This blog exists to support liberatory collectivist activism that seeks to uproot patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. It also acts to center the experiences, theories, and agendas of radical and feminist women of color.
Showing posts with label poverty kills women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty kills women. Show all posts
This was sent to me and I'm happy to post it here for all who are interested:
EARLY BIRD DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JANUARY 20th 2012 The 12th AWID International Forum:
Transforming Economic Power to Advance Women's Rights and Justice
April 19-22, 2012 | Istanbul, Turkey
Join us at the 2012 AWID International Forum where 2,000 women’s rights leaders and activists from around the world will come together to strategize, network, celebrate, and learn in a highly charged atmosphere that fosters deep discussions and sustained personal and professional growth.
Exhibit Hall and Marketplace: From publications and products to handicrafts and textiles, the Exhibit and Marketplace has something for everyone. Shop around and peruse the latest publications, tools and resources from publishers, funders and others. Or stock up on one-of-a-kind, handcrafted treasures from women-owned businesses and collectives in the region. If you are interested in being part of our exhibit or marketplace area please download the application form.http://www.forum.awid.org/forum12/about/activities-and-events/
Campaigns Corner: This is a space where organizations currently involved in campaigns can share information and literature about their campaign and how to take part. Campaign exhibitors should be present at their table for the duration of the display. If you are interested in being part of the campaign corner email us at forum12@awid.org
Free shuttles will be provided between Forum hotel areas and the AWID Forum 2012 venue twice daily. Meeting points will be announced closer to the date of the Forum. Please make your hotel reservations early; bookings are on a first-come first-served basis. Deadline for hotel reservations is April 10, 2012.
If you have any questions on registration, please contact us at forum12@awid.org . Be sure to check the website regularly for frequent updates on Forum 2012 preparations including fundraising information.
Please help us spread the word and forward this message to all your relevant networks, colleagues and friends!
This, people, is CRAP, in all it's ugly glory--making poor people pay taxes when multi-billion dollar corporations pay nothing, get tax breaks, and rob the people of the U.S., the UK, and the world of much-needed resources to survive. If this isn't outrageous, what is it? Please organise in the streets, in front of corrupt corporate offices and businesses, and don't let corporations rob from poor working people and the middle class to give to the richest of the rich. It will always be marginalised women who are hurt most by racist capitalist patriarchy, by CRAP, because that's what the economic-social-political system is designed to do.
The financial institutions, including the IMF and World Bank, including Wall Street, and the U.S. military and NATO forces, and Western patriarchies are all fused together into one willfully evil system that is globalised and murderous without regard for human, non-human animal, or any other Life. Proof follows. But just listen to any Indigenous women activists and activist women in the Global South to find out the deeper truths, of just how ecocidal, genocidal, and gynocidal all of this is. If it looks like CRAP, smells like CRAP, and feels like CRAP, guess what? It's CRAP.
Stop men from ruling. Stop whites from ruling. That's be a good place to start.
Please click on the title below to link back to Democracy Now!
As many as 500,000 protesters marched in London on Saturday to protest Britain’s deepest cuts to public spending since World War II. The protests come after U.K. officials estimated corporate taxes would be reduced even as it tackles a $235 billion deficit and plans to cut more than 300,000 public sector jobs. Meanwhile, in the United States protesters gathered in 40 cities on Saturday to oppose tax cuts for the wealthy amid budget cuts to public services. We broadcast a video report from the streets of London and speak to British journalist Johann Hari and Allison Kilkenny of Citizen Radio in New York.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers who died were hardworking, brave young women senselessly sent to an early death by unsafe conditions.
March 24, 2011 |
A man looks up at the building where the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire took place 100 years ago.
Photo Credit: AFP
Ever hear of the Grover Shoe Factory fire of 1905 when an industrial explosion killed 58 and injured 150 in Brockton, Massachusetts? Or the Port Chicago disaster at a naval ammunition warehouse in California in 1944 that killed 320? How about the Monongah mining disaster that took place in 1907 and, with a death toll of 362, is the worst in US history? Probably not.
These were all large-scale workplace tragedies that brought to light unsafe work conditions and led to labor reforms. But none of them has managed to capture even a fraction of the public’s attention or imagination given to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, in which 146 garment workers died 100 years ago today.
Why Triangle? Part of the interest has to do with the fact that it happened in daylight in the middle of New York City in front of hundreds of witnesses (including Francis Perkins, who would later become President Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor) right at the time when the trade union movement was gaining steam.
These factors certainly played into its quick canonization into American history, but I don’t think they’re it. The reason Triangle continues to fascinate is the girls, the innocent girls.
Nearly all the victims were young women, 129 out of the 146, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, many of whom leapt from the 9th floor, their long skirts billowing out in an almost angelic fashion as they fell to the ground.
Yes, it’s the innocent girls, as they are described in nearly every retelling of the day’s events, which make this story so absolute, so simple. The girls were innocent and the factory owners were guilty. Good and bad. White and black.
Now I hardly want to undermine the tragedy or question their victimhood, but I do think that the constant reference to their innocence is actually doing them a disservice.
Characterizing the girls this way implies purity and passivity. Virgins are innocent. Children are innocent. Women in need of the protection of men are innocent. But the Triangle workers were none of this.
These young women were well aware of their circumstances – working long hours in cramped quarters for meager pay – and prior to the fire fought hard against them. They participated in the New York Shirtwaist strike of 1909, also known as the Uprising of the 20,000, in which a struggle for better wages and working conditions brought them to the streets for months, where they endured verbal and physical abuse from company goons and the police. Over 700 girls were arrested. The improvements to worker safety laws that happened after Triangle were just as much a result of the work they did while alive, as in their horrible end.
I think maybe when Americans began to look back on Triangle -- when female participation in the workforce was starting to shrink -- these working women were seen as an anomaly; their mere presence in the workplace became part of the tragedy.
But that wasn’t the case then. The majority of garment workers at the time, 70%, were immigrant women under twenty, many of whom brought experience with labor organizing with them from Europe. In fact, Triangle workers probably had more in common with young women today than ladies fifty years ago. These women were the adventurous ones; they crossed oceans, pursued careers in very demanding industries, and enjoyed spending their disposable income on things like pretty hats and nights out dancing with friends.
The perception of female innocence has certainly benefited women in violent or dangerous situations. This includes everything from the women-first strategy on the Titanic, to the Madres of the Plaza De Mayo, who were able to protest during Argentina’s Dirty War shielded by their status as innocent mothers, and to Femen, the topless protest movement in the Ukraine where a bare-chest provides a degree of political immunity. And even today, when a woman commits an atrocious crime, we search for a way to divert responsibility, reluctant to believe that a she could be innately violent. But unfortunately this innocence tends to be bundled with a sense of passivity and inaction that, in the case of the Triangle workers, isn’t even historically accurate.
As a young Jewish woman whose grandparents worked in the shmatte business, it means a whole lot to me that the tragic fate of a group of young women is seen as a crucial moment in US history. Though I think it’s time to start remembering them for what they really were: brave and brassy young women, whose real legacy has nothing to do with their innocence.
Elissa Strauss is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Salon, the Village Voice, The American Prospect, the New York Daily News, Tablet, and the Forward, where she is also a contributing editor to the Sisterhood blog.
Corporate capitalism is dying, folks. And well it should. It only exists to make the rich richer and the poor and working and middle classes more and more exploited, traumatised, and insecure to the point of being terrified of losing home and livelihood. (Not only the middle class.) It only exists in the Global North to loot the Global South. It exists to enslave, rape, and murder women and girls. It profits by murdering the Earth and all live on it. If you don't accept this, you are living in denial. That's a requirement of corporate capitalism: you living in denial.
Please click on the title below to link back to the activist website which is where I found what follows.
Financial terrorism and the war on the middle class.
Former Assistant Secretary of Housing under George H.W. Bush Catherine Austin Fitts blows the whistle on how the financial terrorists have deliberately imploded the US economy and transferred gargantuan amounts of wealth offshore as a means of sacrificing the American middle class. Fitts documents how trillions of dollars went missing from government coffers in the 90′s and how she was personally targeted for exposing the fraud.
Fitts explains how every dollar of debt issued to service every war, building project, and government program since the American Revolution up to around 2 years ago -- around $12 trillion -- has been doubled again in just the last 18 months alone with the bank bailouts. "We're literally witnessing the leveraged buyout of a country and that's why I call it a financial coup d'état, and that's what the bailout is for," states Fitts.
Massive amounts of financial capital have been sucked out the United States and moved abroad, explains Fitts, ensuring that corporations have become more powerful than governments, changing the very structure of governance on the planet and ensuring we are ruled by private corporations. Pension and social security funds have also been stolen and moved offshore, leading to the end of fiscal responsibility and sovereignty as we know it.
Fitts explained how when she was in government she tried to encourage the creation of small businesses, new jobs and new skills to compete in a globalized world otherwise the American middle class was toast, only to be forced out by the feds using dirty tricks. The elite instead wanted Americans to take on more credit card, mortgage and auto debt that corporations and insurers knew they couldn't afford, while quietly moving their jobs abroad in the meantime.
She has an extremely sophisticated understanding of how the world's financial system works right down to the "inconvenient truth" that revenues from the illegal drug business are essential for propping up the big money market banks. (Not a theory. Proven over and over again in criminal court trials.)
Fitts' well thought out ideas about exactly what needs to be done to put the American economy powerfully back on course were not welcome in the crime-friendly Bush administration and she was driven from government.
In this fascinating interview, she talks about where things are ultimately headed, the the true nature of the threat we face, and what we can do to turn things around.
Women, especially, have been protesting against the use of nuclear power for decades, including in Japan. Alas, men won't listen to women, internationally. And I'm not talking about a single Chancellor or a Secretary of State, either. I'm speaking about listening to women who do not hold political office. I'm not talking about listening only to women and men with race and class privilege who promote concepts like "sex work" in societies where there is trafficking and sexual slavery and mass rape, all of which are required for "sex work" to happen at all. I'm speaking about the women who know what's happening to the most disenfranchised and assaulted women and girls on Earth because they ARE those disenfranchised and assaulted women. These women's voices may be heard by clicking to some of the blogs in my blog roll and by accessing the important web pages section, linked to on the right side of this page.
Patriarchal men, not because of biology, not because of hormones, not because of genetics, are incapable of producing humane civilisations. How much more evidence do you need, really? How many more wars? How many more systems of gross exploitation of girls and women? How many more men battering women and getting custody of their children if the women leave? How many more Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women disappearing and being raped and killed but getting no media attention or collective outrage from the media and viewers? How much more racist-misogynist capitalism? How many more women have to be oppressed, subordinated, and enslaved to men before we collectively WAKE THE FUCK UP and stop patriarchal societies from ruling? Connect the dots of blood, the missing people, and the cancer tumors. Trust capitalist-patriarchs, and their apologists and defenders, as far as you can throw one.
The nuclear crisis in Japan touched off mass anti-nuclear protests across Europe this weekend. In Germany, some 50,000 protesters formed a 27-mile human chain from Germany’s Neckarwestheim nuclear power plant to the city of Stuttgart. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently announced plans to extend the life of 17 German nuclear plants for an average 12 extra years. A large anti-nuclear protest was also held in France. Eva Joly is French member of the European Parliament.
Eva Joly: "The idea that it’s dangerous and that we can cope with it, that is finished today. And we know how to get out of the nuclear plants we need renewable energies, we need wind mills, we need geothermy and we need solar energy."
For 100 years, women worldwide have demonstrated for their rights every March 8.
In honor of this 100th International Women’s Day, MADRE is mobilizing 100 people to each give $100 to help secure the rights that women have won over the last century.
We want you to be a part of this campaignto celebrate the past and shape the futureby propelling the gains of the global women’s movement into the next century.
Despite our many achievements, women’s voices are still too often ignored by world leaders.
We want women like Malya Villard-Appolon of our sister organization in Haiti to be heard when she denounces the epidemic of rape in the displacement camps. We want women like Sandra Gonzalez of our sister organization in Guatemala to be heard when she condemns violations of women’s labor rights in sweatshops. We want women like Yanar Mohammed of our sister organization in Iraq to be heard when she sounds the call for democracy and women’s rights in her country.
You can help Malya, Sandra, Yanar and other MADRE partners raise their voices as they work for justice and human rights.
Give women community-based activists the training they need to participate effectively in political processes—from local government all the way to the United Nations.
Create popular versions of legal texts so that international law can be a powerful tool in the hands of women at the community level.
Advocate at the United Nations and within governments for local women’s organizations to have a seat at the table when policies are being made that impact their lives.
As we amplify our sisters’ voices, we want to amplify your voice, too.
When you raise or donate $100 this month, you will have the opportunity to send a message of support and connect directly with one of our partners: Malya Villard-Appolon in Haiti, Sandra Gonzalez in Guatemala, Yanar Mohammed in Iraq or Fatima Ahmed in Sudan. These are women who, with MADRE’s support, have helped change the course of international debate on women’s human rights issues.
There is no better time to help amplify their voices than this 100th International Women’s Day.
In June 2010, Malya Villard-Appolon, MADRE partner and women's rights activist from Haiti testified before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. She spoke about her experience as a woman living in a camp for displaced people and about the devastating levels of sexual violence she has witnessed in the camp. She spoke about the life-saving work she helped lead through KOFAVIV, a grassroots women’s group that provides urgent care to rape survivors. Malya’s courageous testimony helped galvanize support for a groundbreaking legal decision upholding the rights of women in Haiti.
In December 2009, the UN launched a Latin American regional initiative, to combat violence against women. MADRE partner Sandra Gonzalez of Guatemala spoke at the launch of this campaign about violence against women sweatshop workers. Sandra has done more than just document labor and human rights violations. Her organization, the Women Workers Committee, has built a community for women workers and provides them with opportunities for empowerment through literacy classes, health fairs and sexual rights trainings.
Yanar Mohammed co-founded the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) after the US invasion in 2003. She set up a series of shelters that served as an underground railroad for women escaping the violence and death threats that escalated dramatically during the occupation. In March 2010, she traveled to UN headquarters for a major gathering on women’s human rights to demand global action to protect women. Now, she is a leading voice among the protestors demanding real democracy in Iraq.
In December 2009, Fatima Ahmed, the head of our partner organization in Sudan, Zenab for Women in Development, attended the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen. She told hundreds of government representatives and civil society activists that smallholder women farmers must be an integral part of our global response to climate change. Then she went home to continue to lead the first ever women farmers union in Sudan, and make sure that the women have the training and resources they need to adapt to climate change.
These are some of the voices you support by being part of our campaign to raise $100 from 100 people in honor of 100 years of International Women’s Day.
Not many news sites will report to you the extent to which everything that happened on Haiti one year ago was a production called "The White Man's Terror". It stars lots of white men, from Europe and the U.S., some of them colonists, some of them CEOs, some of them former U.S. presidents. The people who will always suffer most at the hands of any atrocity constructed by the White Man is women of color. And so it is in Haiti. Below is a sampling of news stories out in the last 24 hours, explaining aspects of the situation there now. The reports, in order, are from The Haitian Action Network, The New Black Man, Amnesty International/Canada, and The Guardian.co.uk. I did my best to ignore news from the U.S., which only ever wants to tell you how GREAT the U.S. is, despite the fact that they are a "Lone Wolf" of terroristic evil on Earth.
I choose to remember, on this day, especially, the deaths of three feminists: Women's rights activists Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin, and Anne Marie Coriolan. For more on each of these women, please see this report from Chicago NOW, *here*.
BAI - Port au Prince, Haiti — One year after the January 12 2010 earthquake, more than a million people remain homeless in Haiti. Homemade shelters and tents are everywhere in Port au Prince. People are living under plastic tarps or sheets in concrete parks, up to the edge of major streets, in the side streets, behind buildings, in between buildings, on the sides of hills, literally everywhere.
UNICEF estimates that more than 1 million people – 380,000 of them children – still live in displacement camps.
"The recovery process" as UNICEF says, "is just beginning."
One of the critical questions is how many people remain without adequate housing. While there are fewer big camps of homeless and displaced people, there has been extremely little rebuilding. The UN reported that 97,000 tents have been provided since the quake. Tents are an improvement over living under a sheet but they are not homes. Many families have lived many places in the last year circulating from rough shelters to tents to camps to other camps to living alongside other families.
It is important to understand that families may leave the huge unsupervised camps and still be homeless someplace else – like a tent in another part of the city or country. Moving from one type of homelessness to another cannot be allowed to be declared progress against homelessness and displacement.
The key human rights goal is housing, not moving out of the displacement camps.
One illustration of the housing challenge facing the Haitian people can be found in a recent report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM December report announced a reduction in the number of persons remaining in displacement camps. The IOM then wrongly concluded that the number of people displaced and homeless was reduced accordingly. Why is this conclusion wrong? Because the IOM report does not even try to track where displaced persons go after they leave a particular camp. They equate homeless families moving out of displacement camps as families finding housing.
These types of erroneous conclusions are not only misleading but threaten to hinder badly needed relief efforts one year after Haiti's devastating earthquake.
Careful consideration of the IOM report provides an opportunity to examine some of the many important housing challenges still facing Haitians.
IOM Assertion: "We finally start to see light at the end of the tunnel for the earthquake-affected population…these are hopeful signs that many victims of the quake are getting on with their lives." IOM reported there has been a 31% decrease in the number of internally displaced people living on IDP sites in Haiti since July.
Fact: Getting on with their lives? Of an estimated 1,268 displacement camps, at least 29% have been forcibly closed – meaning tens of thousands of people have been evicted, often through violent means. Many who are forcibly evicted from one site move on to set up camp for their families in another location, which is often more dangerous. This is not getting on with life; this is searching for less dangerous places for the family tent.
IOM Assertion: People with houses labeled red (uninhabitable or extremely dangerous) or yellow (in need of repair) have "chosen to return to the place of origin or nearby to establish a shelter."
Fact: As of December 16, 2010, only 2,074 of the estimated 180,000 destroyed houses had been repaired and a small percentage of rubble had been cleared. Decisions by desperate homeowners to move back into still destroyed homes is hardly progress.
It is also not even possible for large numbers of people who were renters to return to their destroyed homes. The destruction of more than 180,000 private residences coupled with influx of international aid workers has made Haiti's rental market soar. An estimated 80% of those rendered homeless by the earthquake were renters or occupiers of homes without any formal land title. Current rents are unreachable by the majority of displaced Haitians, many of whom who lost their means of livelihood during the earthquake. The IOM admits "The lack of land tenure and the destruction of many houses in already congested slums left many of those displaced with few options but to remain in shelters."
IOM Assertion: "Some households rendered homeless after the earthquake left congested Port au Prince all-together going home to the regions. Others sent their children to the countryside for a better life."
Fact: Rural Haiti before the earthquake was home to 52% of the population, 88% of which was poor and 67% was extremely poor. Rural residents had a per capita income one third of the income of people living in urban areas and extremely limited access to basic services. Disaster response following the earthquake has not tackled the extreme structural violence that exists in rural areas, and Hurricane Tomas further destroyed livelihoods of rural communities. People moving from displacement camps in the city to living in a tent in the countryside have not really moved out of homelessness, they have just moved.
IOM Assertion: "Surviving in poor living conditions during the long hurricane season has persuaded many to seek alternative housing solutions."
Fact: Homeless people are always seeking "alternative housing solutions." Camp conditions even before Hurricane Tomas and the cholera outbreak revealed that displaced Haitians were in camps because they had no "alternative housing solutions."
According to a study conducted by CUNY Professor Mark Schuller before both Hurricane Tomas and the outbreak of cholera:
40% of displacement camps did not have access to water; 30% did not have toilets of any kind; 10% of families even had a tent, many of which were ripped beyond repair during the hurricane season; the rest were sleeping under tarps or even bed sheets.
A study conducted even earlier by the Institute of Justice & Democracy in Haiti found that:
78% of families lived without enclosed shelter; 44% of families primarily drank untreated water; 27% of families defecated in a container, a plastic bag, or on open ground in the camps; 75% of families had someone go an entire day without eating during one week
and over 50% had children who did not eat for an entire day.
Human rights promise housing, not just forcing people away from displacement camps. Haiti needs practical and sustainable solutions for re-housing along with services and protections for the people still homeless.
One year later, it is critically important for the international community to assist Haitians to secure real housing. The million homeless Haitians and the hundreds of thousands who have moved out of the large homeless camps into other areas are our sisters and brothers and still need our solidarity and help.
Bill is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and a long-time Haiti advocate. Jeena Shah is a lawyer serving in Port au Prince as a Lawyers' Earthquake Response Network Fellow with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Contact Bill at quigley77@gmail.com and Jeena atJeena@ijdh.org
In January 2010, a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti. The international community, including one out of two Americans, pledged billions of dollars in aid, yet the nation has seen little improvement. Three hundred thousand died, nearly two million live in ramshackle tent cities. Cholera has swept through the population, killing thousands and hospitalizing many others. Only about 2% of the rubble has been cleared.
Is this what you expected when you pledged your aid dollars? Independent journalists Film@11.tv journeyed to Haiti in November 2010 to see the situation for themselves, and dig into the burning question: what happened to all that money?
Amnesty International regularly documents a range of violations of women’s human rights through reports, news releases, public statements, and letter writing actions. We work with women human rights advocates and like-minded organizations to encourage governments to enforce women’s human rights as defined in various international and regional human rights standards. This blog covers the full range Amnesty's concerns in the arena of human rights for women, including sexual and reproductive rights; violence in armed conflict, the community and the home; women human rights defenders; and protection of women’s economic, social and cultural rights.
Women and girls living in Haiti’s makeshift camps face an increasing risk of rape and sexual violence, Amnesty International said in a new report released today.
One year after the earthquake which killed 230,000 people and injured 300,000, more than one million people still live in appalling conditions in tent cities in the capital Port-au-Prince and in the south of Haiti, where women are at serious risk of sexual attacks. Those responsible are predominately armed men who roam the camps after dark.
More than 250 cases of rape in several camps were reported in the first 150 days after January’s earthquake, according to data cited in the Amnesty International report, Aftershocks: Women speak out against sexual violence in Haiti’s camps.
One year on, rape survivors continue to arrive at the office of a local women’s support group almost every other day.
Haiti's earthquake drew emergency help from the charity Article 25, but its architects' main focus is finding permanent solutions
Haitian children are seen amid the rubble in Port-au-Prince, a year after the earthquake. Photograph: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
One year on from the devastating earthquake of January 2010, millions in Haiti are still struggling to meet their most basic needs. With food and water in short supply in the 1,300 temporary camps, serious threats to women's safety widely reported, and cholera having left its mark on an already dire public health situation, architectural solutions may seem low on the list of priorities.
But earthquakes in Chile and New Zealand in the same year are two illustrations that it's not earthquakes that kill people, it's buildings. Despite both measuring higher on the Richter scale than the Haitian quake, intelligent design and safer construction minimised the death tolls in Chile and New Zealand. Article 25, the UK's leading built environment charity, promotes the idea that when we build back in Haiti, we must build back better. Architecture is, as our trustee Lord Foster testifies, "a necessity and not a luxury".
Working with our partner Outreach International, Article 25 is breaking ground on the repair and reconstruction of dozens of schools, reinstating education as a driver for overcoming the trauma of the quake for hundreds of Haiti's children. On the ground for almost a year, Article 25 immediately adopted a long term approach, driven by the belief that without ensuring a sense of permanence in the relief stage, Haitians would remain trapped in a crippling state of dependency. Article 25 sees permanence as intrinsic to genuine recovery.
Our project in Pakistan that trained locals to build seismic-resistant housing within 100 days is an example of how disaster response does not have to adhere to the typical model of sticks and tarpaulin, buffeted by trickling aid agency provision. Following Pakistan's 2005 earthquake, Article 25 worked with communities to build prototype homes using locally sourced materials, designed to withstand future earthquakes. Through effective on-the-job training in construction techniques, locals are still building Article 25 houses, years after the training was completed. In this way, locals are transforming a relief-stage solution into a permanent one.
This experience proves that community participation is at the heart of sustainability in reconstruction projects. By placing local communities at the centre of the decision-making process, Article 25 leaves a community empowered and equipped with the necessary skills to rebuild and maintain their own environment. Article 25's work in Haiti over the past year has included a strong emphasis on community participation, using workshops to diagnose a long list of needs and encourage the community to prioritise those needs. These workshops help parents, staff and children become aware of the strengths and challenges of their existing education infrastructure, and to choose what is most important to them. Asking the community to establish their own needs and preferences means donor money makes the biggest difference on the ground.
With Article 25 staff as facilitators, workshops have included "problem trees", where communities are encouraged to dig deeper and recognise the root causes of problems. What has emerged is that shelter for displaced people, improved nutrition and health, more classrooms, and subsidised school supplies are key collective priorities. These issues are laid out in a "ranking exercise" in which communities asked to vote for the three issues they believed were of highest significance. A lunch programme emerged as the first priority for all participants, with internet access a close second. In a country where just 11% of the population are reported to have internet access, this is a clear sign from the next generation that they want to be better connected.
While the developed world has argued over the right solutions for Haiti over the past year, Haitians have too often been left out of the debate. Our workshop results show the people of Haiti themselves are aware of a lifeline: internet access could empower them with knowledge and and make their views heard. The Observer's recent suggestion box scheme is one that has facilitated exactly that. Recognising that local communities hold the knowledge of vernacular techniques allows a design to develop which becomes more powerful than a building. As a community member commented following an Article 25 workshop: "Thank you for coming to our village: you gave the community a voice."
Oxfam recently called the efforts of the government and international community a "quagmire of indecision and delay". Article 25 finds that only by harnessing local knowledge can we cut through the "quagmire" and make sustainable progress. By placing community participation and capacity building at the crux of reconstruction in Haiti, Article 25 ensures it is the people of Haiti who are becoming the authors of a safer, more sustainable future. It is critical that this kind of work in Haiti continues long after the journalists have gone home, and that we stay with this programme as long as it takes to help Haitians lift themselves out of paralysis and build back better.
• Robin Cross is CEO and Director of Projects, Article 25.
Along with the release from prison of Sara Kruzan, I remain hopeful that more women wrongfully imprisoned by the very CRIMINAL injustice system in the U.S. will also be released in 2011. What we need is more public/activist attention put on wrongful arrests, convictions, and sentences for women of color in the U.S. When rich white men steal millions, or run multi-million-dollar companies into the ground, due to complete corruption, they are let go with million-dollar golden parachutes and then are rehired to drive another company into the ground. Compare that to what happened to the Scott Sisters and tell me we don't live in a country that isn't white male supremacist. If you try to, I'm calling you a liar or a complete fool.
Congratulations and Mazel Tov to Gladys and Jamie Scott. Blessings to both of you to the depths of your souls. I hope the kidney transplant proves life-saving and life-enhancing. And that both of you heal well and quickly.
All that follows is a cross-post from ColorLines, *here*.
Scott Sisters Finally Set Free
Sisters Gladys(R) and Jaime Scott. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. Photo: HO/AFP/Getty Images/Newscom
Gladys and Jamie Scott are free. The two sisters have spent nearly seventeen years in a Mississippi prison after being convicted as teenagers of an $11 robbery back in 1994. Last week, the state’s governor, Haley Barbour, finally [suspended the life sentences of] the two sisters, offering a long awaited victory in the highly publicized case.
“We all worked together to make justice work in this state,” said National NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. “I’m here to thank the people and the governor of Mississippi. When you are right, you are right. Gov. Barbour, you were right today.”
Despite receiving praise from some national media, Barbour’s actions are drawing skepticism from some close watchers who say the move was made more out of crass political calculation than compassion. The governor’s decision to pardon the two sisters came less than two weeks after he reportedly had made comments that, in effect, sang the praises of his hometown’s white supremacist group. Barbour had previously denied at least two requests to pardon the sisters.
Barbour’s suspension of the Scott sisters’ life sentences* also came with an order for Gladys Scott to donate a kidney to her sister Jamie, which she had already volunteered to do on her own when her sister was first diagnosed with kidney failure. And so far the state of Mississippi refuses to pay for the transplant, even though doctors have found that the state prison system’s deplorable living conditions and medical care are at least partly to blame for Jamie Scott’s condition.
Still, the pardon is a major civil rights victory, and one that’s largely due to unrelenting organizing over the past year.
“I’m just so blessed and happy. After 16 years, me and my sister can go home to our family who need us,” Gladys Scott told reporters after the decision.
A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the Scott sisters had been pardoned. Gov. Barbour has instead suspended each woman’s life sentence.
The fact that the Govenor had earlier denied at least two requests to pardon the sisters makes me sick.Something is terrribly wrong with a criminal justice system that can send these then two teenage sisters to prison for life for such a minor crime.It would seem that it is not a coincidence that both of these sisters were black.I'm wondering if this same sentence would have been handed down if they were white? Barbour’s decision to pardon the two sisters came less than two weeks after he reportedly had made comments that, in effect, sang the praises of his hometown’s white supremacist group.What is the world coming to?
If you can't figure out why the rich-ass Republicans are fighting gold tooth and manicured nail to prevent themselves from having to pay more in taxes, just consult the following two charts and Rachel Maddow's video clip, especially the last minute of it.
pie chart showing which people hoard the earnings is from here
chart showing how much the rich want to keep annually in their greedy little pockets (read: Swiss Bank Accounts) is from here
And here's Rachel, to make this all much clearer. You can skip the first half or so. Just view the part about the Bush tax cuts and why they were set to expire, and everything that comes after that, including the comments of some poor, poor rich white guy who wants to keep money that is better spent paying down the debt and closing the deficit.
What the most privileged poor, poor rich men don't want you to know is that they are not competent to do much--certainly not the things they claim to be experts at doing.
They can't run financial institutions--except into the ground.
No matter how much Viagra and Cialis they take, they remain effectively impotent at doing anything systemically and systematically good for humanity and the Earth.
They can't win wars. They wage them until people demand they end, then they end, being responsive to "the people" and pretend like they would have won if only "the people" hadn't complained so much about the cost--financial and in human life and environmental disaster. They say they are brilliant at math, yet can't figure out how to add up the cost of war and subtract the price of loss of human and environmental life and conclude that there's a net loss, always.
They don't want to fix the deficit problem. Being in debt is "The American Way". If they wanted to end the debt and close the deficit, they'd all voluntarily give the government their millions stashed away in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands that doesn't go into creating jobs anywhere at all. They'd give up a few of their homes and give that cash to the government too, and would stop complaining that doing things like this is dangerous to "democracy" and "freedom". The only freedom it endangers is the super rich's freedom to be completely unaccountable for the corrupt tax codes and corporate welfare system they've created in order to play golf and ride on yachts and decide in what home Christmas will be celebrated this year.
They don't want to admit that they know much of what they support is a huge waste of money, such as pouring millions into the hands of people known to be corrupt. (Am I referring to Afghan leaders and military personnel or U.S. corporate heads who should have been fired but instead get million dollar bonuses?)
They don't know the meaning of the word "sustainable". "Sustainable" doesn't mean "the electric car", for example. Or carpooling. Or finding an alternative way to get to work once a week. Or recycling.
They see but don't care how capitalism doesn't work for the poor, and they see and care that it does work for the very rich but only in ways that are utterly corrupt. The super rich know exactly how corrupt they are--exactly how exploitive, exactly how oppressive and callous and inhumane, but don't care, because they're comfortable and callous and inhumane.
They don't care that genocide is happening now, today, in North America--including in the U.S., as well as around the globe and that globalisation is part of the cause.
They don't seem to appreciate that the greatest threat to heterosexual marriage isn't lesbians and gay men being able to marry, but it is het men's marital infidelity, use of women in prostitution, fathers' molestation and rape of their own children, men beating the shit out of the women they say they love so very, very much, and heterosexism generally.
They don't challenge the Pope when he says he'll allow men to use condoms if the men are prostitutes, but not if the men are priests who are fucking children. (The logical phallusy seems to be that there is no call for condom use when children are raped by priests because pre-pubescent children can't get pregnant.)
They don't get that men can and must stop raping women. They think what men do is inevitable, like some giant ball on a giant hill that, once sent down, can't stop, ever.
They don't get that sexual trafficking is an atrocity that must be stopped by all means necessary--especially by criminalising all pimping and procuring--including on the corporate level, and that to not make that a priority, along with ending rape, poverty, and genocide, is a sign of their gross incompetence and negligence and inhumanity.
They don't get that killing the messengers of the CRAP they do but want to keep classified isn't a solution to their own corruption; it's a way to keep being corrupt. And we still hear the screams of suffering they cause the world. Even if they sleep well every night.
As they slumber, may all of them who are Christian find Jesus yelling at them for being hypocrites and tyrants, in the course of their otherwise pleasant dreams.
In June 2010, Malya Villard-Appolon, MADRE partner and women's rights activist from Haiti testified before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. She spoke about her experience as a woman living in a camp for displaced people and about the devastating levels of sexual violence she has witnessed in the camp. She spoke about the life-saving work she helped lead through 
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