Peru Government may have killed 100's of indigenous civilians Mood: don't ask Now Playing: Peru polarised after deadly clashes Topic: HUMANITY
Z3 Readers ...I found this on the BBC website...its sickening and rife with propaganda to support the official (sic) story of what is going on and implications that point fingers unjustly at Venezuela. (etc)
Peru polarised after deadly clashes
By Dan Collyns BBC News, Bagua Chica, Peru June 10 2009
The removal by Peruvian riot police of thousands of native Amazonian protesters from a road they were blocking was the worst violence the country had seen in a decade.
At least 54 people are known to have been killed - among them 14 police officers.
In what appeared to be a revenge attack 10 more police officers were killed by their indigenous captors.
More than 100 indigenous protesters still cannot be accounted for.
It was the culmination of two months of massive rallies and blockades across Peru's Amazon - an area that is vital to the country's economy.
The protests threatened to disrupt both national energy supplies and exports.
But it was also the tragic consequence of Peru's failure to decide the true place of its indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest and their role in this multicultural nation.
“ I will never forget what happened that Friday - it was a massacre ” Leoncio Calla
The government decided to act after weeks of deadlocked talks.
The brutal violence has left both sides embittered, but it has been made worse by accusations that the government is covering up the true number of dead protesters.
Many eyewitnesses are too afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals.
"I will never forget what happened that Friday - it was a massacre", says Leoncio Calla, a leader from a native Awajun community.
"According to a preliminary count we have more than 150 disappeared," he says, explaining how each village reported who they had missing.
"The dead were only recovered from the road but many more were in the hills, those bodies have disappeared."
"It's a matter of time, once we return to our communities, and we see who is missing, then we will find out how many dead there really are."
The government, which says all Peruvians should be able to benefit from the country's oil and gas, said the Amazonians had killed defenceless police officers after taking them hostage.
The president has blamed foreign forces - widely understood to mean Bolivia and Venezuela - for inciting unrest.
'Disappearances'
A church building in Bagua Grande and other places of refuge are now filling up with protesters who hid in the hills after the conflict.
One of them, Clementina Paayatui, told the BBC the protesters had been peacefully blocking the road at a place called the Devil's Curve when the police arrived and began "shooting, killing people as if they were dogs".
While exact figures for the disappeared are still unclear the rumours are insistent.
Eyewitnesses say helicopters carried bodies away to be dumped in the nearby River Maranon.
Areas of land near the road where pitched battles were fought have been scorched, fuelling suspicions that the bodies had been burnt.
Whatever President Alan Garcia's vision of progress and modernity is, this cannot be it.
The Minister for Women and Social Development, Carmen Vildoso, resigned in protest at the government's handling of the crisis.
DOG IN THE MANGER In October 2007, President Alan Garcia published a series of articles trying to explain what he saw as the main cause of poverty.
He called it the Dog in the Manger syndrome.
Mr Garcia argued that communally owed land in many Peruvian communities led to an inefficient use of natural resources because it was a free resource open to everybody.
Soon afterwards, Congress allowed President Garcia to issue decrees encouraging oil and gas extraction, commercial forestry, and large-scale agriculture in the Amazon.
Indigenous groups see those decrees as threatening their ancestral lands and way of life.
The situation is more polarised than ever, with the government calling indigenous protesters extremists and their leader, Alberto Pizango, being charged with sedition and rebellion.
He has been granted asylum by the Nicaraguan government, after seeking refuge in their embassy in Lima.
Meanwhile the indigenous movement accuses the government of committing crimes against humanity.
"I see an indigenous population who say: 'Peru doesn't consider us to be Peruvians, it thinks that the jungle is for other people, that we don't exist, that it's empty'", says human-rights lawyer Ernesto de la Jara.
"They've shown that this attitude cannot work."
Many accuse the government of failing to consult the native communities about a series of laws which they say threaten their ancestral lands.
But officials say 12 million hectares (46,300 square miles) have been set aside for native people, and another 15 million hectares for national reserves.
However, the government may be forced to soften its stance and allow the debate of some of the controversial laws in the Peruvian congress.
While the families of police officers and indigenous people alike mourn their deaths, many Peruvians are calling for an independent investigation into what happened and for the dialogue to begin again.
De-Facto Socialism is going to solve our problem (audio / vido clip) Mood: sharp Now Playing: Charles Hugh Smith - "what does the future hold" Topic: HUMANITY De-Facto Socialism
Further to yesterday's post about Dangerous Minds. Richard has now given me the go-ahead to edit and splice the segments of each episode together in order to make it available for putting on portable media devices.
The first episode features an interview with philosopher, novelist and commentator Charles Hugh Smith.
Smith has been described as the new Henry David Thoreau. As Richard put it: "He takes some of the most difficult to understand problems vexing the world today and makes sense of these issues... He writes with a calm and steady voice that takes readers by the hand and carefully explains the most pressing issues of our time. We, all of us, need to comprehend our problems, that's the first step, before we can change anything and master our fates."
Right click and select "Save Target As" to download, then drag and drop to your iPod, Walkman or other portable device. (Dangerous Minds mp3 audio or mp4 video).
I've also created a higher quality avi file that one can acquire using BitTorrent, however, you'll need an account with our tracker to download it. If you haven't got one then you can sign up for free here. (Torrent Underground download).
Three million youngsters will die by 2015 Mood: crushed out Now Playing: Starving in a world with people who dont care Topic: HUMANITY
Ten Million more children across the globe face starvation because of the global financial meltdown, with 4000,000 expected to die this year
About 3million youngsters are expected to die by 2015 as a direct result of the economic crisis, according to Save the Children.
Food shortages will leave millions more youngsters under six across Africa and the developing world malnourished – adding to the estimated 122million already children starving worldwide.
Up to 2.7million youngsters are acutely malnourished – nine times more likely to die – in Africa, while up to 4.7million are suffering in South Asia. The figures were released by Save the Children ahead of the G20 Summit this week. 'The world economy is in crisis and it is children that are bearing the brunt,' said actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who is the charity's global ambassador.
'As the recession bites, families in the developing world will have to struggle even harder to survive.' Four-year-old Abdi, from Kenya, is among the many victims. He is fighting malaria and weighs just 12kg (26lb). 'We are so worried for the future,' said his father Ada Mohammed. 'He was in bed for a whole week when we couldn't feed him.'
Kenya has been among the hardest hit countries, with 100,000 more children suffering from malnutrition since the crisis as a drought wreaks havoc with crops. Save the Children is urging prime minister Gordon Brown and the other G20 leaders to use this week's summit in London to help the children's plight.
'The UK government must work harder to ensure that its investments in agriculture and child welfare improve children's diets now, before it's too late,' said David Mepham, head of policy for the charity.
Solving Hunger one corner at a time Mood: energetic Now Playing: A City in In Brazil their Hunger Problem is not a problem Topic: HUMANITY
> The City That Ended Hunger
> by Frances Moore Lappé > http://tinyurl.com/cge38l > > A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have > yet to do: end hunger. > > In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not > caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization > was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like > that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? > Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise > here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food > stamps—these questions take on new urgency. > > To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens > making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt > wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of > Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such > lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its > population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children > going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a > right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy > food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you. > > The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger > effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member > council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in > the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved > regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the > “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread > across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, > perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of > citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to > more than 31,000. > > The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to > food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It > offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to > sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on > produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. > Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor > people got access to fresh, healthy food. > > When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope’s Edge we > approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned > with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to > support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with > the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.” > > The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, > as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw > their incomes drop by almost half. > > In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by > offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use > well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese > acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the > city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about > twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. > Everything else they can sell at the market price. > > “For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached > to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city > agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive > produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so > everyone can get good produce.” > > Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s > Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily > serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent > of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of > diners—grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers > with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still > others in business suits. > > “I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six > kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis. > > “It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an > athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been > eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a > house so I can get married,” he said with a smile. > > No one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although > about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and > allows “food with dignity,” say those involved. > > Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school > gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government > contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now > buys whole food mostly from local growers. > > “We’re fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent > administrator,” Adriana explained. “We’re showing that the state > doesn’t have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels > for people to find solutions themselves.” > > For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to > “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana > told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens > of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and > radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are. > > The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look > for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, > and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for > school kids’ daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school > children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city. > > The result of these and other related innovations? > > In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as > evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit > almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period > in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And > between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption > of fruits and vegetables went up. > > The cost of these efforts? > > Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. > That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident. > > Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social > mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of > us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food > for all is a public good.” > > The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more > public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean > redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to > participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships > driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect. > > And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in > human nature is required! Through most of human evolution—except for the last > few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where > pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among > unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an > authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme > privation, when some eat, all eat. > > Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We > wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world > taking this approach—food as a right of membership in the human family. So I > asked, “When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? > How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?” > > Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to > be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to > know what had touched her emotions. > > “I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is > so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. > It’s so easy to end it.” > > Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps > Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to > break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes—if we trust our > hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for > or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government > accountable to us. > > ============ > Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the > Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books > including Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food First and > the Small Planet Institute, and a YES! contributing editor. > > The author thanks Dr. M. Jahi Chappell for his contribution to the article
Bad Monkey Business - Lets make It Stop - Get Active! Mood: don't ask Now Playing: Is your taxes going to monkey abuse - and what are you doing about it? Topic: HUMANITY
A nine-month-long undercover investigation by The HSUS has exposed the mistreatment of nearly 300 chimpanzees and other primates at the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana. These chimps, living lives of deprivation and misery, are among the more than 1,000 chimps languishing in laboratories across the United States. Chimps, our closet genetic relative, are complex, social, and long-lived creatures. Many chimps currently warehoused in research facilities have lived for decades behind bars. Especially heartbreaking are stories of the 26 elder chimps at NIRC, who were taken from their mothers in the wild.
The Great Ape Protection Act (H.R. 1326) has just been re-introduced in Congress. This legislation aims to end invasive research on the chimpanzees remaining in laboratories, retire the approximately 500 federally-owned chimpanzees to permanent sanctuary (including the elder chimps at NIRC), and make the recent decision by the National Center for Research Resources (part of the National Institutes of Health) to stop funding the breeding of federally-owned chimpanzees permanent.
TAKE ACTION Please make a brief, polite phone call to urge your U.S. Representative to co-sponsor The Great Ape Protection Act. Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 or click here to look up your Representative and the Capitol office phone number.
After you make your call, fill in and submit the form at the right to automatically send a message to your U.S. Representative. Your legislators receive a lot of email, so it is important to personalize the subject line and text below to make your message stand out and have a greater impact.
Sample Letter from link
Dear [ Decision Maker ],
As your constituent, I am asking you to co-sponsor the Towns-Reichert Great Ape Protection Act, H.R. 1326, which was recently re-introduced. This legislation phases out the use of chimpanzees in invasive research and retires the estimated 500 federally-owned chimpanzees to permanent, suitable sanctuary
____
ABC News: Nightline aired the story of the more than 300 chimpanzees at the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana. The footage of NIRC was taken from a nine-month-long undercover investigation by The Humane Society of the United States.
Among these chimps are 26 elders who were taken decades ago from the wild. It's time to give these animals the sanctuary they deserve.
At any given time, the vast majority of chimpanzees in laboratories are simply being warehoused, and not actually used in research. The approximately $20-25 million in taxpayer dollars per year spent to house, care for, and experiment on this endangered species could be better spent on other, more useful research endeavors.
I am very concerned about the use of these endangered animals for research which causes them considerable harm. In addition to being highly social and emotional beings, chimpanzees have been shown to have amazing mental abilities such as tool use and problem solving skills. Given what we know about them, confinement in a laboratory is simply no place for a chimpanzee.
The United States is the only country, besides Gabon, that still uses chimpanzees in invasive research. The United Kingdom, Japan, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain have all banned or severely restricted the use of chimpanzees. Please help the U.S. join this list of nations by co-sponsoring The Great Ape Protection Act.
MJ article on Obama and Poverty - Sounds like some Hope to this Joe Anybody Mood: bright Now Playing: Mother Jones Report: "Harlem's Man With the Plan" Topic: HUMANITY
Z3 Readers... let me say I didnt vote for the two party corrupt system. In fact I hate teh system , I hate Obama's view on the middle east and his pro war attitude. BUT... I do like some of his "social" plans and attitudes...here is a good article on Poverty and helping kids. I must say I am proud to have a president concerned about these topics for a change.
Harlem on election night was, predictably, a little nuts. At 11 p.m., when the networks declared that Barack Obama would be the next president, church bells rang and champagne flowed. Old women hollered. Young men wept.
There was, quite literally, dancing in the streets. Among the people parading down 125th Street that night, Obama's victory was seen as a deliverance, not just for the nation but for the neighborhood as well. And Harlem has long needed delivering.
Poverty has always been a fact of life in the United States, but the concentrated urban poverty that Harlem—along with sections of every American city—has experienced in the past half-century is a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1950s and 1960s, middle-class blacks, less constrained by restrictions on where they could live, began to move out of neighborhoods like Harlem in great numbers. At the same time, the postwar decline of the country's manufacturing economy deprived the urban African American families who remained of the jobs that had sustained them.
As a result, the number of poor people living in neighborhoods with at least a 40 percent poverty rate almost tripled during the 1970s in the five largest American cities. These areas became a brand-new kind of urban ghetto, almost all poor and all black.The hope spilling out along 125th Street on the night of November 4 was for change of all kinds, from a more productive economy to a more benign foreign policy.
But it was also a hope that President-elect Obama would be able, finally, to find a lasting solution to the kind of entrenched urban poverty that has engulfed Harlem and neighborhoods like it for decades.During the Democratic primaries, Obama didn't talk about poverty as much as John Edwards did. And in the general election, it was John McCain, not Obama, who took a weeklong "poverty tour" of blighted cities like New Orleans and Youngstown, Ohio.
But Obama's unique background—food stamps as a child, community organizing as a young man—seems to have given him an unusually sophisticated understanding of poverty's causes and potential solutions. His poverty plan includes some basic Democratic solutions, like raising the minimum wage and increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit.
But Obama has also proposed more targeted policies: guaranteed sick days to protect low-wage workers, for whom a bad cold can often lead directly to a pink slip; transportation subsidies to help inner-city workers get to better-paying jobs in the suburbs; child care programs to make it easier for single parents to hold down a job.Beyond those more short-term measures, Obama promises an ambitious suite of programs intended to attack the deeper roots of inner-city poverty. The dismal employment situation in neighborhoods like Harlem doesn't only have to do with the lack of good jobs.
It also has to do with the fact that many poor people lack the skills necessary to get and keep those jobs, everything from basic math and reading ability to more subtle noncognitive skills, like patience and perseverance. Some of those deficits can be filled in through job training programs like Job Corps—but many of them cannot.
In recent years, economists, social scientists, and neurologists have shown that the skills gap between rich kids and poor kids opens up very early, and the later you wait to address those deficits, the harder it becomes to turn things around.
The good news from this research, though, is that certain interventions do work, provided they start early and continue throughout childhood. One of the most rigorously evaluated is the Nurse-Family Partnership, a program, now operating in 350 counties across the nation, that sends registered nurses to conduct regular home visits with low-income women who are having their first child.
The nurses act as mentors and counselors, encouraging the mothers to quit smoking, go back to school, and find constructive ways to deal with the stresses of new parenthood. The results are encouraging, even many years down the road—at age 15, kids whose mothers went through the program are 59 percent less likely to have an arrest record than teens in a control group. Currently, the program serves nearly 16,000 mothers; Obama has pledged to expand it to all low-income first-time mothers.Even more ambitious is Obama's plan to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone, a program that I profile in my book, Whatever It Takes.
The Zone is the brainchild of Geoffrey Canada, an African American man in his mid-50s who grew up in extreme poverty in the South Bronx. Canada escaped the inner city for Bowdoin and Harvard and then returned to New York to try to create better options for kids like the ones he grew up with.
In the mid-'90s, he was running a decent-size nonprofit for teenagers in Harlem, and everyone told him how successful he was. But he could see only the kids he wasn't helping. Poor children in Harlem faced so many disadvantages, he realized, that it didn't make sense to address just one or two and ignore the rest.
A great after-school program wouldn't do much good if the school itself were lousy. And even the best school would have a hard time succeeding without help from the parents.
Canada's solution was to take on all those problems simultaneously. The Harlem Children's Zone takes a holistic approach, following children from cradle to college, mimicking the cocoon of stimulation and support that surrounds middle-class children. The Zone now enrolls more than 8,000 children a year in its various programs, which cover a 97-block section of central Harlem. "We're not interested in saving 100 kids," Canada told me once. "Even 300 kids. Even 1,000 kids to me is not going to do it. We want to be able to talk about how you save kids by the tens of thousands, because that's how we're losing them. We're losing kids by the tens of thousands."
Canada believes that many poor parents aren't doing enough to prepare their kids for school—not because they don't care, but because they simply don't know the importance of early childhood stimulation. So the Zone starts with Baby College, nine weeks of parenting classes that focus on discipline and brain development. It continues with language-intensive prekindergarten, which feeds into a rigorous K-12 charter school with an extended day and an extended year.
That academic "conveyor belt," as Canada calls it, is supplemented by social programs: family counseling, a free health clinic, after-school tutoring, and a drop-in arts center for teenagers.Canada's early childhood programs are in many ways a response to research showing that the vocabularies of poor children usually lag significantly behind those of middle-class children. At the Harlem Gems prekindergarten, I watched as the four-year-olds were bombarded with books, stories, and flash cards—including some in French.
The parents were enlisted, too; one morning, I went with a few families on a field trip to a local supermarket organized by the Harlem Children's Zone. The point wasn't to learn about nutrition, but rather about language—how to fill an everyday shopping trip with the kind of nonstop chatter that has become second nature to most upper-middle-class parents, full of questions about numbers and colors and letters and names.
That chatter, social scientists have shown, has a huge effect on vocabulary and reading ability. And as we walked through the aisles, those conversations were going on everywhere: Is the carrot bumpy or smooth? What color is that apple? How many should we buy?So far, Canada's vision has yielded impressive results. Last year, the first conveyor-belt students reached the third grade and took their first statewide standardized tests.
In reading, they scored above the New York City average, and in math they scored well above the state average.Obama's proposal is to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities across the country.
In his speech announcing the plan, he proposed that each new zone operate as a 50-50 partnership between the federal government and local philanthropists, businesses, and governments, and he estimated that the federal share of the cost would come to "a few billion dollars a year." It's an undertaking that would mark a seismic change in the way that we approach poverty. Over the last few months, as I've talked to a variety of audiences about Canada's program, I've heard one question over and over: Can it really be reproduced?
It's true that it took a leader with Canada's unique qualities and personal history to create the first Harlem Children's Zone, to inspire donors enough to expand it from a modest community organization into a nonprofit powerhouse with a $68 million annual budget. But replicating the Zone, especially with federal backing, will require a different and more attainable set of skills. In fact, as leaders around the country create their own versions of the Zone, they'll likely improve on the model Canada has created—as well as, inevitably, make a few missteps.
The bigger question is whether Obama, once in office, will conclude that the government can't now afford this kind of bold initiative. It may be that the plan will be put on hold for a year or two, until the worst of the downturn passes. But Obama, drawing on the research of his Hyde Park neighbor, the economist James Heckman, has made the point that programs like the Harlem Children's Zone are not giveaways; they're investments that will pay for themselves in reduced spending on welfare, job training, and the criminal justice system.
As Obama put it, "We will find the money to do this because we can't afford not to."Obama concluded his speech with a story. "The idea for the Harlem Children's Zone began with a list," he said. "It was a waiting list that Geoffrey Canada kept of all the children who couldn't get into his program back when it was just a few blocks wide.
It was 500 people long. And one day he looked at that list and thought, Why shouldn't those 500 kids get the same chance in life as the 500 who were already in the program? Why not expand it to include those 500? Why not 5,000?
Why not?"
And that, of course," he continued, "is the final question about poverty in America. It's the hopeful one that Bobby Kennedy was also famous for asking. Why not? It leaves the cynics without an answer, and it calls on the rest of us to get to work."
Paul Tough is an editor for the New York Times Magazine and author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America.
Say PANTS to Patriarchy! (repost) Mood: irritated Now Playing: the Sri Ram Sena (Army of Lord Ram) group attacked women in Magalore in Southern India Topic: HUMANITY
There are few things that I like better in life than going to the pub with my friends and drinking whiskey whilst putting the world to rights. Indeed, I think the right to go to the pub is one of those things which should be enshrined in every country's constitution.
Last month, the Sri Ram Sena (Army of Lord Ram) group attacked women in Magalore in Southern India who they saw out drinking, and who they deemed to be acting disgracefully. The attack was filmed, was filmed and then broadcast on national television, showing men chasing and beating up panicking women. Some of the women, who tripped and fell, were kicked viciously by the men. Because, you know, beating the living shit out a woman daring to express her individuality by living her life the way she chooses to is a really good way to win people over to your cause.
The group are also planning to protest against Valentines Day this Saturday, believing that a harmless commercial celebration of hearts and flowers will slowly erode away moral dignity and the fabric of society.
Indian women, however, are fighting back. Last Thursday, The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women was formed on Facebook, which encourages women to to "walk to your nearest pub and buy a drink" this Valentines Day. Their blog is also encouraging people across the globe to send the Sri Ram Sena pairs of knickers. Pink knickers to be exact. The pinker, cheaper and dirtier the better.
Why knickers instead of...say...dog turds? Because in India chaddis is a colloquial term for underwear. And it alludes to a prominent Hindu right-wing group whose khaki-shorts-wearing cadres were often derisively called "chaddi wallahs" (chaddi wearers).
Why should I waste a perfectly good pair of Primark knickers on those close minded twats? you ask? Well, because it draws attention to the fact that in a part of the world where women have enough curbs on their lives as it is, they are choosing to fight back against a set of social constructs trying (once again) to put them in their place.
So, if you happen to be a woman in India on Valentines Day, be sure to buy yourself a pint. Or, indeed whatever tipple takes your fancy (mine's a Jamieson's, straight with ice if you're buying). Or, if you just wish to find out more about the campaign, direct your brower to the Consortium's blog, at thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot.com
crushed out
bright
caffeinated
don't ask
sharp
energetic
irritated
