IdentityTheory.com Social Justice Blog

Programs Help Refugees Forge a New Life

2008-05-15T11:21:00.003-04:00

For the nearly 50,000 refugees that came to the United States in 2007 (and the thousands that came before that), making it here is only the beginning of a long, hard, journey. The Association of Africans Living in Vermont is helping its 1,500-plus members make it here in the long run with innovative programming.

The challenge is significant. As Burlington-based newspaper Seven Days reports: "Having emigrated from refugee camps, AALV members are familiar with hardship. But a new life in Vermont isn't exactly a piece of cake: Roughly half live below the federal poverty line. In the winter, food budgets shrink as work in local hotels tapers off. The average size of an AALV family is five or six people, but primary earners only make about $9 per hour."

AALV recently launched two neat new programs to provide opportunities for its members: New Farms for New Americans and a new welding program. Providing economic opportunity is key to building a stable life for new Americans.

Please visit AALV online to learn more and to watch a video that brings to life the challenges Africans in Vermont are facing.

To find out more about refugees nationwide and how you could help, check out the Office of Refugee Resettlement as a start.

Agents of Social Change

2008-04-29T12:15:00.003-04:00

Echoing Green is a neat organization that "invests in and supports outstanding emerging social entrepreneurs to launch new organizations that deliver bold, high-impact solutions." They offer a two-year fellowship program to help a group of "visionaries develop new solutions to society's most difficult problems."

This year's slate of finalists promise some great problem-solving and good to be done. A few that caught my eye:

The Op-Ed Project: Targeting, training and channeling women experts to the op-ed pages of top newspapers, online sites, and other key forums of public debate to project new diverse voices into national conversation.

GreenMango: Bringing the power of online marketing technologies to poor business owners in developing countries to enable them to grow their businesses and increase their income.

Hot Bread Kitchen: Creating well-paid careers for immigrant women while preserving baking traditions, harnessing lost human capital, and building esteem for immigrant communities.

Sustainable Health Enterprises: Unleashing girls' and women's economic potential by starting up female-run franchises that manufacture and distribute low priced, high-quality, and environmentally friendly sanitary towels for domestic and international markets.

Green Coast Enterprises: Building environmentally sound structures that can withstand the rigors of hurricanes, termites, heat, and humidity at a price that is within the reach of average people.

Check out the entire list (about 30 projects) here.

Remember May '68

2008-04-28T17:16:00.003-04:00

Upon the fortieth anniversary of the May '68 student protests in the streets of Paris, Patrice de Beer, former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde, explores France's politics of memory and finds the French caught between remembrance and forgetting.

An interesting point with particular resonance:

"Julie Coudry, the (possibly departing) president of the Confederation Etudiante, has made the point that in 1968, students (and striking workers) opposed to the ordre etabli sought new forms of participation and communication; while in 2008, people are fearful of all-powerful globalisation yet also anxious to play their part in the reform of an (again) blocked society where a new generation of young people (again) has little say."

Read the entire article here.

Earth Day Top Ten

2008-04-21T10:21:00.005-04:00

It's Earth Day's 38th birthday...so get out there and celebrate, or at least consider doing one thing to benefit the environment on April 22. Here's Identity Theory's Top Ten things to do on Earth Day:

1. Shake Some Action. Find out what you can do in your own city, town or neighborhood. Visit Earth Day Network, EarthDay.gov or the EPA's web site to browse volunteer opportunities.

2. Start At Home. Somebody famous said, "the revolution starts at home" (I think). There are so many simple, energy-smart things you can do around the house. In addition to recycling, consider switching out the six bulbs you use the most to CFLs. Then, get these to show-off to all your friends.

3. Compare Notes. Energy policy will clearly be on the top of the deck for the next president of the United States. Find our where John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stand now.

4. Make the Call. Got something to say to your representative or senator about climate change legislation or environmental policy? Get on the horn.

5. Travel More. Volunteer with Earthwatch Institute and travel alongside scientists and researchers to preserve coral reefs and save endangered species.

6. Go Back to School. A bunch of colleges and universities now offer "green" academic programs. University of Texas-Austin offers a masters degree in sustainable design and other school are following suite. Already working in the green sector? Get together for Green Drinks, an organization that schedules meet-ups.

7. Eat Up! Sprig.com lists seven foods you should add to your grocery list, from Stonyfield Yogurt to Carbon Neutral Wineries. These companies are carbon-offsetting so these foods don't contribute to climate change.

8. Make An Eco-Resolution. Use a green calculator to figure out how small changes in your everyday life could positively impact the environment. Then, pick one action and stick with it for the year.

9. Get in the Sack. Yes, there are a plethora of ways to green your sex life, and Treehugger has got an exhaustive list of what you can do between your bamboo bed sheets.

10. Look Beyond This List. For more ideas, check out the New York Times Magazine's Green Issue.

"A Pathetic Round of 'Gotcha' Questioning"

2008-04-18T10:18:00.002-04:00

"For years now, I've grimaced when I see polls showing the persistent downward slope of public trust in the American news media. This Wednesday night, I could hardly blame that public."
-Jerry Lanson, Professor of Journalism-

Emerson College professor Jerry Lanson reacts to Wednesday night's presidential debate in "A Pathetic Round of 'Gotcha' Questioning," and wonders:

"Someone might just as well have asked: 'Senator, are you or were you ever a member of the Communist Party? A sympathizer, perhaps? Because the tenor of the questions at times seemed vaguely reminiscent of the '50s, the early '50s when Joseph McCarthy took his communist witch hunt from the State Department to Hollywood."

Meanwhile, FactCheck.org puts what both candidates said to the test. Read it all here.

Images from the Other Side

2008-04-14T11:51:00.003-04:00

"Imagine if every week a televised roll call memorialized Iraq's civilian casualties with individual portraits. If this were possible, we would witness, in full, the staggering human costs of Iraq's occupation on a personal level. The politics of history dictate who is remembered and who is not, and most countries prefer to honor only their own dead. Perhaps, if we were confronted with those we've killed, face-by-face, we could better question the notion of 'us and them' and address the abstraction of death that skews our understanding of war."

Read more of Caroline E. Winter's Witness column at AdBusters. Winter takes as her point of departure the recent release of stills taken of Khmer Rouge victims at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison where an estimated 1.7 million people were tortured and killed between 1975 and 1979. The images, taken by Nhem Ein, are now housed at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide.

Perspectives on the Summer Olympics

2008-04-10T09:38:00.002-04:00

Find out what the Dalai Lama and Tibet's Prime Minister in exile have to say about this year's Summer Olympics in China. Read the New York Times article "Dalai Lama Show Support for Games" and Good Magazine's "Remember Tibet?".

Truckers Put On The Brakes

2008-04-09T10:02:00.003-04:00

"On April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching 'as far as the eye can see,' according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 miles per hour."

Read more of Barbara Ehrenreich's "Truckers Hit the Brakes" at Common Dreams to find out why Ehrenreich calls the truck drivers' inaction a "shining example of defiance in the face of economic assault." You can also check out her blog.

Super Site About EPA's Superfund Program

2008-04-07T13:39:00.004-04:00

Check out SuperFund365.org, a web site with daily updates about places where Americans live at risk to exposure to dangerous toxins, sites that Superfund, a "federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country," according to the Environmental Protection Agency, was created to clean-up. The program ran out of money in 2003.

Starting on September 1, 2007, Superfund365 will visit one toxic site currently active in the Superfund program, a journey that started in New York City and will end in Hawaii.

Democracy Now! Celebrates MLK

2008-04-04T11:56:00.006-04:00

Listen in to Democracy Now! for a special one-hour feature on Dr. King's life and legacy, forty years after his assassination.

The segment features Rev. Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Dr. Vincent Harding (who wrote King's major antiwar speech, "Beyond Vietnam"), Taylor Rogers, Charles Cabbage, Jerry Williams, Judge D'Army Bailey -- all friends, colleagues, and activists motivated by King. You will also hear King giving his major speech against the Vietnam War and his last public address given the night before his death.

Also check out Amy Goodman's column, "Where Do We Go From Here." An excerpt:

"King made an essential link between poverty at home and war-making abroad. The connection, sadly, is as relevant today as it was the last year of King's life. A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, '40 Years Later: The Unrealized American Dream,' lays out key elements of the inequality that African-Americans experience in the United States around education, employment and wealth accumulation."

Latest From Howard Zinn

2008-04-03T12:00:00.002-04:00

Zinn's latest book, A People's History of American Empire, hit on April 1. According to TomDispatch.com, "It's a gem and...represents a surprise breakthrough into cartoon format. It's a rollicking graphic history, illustrated by cartoonist Mike Konopacki, that takes us from the Indian Wars to the Iraqi "frontier" (with some striking autobiographical asides from Zinn's own life)."

Check out TomDispatch.com for Zinn's essay, "Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire." An excerpt here:

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project -- Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army... as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here...will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes -- in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

Zoning Out

2008-04-01T17:06:00.005-04:00

In college, I was fortunate to take a class with one of the foremost experts on public policy, Theodore Lowi. What I remember most about Lowi, and the class, is a chapter from his book, The End of Liberalism, that focused on redistricting, rebuilding and rezoning in American cities, namely Chicago, and the adverse affect it had on minority populations in those cities.

I was again reminded of Lowi upon reading a wonderful piece that Good just ran on the public housing project Cabrini-Green in Chicago. With the City of Chicago now looking to massively overhaul public housing, Good asks, "when you get rid of the slums, where do you put the people?"

It's a problem that's being faced in a not too dissimilar way in New York City. Rezoning approved by the Planning Commission will remake 125th Street in Harlem into a "regional business hub with office towers and more than 2,000 new units of market-rate condominiums."

As the New York Times explains, "Opponents say the plan would displace dozens of small businesses, does not offer enough moderate-income housing and does too little to protect the area's historic buildings." Fortunately, two young law students - Giselle Schuetz and Kathleen Meyers, both 24 - are challenging the rezoning armed with a 110-year-old law. (More coverage at VOTE: Voices of the Everyday People)

Lowi challenged us to look beneath the surface of public policies. It's good to know there are writers and students out there who are taking his lesson and using it.

A Map of Election Fraud

2008-03-28T15:30:00.003-04:00

"There are lots of ways to rig an election, and it sure helps to be the incumbent if you're planning on doing so," writes Ethan Zuckerman over at WorldChanging.net. He's talking about the elections in Zimbabwe, slated for March 29. In 2005, the country's parliamentary elections were largely derided for serious human rights abuses (check out this study by Human Rights Watch).

Zuckerman reports that incumbent Morgan Tsvangarai has engaged in fraudulent activities, which include printing over 9 million ballots (a lot for a nation of 5.9 million voters); he also reports:

"The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has recruited 90,000 polling officers, who will oversee voting at polling places. Polling officers are often asked to help illiterate voters cast their votes, which can lead to vote rigging. And the ZEC has primarily recruited schoolteachers - who are government employees - to serve as the polling officers."

Visit Sokwanele for more information or check out this neat new application Sokwanele launched with Google Maps. As Zuckerman writes:

"Will Sokwanele's map show us whether the Zimbabwe election was rigged? It's possible that it already has - the map is filled with incidents of "political cleansing," violence where people who don't hold membership cards in ZANU-PF have been chased out. If you can't safely make it to a polling place, you can't vote. There are countless reports of failures to register voters, of food being given to government supporters and not to the opposition, of violence from police and troops against citizens."

McCain Debates Himself on Iraq

2008-03-26T17:39:00.001-04:00

John McCain debates himself on Iraq.

George W. approves.

God is constant , governments change

2008-03-21T17:45:00.005-04:00

Above is the full video of Rev. Wright's speech in which he shouts "God Damn America" after listing violent racial injustices. His thesis is that God is constant and governments change and that often times the American government has gotten it wrong (segregation, slavery, internment camps, etc.).

And there's the "America's chickens are coming home to roost" speech after 9/11 in which he's QUOTING SOMEONE FROM FOX. Yes, Fox News is actually crucifying this guy for directly quoting one of their shows.

Read (and watch) more about the truth of the Trinity Church.

World Water Day 2008

2008-03-19T16:01:00.003-04:00

Currently 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water.

World Water Day 2008 - this March 22 - is a time to take action and help solve this problem. Please visit WorldWaterDay.org and WorldWaterDay.net to find out how to get involved in one of the marches in NYC, LA and Seattle (you can also join a virtual march), or become a water advocate.

The Sierra Club also has a few good ideas: host a "Running Dry" screening, send a message to decision-makers, or simply get smart about the issue.

Water is a critical part of sustainable development, contributing to the preservation of the natural environment and alleviation of poverty.

Dear American Citizens 18 and Older,

2008-03-18T18:44:00.000-04:00

Please elect this man.

Five Years Later

2008-03-18T18:07:00.001-04:00

The images captured in the New York Times' Baghdad Bureau blog speak for themselves.

"A More Perfect Union"

2008-03-18T10:02:00.004-04:00

Today, Senator Barack Obama delivered a major speech on race relations, tackling what many deem "the biggest test of his presidential campaign and political career." Obama renewed his call for generational change and national unity this morning and addressed race relations at length. The speech also addressed Reverend Wright's sermons about America following 9/11.

An excerpt:
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old - is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know - what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Read the entire speech here.

Chaos in the Streets

2008-03-14T11:04:00.006-04:00

Gunfire and violence are filling the streets of Tibet this morning, following on the heels of protests that started on Monday. Many reports are labeling the protests as the most serious challenges to Chinese government authority in nearly two decades.

What's happening and why? "It was evident to most observers - including the State Department - that the human rights situation in Tibet deteriorated last year. The reports in the last couple of days of peaceful protests being broken up with tear gas, of monks being detained and beaten, and of the sound of gunfire coming from monasteries around Lhasa are sadly predictable given the severity of the situation described by the 2007 report, and could be a harbinger of further clashes between Tibetans and Chinese authorities in this Olympics year," said Mary Beth Markey, Vice President of the International Campaign for Tibet. Check out their report here.

The protests come at a time when China is eager to present a harmonious image to the rest of the world as Beijing prepares to play host to the Olympic Games in August.

The International Campaign for Tibet is inviting Tibet supporters to join their Olympics campaign, Race for Tibet. Organizers hope to challenge the "Chinese government to use the Olympics opportunity to step forward on the world stage, abandoning its human rights abuses and failed policies in Tibet."

For frequently updated information on the continuing crisis, check out Tibet Will Be Free, published by Students for Free Tibet International.

Myth of the Victimless Crime

2008-03-12T10:32:00.002-04:00

Melissa Farley, author of Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections, and Victor Malarek, author of The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, have a great Op-Ed piece published in the New York Times today in regards to Eliot Spitzer's involvement with a prostitution ring. They ask:

"What do we know about the woman Gov. Eliot Spitzer allegedly hired as a prostitute? She was the one person he ignored in his apology. What is she going through now? Is she in danger from organized crime because of what she knows? Is anyone offering her legal counsel or alternatives to prostitution?"

They're not the only ones wondering. Human rights groups that credit Spitzer with what they call "the toughest and most comprehensive anti-sex-trade law in the nation" can't believe Spitzer stands accused of being one of the very men his law was designed to catch and punish. Read more about that here.

To find out more about global organizations working to end sex trade/human trafficking visit Project to End Human Trafficking, Human Trafficking.org, Shared Hope International, or The Red Light Movement.

Bush Vetoes Anti-Torture Bill

2008-03-11T09:37:00.003-04:00

Amidst the news of the continuing battle for the Democratic nomination, and the shocking end to Eliot Spitzer's political career, President Bush vetoed an intelligence authorization bill which would have prevented the CIA and other US agents from using waterboarding, sexual humiliation, dogs and other techniques that amount to torture and ill-treatment. Click here for more about the provisions of the proposed act.

Bush claims the "need to maintain a separate CIA program that will shield from disclosure to al Qaeda and other terrorists the interrogation techniques they may face upon capture...I cannot sign into law a bill that would prevent me, and future Presidents, from authorizing the CIA to conduct a separate, lawful intelligence program, and from taking all lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack."

Amnesty International is calling on Congress to "immediately mandate an independent investigation into the heaps of highly credible evidence of illegal and inhumane actions in the war on terror, and then prosecute those responsible promptly." To take action click here.

Obama is Winning

2008-03-06T07:47:00.002-05:00

We've been spending a lot of time at ObamaIsWinning, a fun, informative site about Obama's campaign that features a nice collection of often-hilarious videos and a blog:

http://obamaiswinning.com/

Primary Day Round-Up

2008-03-04T09:41:00.003-05:00

Just voted here in Vermont! Today, a total of 370 pledged delegates are at stake in primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont.

To find out more about what's going on around the country today, check out some of these links:

Read about the races in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Listen to what people around the country are pinpointing as this election's most important issues.

Find out why rank and file Dems don't think Hill should drop out the race -- even if she loses big today.

Learn more about the tradition of the town meeting, and why political scientist Frank Bryan thinks "real, deliberative, legislative democracy without decision, is like sex without completion."

All aboard the capitulation express!

2008-03-04T07:56:00.002-05:00

Over at The Daily Kos, a discussion of the FISA debacle:

Are you comfortable with allowing unlimited, warrantless electronic surveillance and datamining of the communications of all Americans and indeed the entire world on the say-so of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and/or David Addington, with no possibility that they will ever agree to answer any questions you may ever have about it?

Chalk up another victory for American Fascism while I go vote in the primaries and pretend to live in a democracy.