NEWS
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Contents © 2006
by Jim Holman.
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NEWS
March 2006
A SECOND EXECUTION in little over month was performed at San Quentin state prison on January 17. (Stanley Tookie Williams died at San Quentin last December.) Clarence Ray Allen, 76, was executed by lethal injection at about 12:30 a.m. In 1982, Allen was convicted of the murders of three persons in Fresno, one of whom had testified against him in an earlier case in which he was convicted of murdering his son's girlfriend in 1974. While in prison, Allen paid a former inmate, Billy Ray Hamilton, $25,000 to carry out the murders. Hamilton also faces the death penalty for the murders. Allen denied any part in the killings.
Calls for clemency were issued for Allen in the days before his execution, saying, because he suffered ill health, execution would be cruel and unusual punishment. Allen recently had a heart attack, suffered from diabetes, was legally blind, and used a wheelchair. But on January 14, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency, writing, "my respect for the rule of law and review of the facts in this case lead to my decision to deny clemency. While serving a life sentence for murder, Allen executed a plan to silence witnesses. Allen's crimes are the most dangerous sort because they attack the justice system itself. The passage of time does not excuse Allen from the jury's punishment." The federal ninth circuit court of appeals refused to issue a stay of execution, and the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an appeal, without comment, except for a brief dissent from Justice Stephen Breyer. Noting that Allen had been on death row for 23 years, Breyer wrote, "I believe that in the circumstances, he raises a significant question as to whether his execution would constitute 'cruel and unusual punishment.'"
The day before the execution -- Allen's 76th birthday -- opponents of the death penalty marched in front of San Quentin. Allen himself was said to be upbeat before his execution. After a last meal of buffalo steak, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken (only white meat), sugar-free pecan pie and black walnut ice cream, and whole milk, Allen (who said he was part Cherokee) met with a Native American spiritual advisor. Wearing a headband and a neck ornament called a "stairway to heaven," Allen said, shortly before his execution, "the last words I'll speak is an old Indian saying, hok-ah-ei -- it's a good day to die."
A PROPOSED TWO-YEAR MORATORIUM on executions died in the state assembly on January 17 because state Democratic legislators feared its potential to harm them in the upcoming elections. Assemblyman Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood) sponsored the amendment that would have halted all executions in California from January 1, 2007 to January 1, 2009. The moratorium would have been in place while a blue ribbon commission studies whether the death penalty is being justly administered in the state. The assembly appropriations committee, however, placed the bill on hold, basically ending its chances for consideration this year. Democrats, who control both the assembly and the senate, while not necessarily opposing the bill in principle, decided it should be put on the back burner. "There was a general consensus there was no reason to put people through a very divisive and emotional vote if we couldn't get to the 41 votes," Koretz told the January 20 Los Angeles Times, adding that Democrats feared Republicans would use the issue against them in the November 2006 election. Koretz said he hoped to revive the bill after the election.
Assemblyman Todd Spitzer (R-Orange) said Koretz had failed to show "that there are either injustices or inequities of the carrying out of the death penalty in California." Since reinstating the death penalty in 1978, the state has executed 13 people while maintaining a population of 646 others on death row. Supporters of the moratorium pointed to six death penalty convictions that have been overturned, but none where anyone was wrongly executed.
Proponents of the moratorium hope the abnormally high number of executions (for California, that is) in the next year will help stir up support for their cause. Since December, the state has executed two death row inmates -- Stanley Tookie Williams and Clarence Ray Allen. The next execution will be that of Michael Angelo Morales on February 21. Morales was convicted of raping and murdering a 17-year-old in 1981. Three other death-row inmates might be scheduled to die in 2006.
MERCHANTS AND PROPERTY OWNERS on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood are disgruntled with plans to add more homeless services to their neighborhood, said the January 27 Los Angeles Times. The area around Hollywood Boulevard and Gower Street already has around 20 homeless shelters, drop-in centers, feeding programs, and health clinics for the homeless. Now the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency has purchased three lots in order to build 60 residences with social services for the homeless. Those behind the project say it will take homeless off the street and provide them housing. The roughly 2,100 homeless in Hollywood, said the Times, are mostly white runaway youth who have been on the streets only a short while. Critics, however, charge that the shelters will draw more homeless into an area which is undergoing urban revitalization. More homeless might drive people from the area. Said a local photo shop owner, Vladimir Bedoyan, "how many times do you want to be accosted for spare change or cigarettes as you walk from your car into the store if you're a customer?" Other business owners tell of threats of violence and property damage by the homeless youth.
But the Los Angeles city councilman who represents Hollywood, Eric Garcetti, spoke of the necessity of the new project. "We are opposed to turning more people out on the streets of Hollywood," he said. "If we're serious about cleaning up our streets, we have to be serious about permanent housing and supportive services for the homeless." And Gabriella Wynn, the director of a Salvation Army center that has been on Hollywood Boulevard since the mid-'80s, said the homeless "didn't come here because we opened our doors. We opened our doors because the kids were already here. No, this area is not oversaturated with these services."
PARENTS AT VILLANOVA Preparatory School (run by the Augustinians) in Ojai were surprised to learn in January that the school's headmaster, Anthony Sabatino, had hired a convicted murderer to teach Latin and public speaking, the January 28 Los Angeles Times reported. In 1992, Shannon McCreery killed his father, John McCreery, as part of a family suicide pact. The elder McCreery had been a successful lawyer and law school teacher in Bethesda, Maryland, but began to suffer delusions, according to the Times. The family moved around frequently. In the spring of 1996, they returned to their home state of Illinois, where, in a hotel room, John McCreery asked Shannon's help to plunge a knife into his stomach. The father did not die but lay in agony. Unwilling to watch his father suffer, Shannon stabbed him twice in the neck. He then called the police. Shanon McCreery pleaded guilty to second degree murder in 1997 and was sentenced to four years' probation. Based on psychiatric testimony, both sides in the trial agreed that the McCreery family suffered from group psychosis at the time of the murder.
Though hired in the fall, McCreery was placed on a leave of absence after only a month. Though he has taught at two other schools in California, state law forbids convicted violent felons from classroom teaching. McCreery returned to Illinois to seek a pardon from that state's governor. If granted, McCreery could return to Villanova.
But parents at the school might not be pleased with that eventuality. Sabatino did not inform them or school staff until January of McCreery's past, and some parents at the $30,000-a-year school are not sure they want a convicted murderer teaching their children. Some faculty members also objected. Sabatino held an emergency faculty meeting on January 26, and the next day sent a letter to parents, saying, "I made a conscious decision to hire Mr. McCreery after discussion, reflection, and prayer, recognizing an opportunity for a young man to have a chance to build up his life in a Christian community. Based on Christian compassion, I believe that I made the right decision."
McCreery himself told the Times he did not want to return to Villanova. "I'm not ashamed of my past," he said. "I've tried to overcome it. I have fulfilled every requirement of the law. I haven't hidden anything from anyone."
A PRIEST CONVICTED of child molestation was released from prison January 25 after serving eight and a half of his ten-year sentence, Associated Press reported. Until 1981, Edward Anthony Rodrigue, known as "Father Tony," served in parishes in Coachella, Loma Linda, Ontario, and in San Diego and Imperial Counties. In 1992, he resigned from the priesthood, and in 1998, pleaded no contest to molesting an 11-year-old, developmentally disabled boy. According to a 1997 San Bernardino County sheriff's report, Rodrigue told detectives that he had molested five or six boys during his 20 years as a priest. About 19 men, who served as altar boys between1967 and 1979, have sued the San Diego and San Bernardino dioceses, claiming the Church had failed to protect them from Rodrigue. According to the lawsuits, the dioceses moved Rodrigue from parish to parish and sent him to several psychological treatment centers both before and after the priest pleaded no-contest to misdemeanor child abuse charges in Ontario in 1979.
Rodrigue is currently living in a half-way house. His brother, Tom Rodrigue, who is a sexual abuse victims' advocate, said his brother will "be a pedophile until the day he dies. There is no cure for it, and I just hope that he basically stays in a halfway house with other adults and he is never around kids."
THE TRIAL AGAINST RETIRED PRIEST Michael Wempe began January 23 in Los Angeles. Wempe, 66, has been accused of repeatedly molesting a young man between 1990 and 1995, the Los Angeles Times reported. The alleged victim is the brother of two other men who, with ten other men, accused Wempe of molesting them when they were boys in the 1970s and '80s. These 13 victims had filed criminal charges against Wempein 2003 after the California legislature lifted the statue of limitations in criminal molestation cases. However, that year the U.S. Supreme Court declared the legislature's act unconstitutional, and the cases against Wempe were dropped. Subsequently, Wempe admitted to molesting the 13. But after this confession, the plaintiff in the current trial, known only as Jayson, came forward.
Though eight of the 13 victims were allowed to testify during the trial, Wempe's defense lawyer, Leonard Levine, was careful to instruct the jury that his client was not on trial for his earlier misdeeds. For these, he said, "there is no excuse, no explanation and no defense, and none will be offered." As for the molestation of Jayson, Levine said it did not happen. Wempe's counsel claims the alleged victim is lying to avenge his brothers.
Wempe has been something of an embarrassment to Cardinal Roger Mahony, who, in the late '80s referred Wempe for treatment after learning of molestation charges against the priest. Then, in 1988, Mahony made Wempe chaplain at Cedars-Sinai hospital without informing the hospital of accusations against the priest. The plaintiff in the current trial claims he was molested by Wempe at Cedars-Sinai. Mahony later admitted that transferring Wempe to the hospital had been a mistake and that he should have reported Wempe to police when the accusations against him surfaced.
In his February 2002 pastoral letter, "I Will Appoint Over You Shepherds After My Own Heart," Mahony said that the archdiocese has had a policy of zero tolerance of molesting priests in place since 1988.
ALLEGED VICTIMS OF CLERGY molestation and their advocates have criticized Cardinal Roger Mahony's attempts to settle out of court only a small portion of the molestation cases against the archdiocese, the January 7 Los Angeles Times reported. The proposed settlement of 45 out of the 560 cases is expected to yield on average $1 million per case. The archdiocese has said that it selected the 45 cases because they were mostly not covered by insurers, who have claimed that the archdiocese forfeited its coverage because it covered up cases of molestation. "We do not have the resources to settle more than these cases," said archdiocesan attorney, J. Michael Hennigan. "We have always said that with respect to the other cases, that we believe we are adequately insured to cover the amount of the remaining obligation." But Stephen Sanchez of Glendale, who says he was molested as a teen by a priest, told the January 7 Times that the settlement offer is "another media stunt" by the archdiocese.
Some victim advocates say the cardinal chose the cases he did to protect his reputation. Though some the cases concern pre-1953 allegations, many of them have to do with incidents that occurred after Mahony became archbishop of Los Angeles in 1985 -- including cases against Michael Wempe (the key witness in his prosecution could benefit from the settlement) and Michael Stephen Baker. In 1986, Father Baker told Mahony that he had molested at least two boys; after this confession, Mahony transferred Baker to nine different churches over the course of a decade; six of these churches had elementary schools adjacent to the rectory. Baker allegedly molested at least nine youths between 1976 and 1999. Julio Gavotti, a plaintiff in a case not covered by the proposed settlement said, "the latest proposal is a weak attempt for Mahony to cover himself for repeatedly looking the other way when abuse occurred."
BAKER WAS ARRESTED January 19 at Los Angeles International Airport as he returned from a trip to Thailand, the Los Angeles Times reported. Suspected of molesting young men for 12 years, beginning in 1984, Baker was jailed on $1 million bail. In October, Los Angeles County authorities reopened a case involving two brothers who say Baker molested them from 1984 to 1999. The case of one of the brothers led to Baker's arrest.
Cardinal Mahony removed Baker from ministry in 2000 after the archdiocese reached a confidential settlement with the two brothers; but the archbishop did not inform police of the allegations until 2003. "Baker's history in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is a bad one," archdiocesan spokesman Tod Tamberg told the Times. "He deceived his archbishop, his therapists and the young people who trusted him."
BEFORE THEIR CASES are settled, some victims and their lawyers are demanding that the archdiocese of Los Angeles release confidential files on priests accused of molestation. These files, they believe, will show that Mahony knowingly protected molesting priests from law enforcement or neglected to dismiss them from the priesthood. For three years, the archdiocese has been fighting to keep the files confidential -- at least, insofar as they concern Mahony's dealings with accused priests. In July, a three-judge panel of the second district court of appeal in Los Angeles ruled that the archdiocese had to turn over files of suspected priests to prosecutors, and in November, the state supreme court let the lower court's ruling stand.
But Mahony has not given up. On February 2, archdiocesan lawyers filed a petition to the United States Supreme Court to block a subpoena from Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley, who wants the files for a grand jury investigation of accused molester priests. The cardinal and his lawyers have claimed that the subpoena violates the archdiocese's First Amendment right to freedom of religion. However, according to a February 3 Times editorial by Eric Berkowitz, a Los Angeles lawyer and journalist, archdiocesan counsel J. Michael Hennigan admitted the appeal to the highest court is a "shot in the dark."
BERKOWITZ'S EDITORIAL defended the archdiocese's contention that confidential communications between priests and their bishop deserve the respect of confidentiality, both according to the First Amendment and "various state privileges." "Most everyone," said Berkowitz, "seems to believe that Mahony's real aim is to reduce the archdiocese's potential liability in the scandal and to hide the church's complicity in keeping dangerous priests on the job." This may be so, said Berkowitz, but "in prying open the church's files, the courts also will be trampling on some of society's most important constitutional and civil rights -- including the Catholic Church's 1st Amendment right to freely exercise its religion and an individual's right to discuss sins in private with clergy. And ironically, the courts might even be making it harder for religious organizations to prevent abuse by priests."
Berkowitz contended that "if priests don't talk about their urges and problems to their counselors beforehand, the only mechanism for dealing with potentially abusive priests will be criminal prosecution after the damage is done.... As with the attorney-client and psychotherapist-patient privileges, the protection of clergy-penitent communications expresses society's collective decision that it is more important to guard a confidential relationship than it is to expose what happened in a particular case." And though "we may not see much value in providing this service to accused child molesters," he continued, "when the privilege is weakened for some people, it is weakened for all of us."
The courts' reasoning that because Cardinal Mahony admitted a third party -- his vicar general -- into confidential discussions with his priests he, in effect "erased the essential element of confidentiality," is bad reasoning, Berkowitz opined. "In an organization as vast as the archdiocese, it is unrealistic not to allow Mahony to be assisted by the vicar. It would not have been a stretch to include the vicar in the cardinal's zone of confidentiality."
"The desire to get bad guys makes us sometimes devalue our own rights," said Berkowitz.
"GAY" BATHHOUSES and sex clubs were unfairly targeted by a new Los Angeles County ordinance, one Scott Campbell told the January 11 Los Angeles Times. Campbell, president of Midtowne Spa, which runs three bathhouses in Los Angeles, said his company spends $200,000 on safe-sex materials. But, said Campbell, "bathhouses are an easy target," especially since their clientele "tend to be people ... who are closeted and they're not going to stand up and protest."
Campbell would doubtless like his clientele to protest a January 10 ordinance passed by county supervisors that establishes new regulations of "commercial sex venues" that attract homosexual men. Under the ordinance, the "venues" will be inspected four times a year and will have to pay an annual fee of $1,088 each. They will also have to provide for their clients in-house testing for sexual diseases, especially HIV, along with free condoms and lubricant, with information on how to use them. The "venues"must post large signs at their entrances prohibiting unsafe sex.
Though the county has had rules that would allow it close down bathhouses, officials said the rules were unenforceable. The new rules give the country new power to close down such businesses.
ACTIVIST UCLA ALUMNUS, Andrew Jones, commenced a "witch hunt" in mid January, said critics, when he offered students $100 per class to give him information on their professors. Jones, 24, the former leader of the Bruin Republicans at the university, is the president of the Bruin Alumni Association, which he formed last year, collecting $24,000 for the endeavor as well as a number of important conservative scholars and politicians to serve on the advisory board. Jones' website, www.uclaprofs.com, offers a "Dirty Thirty" list of UCLA professors who are either Marxist, opposed to the Bush administration, or are critical of the state of Israel and Zionism. The $100 per student offer for information was to help Jones demonstrate that students, by providing taped or written comments by the teachers, at UCLA undergo "classroom indoctrination" from their professors.
But one week later, Jones decided to pull his payment offer, according to the January 24 Los Angeles Times, because the university claimed that the payments amounted to students' selling instructors' materials, which violates university policy and raises copyright infringement issues. Such claims had a "chilling effect" on student activists, said Jones. The payment offer, he said, had become a "distraction from the real problem." He said, however, he would continue his campaign, but only with student volunteers.
But Jones' alumni organization lost some influential advisory board members in the wake of his payment offer scheme, including KABC talk show host Al Rantel, Congressman James Rogan, Harvard historian Stephen Thernstrom, and UCLA English professor Jascha Kessler. UCLA English professor Robert Watson (one of those targeted by Jones), said Jones "withdrew the money offer because professors figured out they could bankrupt him by encouraging masses of their students to submit recordings." Watson is assailed by Jones for Daily Bruin submissions in which the professor attacked the policies of President George W. Bush and in which Watson allegedly failed to reveal that his father, Goodwin Watson, a target of McCarthyism in the 1950s, was a communist. The Kerr Committee, which questioned Goodwin Watson because he had received a federal appointment, writes Jones, "was focused, and rightly so, on his more substantive and direct opposition to the capitalist bedrock which underlies American democracy; [the commission] was concerned by his campaign for classroom indoctrination, and yes, even a professed admiration for the Soviet Union."
THOUGH IT HAS BEEN over ten years since it came to light that fertility doctors at the University of California, Irvine, stole eggs and embryos from patients, the issue is far from over. In 1995, the Orange County Register revealed that the university's medical center had for years taken eggs from some women and given them to others. The revelation resulted in 128 settlements totaling $22 million between the university and victims. The university promised to try to find the women who had been victims. But it did not contact everyone. In 2003, 29 couples, after learning that university doctors had stolen their eggs or embryos, without telling them about it afterwards, sued the university. In mid January of this year, the university conceded that it had not contacted at least 20 patients, though it had sent out letters in 1995 and 2000 and hired a private investigator. But while the university says it is willing to continue talking to the lawyers representing its former patients, it has denied its legal liability because the statute of limitations on the cases (some of which concern events 18 years old) has expired.
The university has been involved in other scandals over the past ten years, including the misplacing of cadavers and trafficking in cadaver parts without consent. In 2004 and 2005, 32 patients awaiting liver transplants died while doctors at the university medical center turned down livers that were successfully transplanted into patients elsewhere.
IN RESPONSE TO AN IMMIGRATION BILL backed by U.S. representative F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wisconsin), the Catholic Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights declared February a month of fasting and prayer, said the February 2 Los Angeles Times. Sensenbrenner's legislation would apply the category of "smuggling" to anyone who "assists" or "directs" an undocumented immigrant to stay in the United States, according to the Times. Penalties could result in five years imprisonment. Critics of the legislation say it would criminalize religious and human rights groups that provide aid to immigrants. Los Angeles auxiliary bishop Gabino Zavala said "the bill is unjust," since it would target "anyone who provides assistance to undocumented immigrants, such as priests, doctors, social workers, even family members." Sensenbrenner's office denied that the bill would criminalize aid groups.
Proponents of increased border controls who support the bill have criticized Church leaders who, they say, in helping immigrants, have encouraged them to break the law. Lupe Moreno, president of Latinos for Immigration Reform, said, "you can be kind to foreigners in a strange land, but you're not supposed to be helping people who are breaking the law and sinning." But, said Jose Luis Aguilar, an immigrant who took shelter at Dolores Mission, "we come here by necessity. It's not a sin to come and look for a better life." Aguilar left his wife and five-month-old daughter in Mexico City four months ago and said he plans to send for them once he finds work.
Dolores Mission has long been known for social activism.
A LOOK AT DAY LABORERS. A recently released national survey, conducted by professors from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of California, Los Angeles, and New York's New School University, gives a picture of what life is like for day laborers, most of whom are Latino and many of whom are undocumented. The results, according to a January 23 Associated Press story, were gleaned from interviews conducted between July and August 2004 with 2,660 workers at 264 hiring centers in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Of those interviewed, 49 percent said they were hired by homeowners (for such tasks as gardening and carpentry jobs) while 43 percent said they were hired by construction contractors. Two-thirds said they worked frequently for the same employers. Eighty percent of those interviewed said they relied solely on day labor for their income, earning on average $10 an hour or about $700 a month. Twenty percent of respondents said they had suffered on-the-job injuries; over half of these said they received no medical care for these injuries either because they could not afford it or their employers would not provide it. Almost half of the day laborers said employers had withheld wages from them. Most of the respondents (three-fourths) said they were illegal.
Over half of the day laborers interviewed said they attended church regularly, and about two-thirds said they had children; 36 percent said they were married, and seven percent said they lived with a partner. One man interviewed, Martinez, a native of Guatemala, said he has been in Southern California illegally for 15 years. He said every month he sends $300 to $500 to his six children, ages two to 14. Once, he said, an employer refused to pay him after three weeks of work. ''I couldn't complain because I'm not here legally," he said, "but I was so angry because I need every cent. I'm always thinking, 'Are they going to pay me, am I going to get to work eight hours on this job, will I get hurt doing it?'"
OPPONENTS OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN won a victory in January when the El Tejon Unified School District agreed to discontinue a class on alternatives to evolutionary theory at Frazier Mountain High School in Lebec. The school offered a course, the "Philosophy of Design," as a philosophy, not a science, elective, in which history, religion, and creation myths would be studied. The course, which began January 3 and was to run for one month, aimed to "to discuss intelligent design as an alternative response to evolution." But some parents objected to the course and, with the help of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sued the school district in federal court in Fresno. In the January 17 settlement, which resolved the lawsuit, the school district agreed to end the course and never to offer a similar course again.
Ayesha Khan of Americans United said, according to the January 18 Los Angeles Times, that her organization saw the suit "as sending a signal to school districts across the country that you can't just change the title of a course from science to humanities and then proceed to promote religious theories as alternatives to evolution." But El Tejon superintendent John Wight said that neither the school board or school employees "have promoted any religious belief in any academic setting." Wight said that, given that El Tejon is a small district, it could not "afford to spend the amount of economic funds to defend the Philosophy of Design class in the court system."
THE LEBEC SETTLEMENT followed, within the same month, a decision by a U.S. district court judge in Dover, Pennsylvania that a school board could not allow the teaching of intelligent design as part of a science course. Intelligent design, said the judge, is not science but theology.
An article published in the January 17 edition of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano basically agreed with the Pennsylvania court. According to a January 17 Catholic News Service report, the author of the article, Fiorenzo Facchini, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, said that intelligent design fails in that it seeks to assign a "superior cause" -- whether God or something else -- to explain perceived problems in evolutionary theory. But science cannot proceed by assigning superior causes to explain events, said Facchini. "If the model proposed by Darwin is held to be inadequate, one should look for another model. But it is not correct methodology to stray from the field of science pretending to do science," he wrote. "Intelligent design does not belong to science and there is no justification for the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside the Darwinian explanation."
According to Catholic teaching, wrote Facchini, God does not have to be the immediate cause of everything in nature. "God's project of creation can be carried out through secondary causes in the natural course of events," he said, "without having to think of miraculous interventions that point in this or that direction." Random mutation and natural selection may be examples of such secondary causes. Still, said Facchini, Darwinian scientists have been at fault in seeking to assign to chance not only secondary causes but primary causes as well. But, he said, "science as such, with its methods, can neither demonstrate nor exclude that a superior design has been carried out."
A STREET COUNT of homeless people in Los Angeles County claims that the homeless are not found only in downtown L.A. but throughout the county, including neighborhoods like Brentwood and Beverly Hills, the January 12 Los Angeles Times reported. The count was released January 12 by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Results from this count and others say that over 88,000 people countywide live on the streets and in shelters and vehicles; about 35,000 of these are chronically homeless. The largest number were found in metropolitan Los Angeles -- about 20,000 -- but the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys had about 20,000 homeless, with 3,500 in the Antelope Valley. The upscale parts of Los Angeles -- Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Marina del Rey, and Venice -- yielded a count of 2,500, while Encino, Sherman Oaks, Westwood, and Century City together had about 2,000 homeless.
County citizens might be surprised at the reported numbers, but this is because "the typical response in Los Angeles is 'out of sight, out of mind' because most people don't see the homeless in their area," according to Mitchell Netburn, executive director of the joint city-county Homeless Services Authority. "It's a huge county and the main mode of transportation is by car. People just don't interact as much, and due to the weather nobody wakes up and sees a headline that 10 people died the night before. Because of that, it's relatively easy to ignore the problem in their own backyard."
BACK DOOR DRAFT AGAIN? Last November, the U.S. Army said it was discontinuing a program in which it called inactive soldiers back into service. The Pentagon, in June 2004, began calling into service members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a group of about 114,000 soldiers who, having completed their active duty requirements, had returned to civilian life. The program proved too difficult to manage, so in November 2005, it was allegedly scrapped. But this has not been the case, according to January 11 In These Times report. Around Christmas, over 800 members of the reserve received Western Union Mailgrams from the army, telling them to report for duty in "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Officers interviewed by In These Times all started their active duty in 1998, and their contract with the Army was set to expire in May 2006. But though they thought they could expect only four more months of inactive duty to the military, their being called up would commit them to 18 months in Iraq under the Army's Stop-Loss program, which it initiated in November 2002.
Army spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, told In These Times that the mobilization of the reserve in December was part of an "involuntary mobilization" begun in 2004. The mobilization will continue, said Hart, until it yields 5,600 active-duty soldiers from the Individual Ready Reserve. "We have 114,000 soldiers in the IRR and we're only looking at 7,000 who've received orders," said Hart. "Now mind you, it can be traumatic for the individual soldier, but looking at the big picture it's understandable."
And the "big picture," according to In These Times is that "the Army's effort to pull soldiers into active duty service just a few months before their contracts expire suggests that, despite talk of draw-downs, military leaders anticipate that Operation Iraqi Freedom will need every last body they can get for the foreseeable future." And one of those called up said, "there's this lack of courage on the part of politicians to admit that they need more bodies to do this. If the Army started a general draft there'd be public outcry, but because they're targeting people in the military who fear reprisal, people stay quiet about it and try to deal with it on their own."
BUSINESS PLAN FOR THE APOCALYPSE. At their February 7 meeting in Inglewood, the Global Pastors Network launched a "Billion Souls Initiative" to start five million churches worldwide and thus hasten the second coming of Christ, said the February 8 Los Angeles Times. James Davis, the campaign's president, told the Times, "Jesus Christ commissioned his disciples to go to the ends of the Earth and tell everyone how they could achieve eternal life. As we advance around the world, we'll be shortening the time needed to fulfill that great commission. Then, the Bible says, the end will come." Davis said he thinks "the current generation may actually live long enough to see this." Kenneth Ulner, pastor of Inglewood's 10,000-member Faith Central Bible Church, where the network meeting was held, said, "meeting our goal has messianic dimensions. It will certainly mean some kind of new world order." In that new world, said Ulner, "the power of peace will be greater than the power of war, the power of love will be greater than the power of hate, and fullness will be greater than poverty and hunger."
Davis said that if the initiative does not take hold and churches do not work together, only 83 percent of the world's population will be evangelized by 2200. However, he said, "if we work together and grow each year by 12 percent -- and start 370 new churches per day, then we'll have passed five million churches in ten to 15 years. We'll have to pool our resources to make it happen."
The Global Pastors Network, founded in 2001 by Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright, has to date drawn over 20,000 church leaders to its events. Though, said Ulmer, some of its members did not wish to invite him, former New York City mayor Rudolf Giuliani in late January spoke to a meeting of the network in Orlando, Florida. A presidential hopeful, Giuliani is a Catholic who supports legalized abortion and homosexual rights.