nation. Justice officials filed a challenge to the law last week, claiming it is “highly likely to expose persons lawfully in the United States, including school children, to new difficulties in routine dealings.”

Alabama responded by defending its right to enforce the law and the Justice Department filed its latest salvo this week.

“The Constitution does not vest Alabama with authority to deter illegal immigration except through means contemplated by Congress,” the department’s filing said. “The statute marks a radical departure in the treatment of aliens in the United States, resulting in significant adverse implications for our foreign policy, hardships for aliens lawfully in the United States, and burdens on other States of the Union.”

The overhaul allows authorities to question people suspected of being in the country illegally and hold them without bond. It also lets officials check the immigration status of students in public schools.

A federal judge in Alabama upheld those two key aspects of the law, which have already taken effect.

Those provisions that took effect are what help make the Alabama law stricter than similar laws passed in Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia. Other federal judges have blocked all or parts of the laws in those states.

Immigration became a hot issue in Alabama over the past decade as the state’s Hispanic population grew by 145 percent to about 185,600. While the group still represents only about 4 percent of the population, some counties in north Alabama have large Spanish-speaking communities and schools where most of the students are Hispanic.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011…migration-law/

Holy Peter Pan! Peanut butter prices are going up

Stock up now while you can afford to.   Today I paid  4.67 for a big jar, in November that same jar will cost $2 more.

Bob Andres / AP

Prices for peanuts are skyrocketing, so shoppers will be seeing the cost of peanut butter soar soon.

Will moms be skipping the Skippy?

The price of peanut butter, that American lunch bag staple, is going up, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The reason: peanut prices have skyrocketed after a hot, dry summer decimated the crop.

According to the Journal, the price for J.M. Smucker Co’s Jif is going up 30 percent beginning in November and the price of Conagra’s Peter Pan brand will rise 24 percent in the next few weeks. The paper said Unilever, which owns the Skippy brand, would not comment on pricing, but a spokesman for Wegman’s Food Markets said it’s paying up to 35 percent more for wholesale, including Skippy, than it did a year ago.

Prices for Kraft’s Planter’s brand will rise 40 percent at the end of the month.

http://msnbc.com

Jumping The Shark…Sport Of #OWS Protesters And George Soros

Jumping The Shark…Sport Of #OWS Protesters And George Soros.

http://thatmrgguy.wordpress.com/

Is George Soros behind the Occupy movement?

Who’s behind the Wall St. protests?

By Mark Egan and Michelle Nichols

NEW YORK | Thu Oct 13, 2011 11:09am EDT

(Reuters) – Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest men.

There has been much speculation over who is financing the disparate protest, which has spread to cities across America and lasted nearly four weeks. One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.

“I can understand their sentiment,” Soros told reporters last week at the United Nations about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which are expected to spur solidarity marches globally on Saturday.

Pressed further for his views on the movement and the protesters, Soros refused to be drawn in. But conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation when he told his listeners last week, “George Soros money is behind this.”

Soros, 81, is No. 7 on the Forbes 400 list with a fortune of $22 billion, which has ballooned in recent years as he deftly responded to financial market turmoil. He has pledged to give away all his wealth, half of it while he earns it and the rest when he dies.

Like the protesters, Soros is no fan of the 2008 bank bailouts and subsequent government purchase of the toxic sub-prime mortgage assets they amassed in the property bubble.

The protesters say the Wall Street bank bailouts in 2008 left banks enjoying huge profits while average Americans suffered under high unemployment and job insecurity with little help from Washington. They contend that the richest 1 percent of Americans have amassed vast fortunes while being taxed at a lower rate than most people.

BANKING LIFE SUPPORT

Soros in 2009 wrote in an editorial that the purchase of toxic bank assets would, “provide artificial life support for the banks at considerable expense to the taxpayer.”

He urged the Obama administration to take bolder action, either by recapitalizing or nationalizing the banks and forcing them to lend at attractive rates. His advice went unheeded.

The Hungarian-American was an early supporter of the 2008 election campaign of Barack Obama, who will seek a second term as president in the November, 2012, election. He has long backed liberal causes – the Open Society Institute, the foreign policy think tank Council on Foreign Relations and Human Rights Watch.

According to disclosure documents from 2007-2009, Soros’ Open Society gave grants of $3.5 million to the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based group that acts almost like a clearing house for other donors, directing their contributions to liberal non-profit groups. Among others the Tides Center has partnered with are the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

Disclosure documents also show Tides, which declined comment, gave Adbusters grants of $185,000 from 2001-2010, including nearly $26,000 between 2007-2009.

Aides to Soros say any connection is tenuous and that Soros has never heard of Adbusters. Soros himself declined comment.

The Vancouver-based group, which publishes a magazine and runs such campaigns as “Digital Detox Week” and “Buy Nothing Day,” says it wants to “change the way corporations wield power” and its goal is “to topple existing power structures.”

SLOW START

Adbusters, whose magazine has a circulation of 120,000 and which is known for its spoofs of popular advertisements, came up with the Occupy Wall Street idea after Arab Spring protests toppled governments in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, said Kalle Lasn, 69, Adbusters co-founder.

“It came out of these brainstorming sessions we have at Adbusters,” Lasn told Reuters, adding they began promoting it online on July 13. “We were inspired by what happened in Tunisia and Egypt and we had this feeling that America was ripe for a Tahrir moment.”

“We felt there was a real rage building up in America, and we thought that we would like to create a spark which would give expression for this rage.”

Lasn said Adbusters is 95 percent funded by subscribers paying for the magazine. “George Soros’s ideas are quite good, many of them. I wish he would give Adbusters some money, we sorely need it,” he said. “He’s never given us a penny.”

Other support for Occupy Wall Street has come from online funding website Kickstarter, where more than $75,000 has been pledged, deliveries of food and from cash dropped in a bucket at the park. Liberal film maker Michael Moore has also pledged to donate money.

The protests began in earnest on September 17, triggered by an Adbusters campaign featuring a provocative poster showing a ballerina dancing atop the famous bronze bull in New York’s financial district as a crowd of protesters wearing gas masks approach behind her.

Dressed in anarchist black, the battle-ready mob is shrouded in a fog suggestive of tear gas or fires burning. Some are wearing gas masks, others wielding sticks. The poster’s message seems to be a heady combination of sexuality, violence, excitement and adventure.

Former carpenter Robert Daros, 23, saw that poster in a cafe in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Having lost his work as a carpenter after Florida’s speculative construction boom collapsed in a heap of sub-prime mortgage foreclosures, he quit his job as a bartender and traveled to New York City with just a sleeping bag and the hope of joining the protest movement.

Daros was one of the first people to arrive on Wall Street for the so-called occupation on September 17, when protesters marched and tried to camp on Wall Street only to be driven off by police to Zuccotti Park – two acres of concrete without a blade of grass near the rising One World Trade Center.

“When I was a carpenter, I lost my job because the financier of my project was arrested for corporate fraud,” said Daros, who was wearing a red arm band to show he was helping out in the medic section of the Occupy Wall Street camp.

Since its obscure beginnings, the campaign has drawn global media attention in places as far-flung as Iran and China. The Times of London, however, was not alone when it called the protests “Passionate but Pointless.”

Adbusters’ co-founder Lasn dismisses that, reeling off specific demands: a tax on the richest 1 percent, a tax on currency trades and a tax on all financial transactions.

“Down the road, there will be crystal clear demands coming out of this movement,” he said. “But this first phase of the movement is messy and leaderless and demandless.”

“I think it was perfect the way it happened.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/13/us-wallstreet-protests-origins-idUSTRE79C1YN20111013

UPDATE: Gibson Guitar CEO slams U.S. raids as “overreach”

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON | Wed Oct 12, 2011 6:06pm EDT

(Reuters) – Gibson Guitar Corp.’s chief slammed the U.S. government on Wednesday for sending armed agents to raid two Tennessee factories under a law aimed at curbing the illegal harvest of tropical hardwoods.

“Armed people came in our factory … evacuated our employees, then seized half a million dollars of our goods without any charges having been filed,” Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz told reporters and others at a Washington lunch.

“I think it’s a clear overreach,” he said.

Government agents seized a total of over $1 million worth of rosewood, ebony and finished guitars from Gibson factories in Memphis and Nashville in raids in 2009 and August of this year, Juszkiewicz said.

He brought samples of rosewood and ebony to the lunch; these tropical hardwoods, used in guitar fingerboards, are prized for their strength and tone. Gibson’s factories remain open “under great difficulty” because the raids took most of the company’s raw materials, the CEO said.

The U.S. Justice Department declined on Wednesday to comment on the case but provided information on the Lacey Act, which aims to curb trafficking in wildlife, fish and plant products, including illegally obtained timber.

“By prohibiting trafficking in wood illegally harvested overseas, the Lacey Act prohibits companies from undercutting law-abiding U.S. wood products companies … by trading in artificially inexpensive raw materials that have been illegally harvested from foreign forests,” Justice and Interior department officials wrote in a letter.

Gibson Guitar uses a small fraction of the world’s tropical hardwoods, compared to that used for furniture and flooring, and because it uses so little it can use it sustainably, Juszkiewicz said. He said his company has been a leader in this area with its line of SmartWood instruments, using wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

“The issue here is not illegal logging or some conservation abuse,” he said. “The laws that are being identified by the Department of Justice have to do with protectionism by the country of origin, keeping work in that country and therefore not allowing something that isn’t that value-added to be exported.”

The Lacey Act, enacted in 1900 and amended in 2008 to broaden the range of plant products it includes, makes it illegal to trade in plants obtained in violation of U.S. or foreign law.

Those who unknowingly possess an instrument containing wood that was taken illegally “do not have criminal exposure,” the government said in a letter responding to questions from members of Congress on the Gibson case.

Gibson has filed suit in federal court in Nashville to recover the seized material, but that suit has been stayed while the investigation continues, Juszkiewicz said.

Meantime, Gibson’s chief said the law should be changed.

“I believe in the intent of the law … but I do believe that the way it’s currently written allows what’s happening to me to happen to other companies, and that’s wrong,” he said.

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner invited Juszkiewicz to join him in the speaker’s box to watch President Barack Obama’s address on jobs to joint session of Congress on September 8.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/12/us-guitar-idUSTRE79B7PT20111012