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columbus represent

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Pain Part V

If you have pain, if a loved one of yours has pain, if you care about justice, please take a moment to read this Action Alert from the American Pain Foundation regarding clemency for Richard Paey (see Pain Part II for a background article from the NY Times, or here for background from the Huffington Post. It will only take a couple of clicks to send a message to Florida Governor Charlie Christ.

Friday, March 30, 2007

Do the Right Thing

By DIANE CARDWELL
March 30, 2007

Seeking new solutions to New York's vexingly high poverty rates, the city is moving ahead with an ambitious experiment that will pay poor families up to $5,000 a year to meet goals like attending parent-teacher conferences, going for a medical checkup or holding down a full-time job, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday

I will be really interested to hear what you all think of this initiative.  I have mixed emotions. My first reaction was: the underlying theory of this "experiment" to get poor people to do what is "good for them," is that people simply aren't doing these things because they just don't want to, they are lazy and greedy, and if we give them money, then they will stop being the irresponsible people we all know they are, because why else would they be poor? But take a look at who were are talking about.
 
To be eligible, families must have at least one child entering fourth, seventh or ninth grade and a household income of 130 percent or less of the federal poverty level, which equals roughly $20,000 for a single parent with two children.
 
To be eligible, you have to make no more than $20,000 for a family of three. And that's $20,000 in NEW YORK CITY, not rural Ohio, where it would still be hard to make ends meet and do everything that you need to do on 20K a year. Once again, do you think the reason people aren't making routine medical checkups, or parent teacher conferences are because they don't want to? I am all for innovative, out of the box, new ideas that could rev things up, and address what is an ever increasing income gap, with the numbers of people living in extreme poverty growing faster than any other sector of the population, but.... is this the way? Hmmmm.

How Many Days Left?

And how much more can we fuck up our world and damage all people, but mostly women and children, during these remaining days of the Bush Administration?  Well, we kind of sort of maybe partially dodged this bullet:
 
WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the federal office responsible for providing women with access to contraceptives and counseling to prevent pregnancy resigned unexpectedly Thursday after Medicaid officials took action against him in Massachusetts.

This individual, Dr. Eric Keroack, before being appointed by Bush to head Health and Human Services' Office of Population Affairs, had apparently been known, and worked for an organization that doesn't believe in contraception.  That's right, doesn't believe in contraception. Who knows what he has been able to fuck up in the five months that he was in this position, but at least he's out.

 

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Rich Bastards Suffer Too

Immigration : The Human Cost

Monday, March 26, 2007

Interesting Influences

The Washington Post did an article this weekend linking together the backgrounds of Obama and Clinton through one man: Saul Alinsky. For those of you unfamiliar with the guy, there is a brief narrative of his life included in the article. I never realized that both had this connection, and how deeply his influence continues to run through our society even today.


I fell into Alinsky style organizing after coming back from tramping around the world in college. My heart had been broken as I saw the extreme change that needs to happen at every turn, and was at a loss on how to make those changes happen, and even unsure if they could happen at all. I had packed my idealism away in the back of some closet of my heart, and tried to make it day by day. Marla was always there, poking and prodding: What are you working on? Why don't you start some radical organization? Organize a protest and just...just...I didn't have the energy to argue with her much about it, but to sum it up, I didn't do those things because I didn't think it would work. I lived in Ohio, she in San Fransisco. Ohio would never get it. So I took various jobs as temps, answering phones, doing data entry, feeling less and less like my dreams had led me to believe I would always feel. Then it happened.

I had finally packed up my dreams, and put them away for a career as an interpreter. At least I would be facilitating communication between people, bringing folks together to understand each other, even if it didn't mean changing much. I accepted my space in the interpreter program at a local community college, and resigned myself. A couple of weeks before classes were to start, I got a random email from an organization that trained organizers in congregation based settings. "Huh" I thought, "this might be interesting, I'll go ahead and drop my hat in the ring." By the end of that week, I had gone through multiple interviews, and bam, I was in training to organize. First book on our reading list: Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.
Ah ha! I thought (and apparently so did Clinton and Obama) here is a way to be idealistic, but realistic at the same time! Ohioans could be moved by their self-interests, not slogans, empathy, or street theater. My pragmatism felt validated. As Clinton noted:

Much of Alinsky's agenda, she wrote after interviewing him three times, "does not sound 'radical.' " Even his tactics, she concluded, were often "non-radical, even 'anti-radical.' His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them and recognizes the necessity of changing the present structures of our lives in order to realize them."

I tried to explain this to Marla, involve her in serious and lengthy debates over ideas. She never really responded to my arguments, just let me know, as always, that she supported me and was so glad that I was finally happy. Well, I wasn't happy, but I was moving forward and after having been so stuck for what felt like forever, that felt almost as good, if not better. Of course in the mean time, Marla was out with her own brand of organizing, "the Marla Model" of organizing, and we all know how amazing that turned out to be. I don't know why I ever tried to push her in any other direction, she was not made for the Alinksy mold. Hind-sight.

Last week I was giving a "community organizing" training to some staff at my place of employment. These are all organizers, but none had been trained in community organizing per se. They were surprised by the ideas of self-interest, one to ones, power, and the like. I was amazed at how helpful they felt it was to have a basic understanding of these things in order to get people to act (their goal, and the reason I was asked to perform the training).

Then today I went to lunch with someone from my job who I have not had the chance to really get to know. I sneakily thought: I need to do a 1-1 with her, and see what makes her tick. We asked each other the normal softening up questions. She asked the same questions I asked. It turns out that even though we are about 20 years apart in age, we both started out being trained in the "Alinksy Style" of organizing. And like Obama and Clinton, we both ended up working the system a bit differently than we maybe had initially imagined.

I could fill up a whole blog with what' s wrong with Alinksy, with community organizing, with organizing in general. But in the end, I couldn't imagine a better foundation of skills on which to build in order to change the world.


Is this guy so prevalent in your lives too?

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

I Second This Emotion

You are not alone in your sanity and anger. Outtakes from from an article posted on TomPaine.com:

Damn Right, We're Angry
Paul Waldman
March 14, 2007

Yes, we’re angry at George W. Bush. We’re not angry at him because of who he sleeps with, and we’re not angry at him because we think he represents some socio-cultural movement we didn’t like 40 years ago, or because he hung out with a different crowd than we did in high school. We’re angry at him because of what he’s done.

Yes, we’re angry about Iraq, and we may be for the rest of our lives.

We’re angry that America may now be the only country in the world in which torture is an officially sanctioned policy, proclaimed proudly in public.

We’re angry that they tell us we have to shred our freedoms in order to be safe, and that so many of our fellow citizens shrug their shoulders and think it’s no big deal.

And we’re angry that Bush has made our nation so hated around the world.

We’re angry that the federal government is brimming with people fundamentally opposed to the mission of the agencies over which they preside, the anti-environmentalists who run the Interior department, the mining company lobbyists in charge of mine safety and the union busters in charge of worker safety.

We’re still angry about Hurricane Katrina, that our government left thousands of its citizens stranded to suffer and die, while the president thought that the guy presiding over the disastrous failure was doing a heckuva job.

We’re angry that our government sends religious fundamentalists around the world to discourage condom use, thus condemning untold numbers of people to unwanted pregnancy, disease and death.

We’re angry that forty years after the Voting Rights Act, the Republican Party continues to exploit racism and do everything in its power to stop black people from voting in each and every election.

Those are a few of the things we’re angry about, and yes, that’s a lot of anger. But you know what? There’s nothing wrong with being angry. Anger is the appropriate reaction to moral outrages, to crimes against our common humanity, to the actions of those who would turn our country into something twisted and ugly.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Good for Washington

According to Kaiser Daily Health Policy Reports, Washington State is suing HHS over the citizenship verification law. Hells yeah! Governor Gregoire argues that it discriminates against children born to low-income undocumented women. Heck, it discriminates against infants born to low-income women in general.  Another argument on the side of common sense is that "the regulation is illogical because the state already pays the costs of delivering the newborn and, by doing so, validates citizenship." Regular readers will know that this is something that I've been following for a while, and I feel this is a perfect example of our special brand of knee jerk reactionary xenophobic legislative action at its worst.

 
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