tisiwoota

I’ve been car-less since my car got stolen in September, but those of you still car-bound may want to check this roadside assistance alternative: A Better World Club.

Why the need for an alternative? Well, AAA isn’t just a benign organization that picks you up in emergencies and gets you hotel discounts. They do a lot of lobbying– and it’s all pro gas-guzzling, against fuel efficiency, against public transit (they’d rather see more highways paved), against the Clean Air Act, etc.

There’s a great Sierra Club article on A Better World Club (and AAA’s activities):
here

Excerpt:
Well, I think the bottom line question for everyone is, when the car breaks down at some inopportune time and place, will you be there?

The way that works is this: There are six national towing networks in the country, AAA being the most prominent of them. The important point is that these networks are non-exclusive for the most part. The service providers can sign up for any of them, so you’re really dealing with the same service providers no matter which network you’re with.

*BWC provides nationwide 24-hour emergency roadside assistance including towing, lockout and flat tire assistance, jumpstarts, gas and fuel delivery.
*BWC supports sound environmental policies like mass transit funding and the Clean Air Act.
* 1% of all BWC revenues go towards environmental cleanup and advocacy.
* BWC donates $1.00 for every online booking made through their web site and offer members free carbon offsets (to help fight global warming) when you make your airline reservations through Better World Club.

BWC is generally less expensive than AAA, and guarantees to match their prices.

Check it out, eh?

Better World Club

PS Also awesome? They have roadside assistance and towing for _bicycles_. Whoa nelly.

This morning my friend Tom (no blog!), through some random serendipity, found himself acting as translator for a Democracy Now! interview of Bolivian activist Oscar Olivera, who played a significant role in the campaign against Bechtel’s privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

The transcript (and audio stream) is here; I encourage you to check it out.

Excerpt:
AMY GOODMAN:
[C]ould you explain . . . what happened in Cochabamba? Talk about what Bechtel tried to do and what the people responded.

OSCAR OLIVERA: [translated]
It’s not that Bechtel tried to do it. They did it. They increased the charges for water, the cost of water, by 300%, so that every family had to pay, for this water service, one-fifth of their income.

AMY GOODMAN:
How did they get control of the water? I mean, here, you turn on the tap. You don’t pay.

OSCAR OLIVERA: [translated]
The government, under a law that was passed, conceded control of the water under a monopoly to Bechtel in a certain area. So that means that Bechtel tried to charge a fee and had the monopoly power over a very basic necessity for people. The law said even that people had to ask, had to obtain a permit to collect rainwater. That means that even rainwater was privatized. The most serious thing was that indigenous communities and farming communities, who for years had their own water rights, those water sources were converted into property that could be bought and sold by international corporations.

via Wall Street Journal:

Frustrated that over two decades of research have failed to produce an AIDS vaccine, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates is tying his foundation’s latest, biggest AIDS-vaccine grants to a radical concept: Those who get the money must first agree to share the results of their work in short order.

Even as AIDS researchers around the world strive toward a common goal, they do so largely independent of one another due to a mix of commercial interests, bureaucratic jostling and personal rivalries. Like most biomedical research, results of AIDS-related studies are often carried out in secrecy, with successes and failures closely held until they are published in scientific journals months later.

So far, attempts to come up with a vaccine that produces protective antibodies to block infection by the wily and shape-shifting AIDS virus have been a “miserable failure,” says Nick Hellmann, interim director of HIV projects at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Now, Mr. Gates’s family foundation is putting $287 million new, five-year grants behind the notion that pooling results can surmount the massive technical hurdles that have hindered individual, sometimes-competing efforts.

A friend of mine who has done a lot of research on migrant farm laborers has passed along notice of anti-immigrant legislation that was passed by the House of Representatives and will now come before the Senate sometime this winter:

“[The bill] would make somewhere from 10 to 20 million workers in the United States aggravated felons for their simple presence. It is now nearly impossible to buy any food item that did not in some way depend on labor from an undocumented (”illegal”) worker, and in most cities, even as far North as Portland, Maine, many, if not most buildings are now built by undocumented construction workers. Agriculture/Horticulture/Silviculture/Fishing/Meat and construction are only the two industries with which I’ve had the most contact that depend heavily on undocumented labor, but the same is true of many health care workers, janitors, gardeners, and workers in all kinds of factories. The bill is also significant because, depending on the breadth of their interpretation, it also criminalizes any kind of contact with undocumented workers. For example, for the summers I interpreted for farm workers to help them receive medical treatment, I would now be punished by up to 5 years in prison if the bill were passed by the Senate. Bush has already said he would sign it.”

A group called United Farm Workers has issued an action alert as follows: (more…)

No, dear speed-reading gutter-minded audience members (you know who you are): not sodomize.

Sudan… er, -ize. Remember? Genocide? The media coverage has fallen off quite precipitously in the past few months. Personally, I’ve clicked on a few update articles every once in a while, but my knowledge of the current state of affairs is still embarrassingly sparse.

Today, via Global Voices Online, I discovered the blog of an aid-worker in Sudan.

I invite you to check it out… and perhaps add it to your RSS aggregator [Or bookmarks, if you’re a technological troglodtye… AKA me until, er, last month…]

I believe very strongly that personalizing an issue– finding a connection that will make you feel engaged with the welfare of real, live people– is _the best way_ to get yourself to stay informed of, or involved with, that issue. Reading articles can be dispiriting, and make you feel powerless to have an effect on the statistics you see on a page. Guilt does not work. [For short-term donations; yes. But not to stay engaged]. The key is personalization.

Here are excerpts of three entries from Sleepless in Sudan:

>>

I can usually gauge the amount of public attention that Darfur is getting by the frequency of parental phone calls from faraway lands. “The United Nations says that they might pull out of Darfur - what are you still doing there?” my mother asks me accusingly today. In past jobs, I have tried to address her worries by doing my best to explain the security situation as clearly and honestly as possible, but in this one I can’t - not because I don’t want to scare her (well, I guess that’s always part of it too), but also because the situation is simply too confusing, too complicated and above all too unclear here in Darfur.

…

So, back to men in Darfur today - and not the ones with guns.

We are still having some communications problems and the girls and I have been getting slightly annoyed with some of our men and their lack of enthusiasm for romantic gestures (well, besides occasionally travelling for thousands of miles through rebel-held territory to see us). I know this is Darfur, but JEEZ - at least they could try to give us girls something to smile about.

A friend has not gotten any emails from her guy in the field for nearly a week now and is looking more and more sour every day. I keep consoling her with the words, “It’s not you, he’s probably just been abducted by rebels”, which seems to help somewhat. It has now become our standard excuse for lack of male attention and a bit of a running joke.

…

I’ve been accused of blogging too much about the problems of Darfur and the mistakes that people are making - and not offering any bright solutions myself. While it’s a sad fact that there simply ARE lots of problems and very few successful solutions in Darfur, I am taking this criticism on board - and here is my solution for the day:

Send us those Canadian armoured personnel carriers.

There are currently 105 armoured personnel carriers stuck in a warehouse in Senegal - waiting to be transported to Darfur so that the African Union soldiers can use them in their patrols. Unfortunately, the Sudanese government - which has very little concern about the safety of people in Darfur - is refusing to let the shipment come into the country unless it gets a certain degree of control over their use. After much negotiation, it seems that 35 have now been granted permission to come here.

While I have not seen these big new trucks arrive here yet (or know much about the negotiations and lobbying that are taking place behind the scenes about this), I do know what sort of impression a fully-equipped military can have on the perceptions of people on the ground.

>>

Also: Googling Sudan just now turned up this item about Sudan’s plans for combatting Bird Flu. It never fails to amaze me that there is a government there going about its business as usual…

Want to know what I did during my winter in San Francisco?

I was just forwarded a link to a radio-interview with the people who run Freedom Archives, a non-profit with over 8000 hours of audiotapes from the civil rights and other solidarity movements. The director, Claude Marks, is an ex-political prisoner (it wasn’t until googling him just now, in fact, that I learned– via “The MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base”– what for).

Anyway, it’s a great project. Check out the interview here (note: link launches an mp3 file). The segment begins at 24:08 (at least on MusicMatch Jukebox– the email said it began at 12:00; so perhaps results vary with the program?).

This article was featured on 3qd a while back, but I’ve only gotten around to reading it just now. And it’s very, very powerful:

On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott’s third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. “Hey, Mrs. Elliott,” Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk.

“They shot that King yesterday. Why’d they shoot that King?”

All 28 children found their desks, and Elliott said she had something special for them to do, to begin to understand the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the day before. “How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?” she asked the children, who were white. “It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?”

…That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. “The brown-eyed people are the better people in this room,” Elliott
began. “They are cleaner and they are smarter.”

…On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy theywere. Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blueys were much less nasty than the brown-eyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn’t want to inflict it on their former tormentors.

…Hundreds of viewers [of the Tonight Show] wrote letters saying Elliott’s work appalled them. “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children,” one said. “Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there’s no way they could possibly understand it. It’s cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage.”

We forget so easily what the world was like– and even more easily, how similar in ways it still is (until something happens to remind us).

Today’s web-clicking led me to the website for a philanthropy organization called Modest Needs. Its mission is to reach out “to the people conventional philanthropy has forgotten: hard-working individuals and families who suddenly find themselves faced with small, emergency expenses that they have no way to afford on their own.”

How beautiful: the internet is now making possible the type of personalized, targeted emergency support that used to be typical only in small towns.

Besides donation, the site also coordinates volunteering of professional services (plumbing, dentistry, auto help, etc.) It seems like a very hands-on site, for both donors and applicants, with a community “bulletin board” and a section devoted to advice on fiscal responsibility.

There are also profiles of recipient families, which are very touching, and really show what a big difference “small change” can make– one that I read told of a cancer survivor to whom $16 was going to make the difference between making the next month’s rent or losing her housing. Another tells of three children who held a garage sale and sold their toys to help a woman who was caring for her sick mother to make her mortgage payment.

The more I read about the organization’s philosophy and set-up (including secure giving, requirements of specific documentation from applicants, etc), the more I am impressed with the thoughtfulness and integrity of the people running Modest Needs.

I encourage you to check it out (and when you can, to help out).

…

To contrast my earlier post-title today, it’s good to be reminded that sometimes we humans can get the whole “an ounce of prevention for a pound of cure” thing right…

“By offering to assist individuals and families before they have been forced into the unforgiving cycle of poverty, Modest Needs’ donors work with our applicants to beat the cycle of poverty before it starts.”

There’s an interesting article in this week’s Economist comparing the ability of democracies and dictatorships to reduce poverty. Basically it finds that dictatorships (like China) achieve the most extreme results– either the most striking miracles or the most terrible tragedies, often within the span of the same ruler, while democracies (like India) muddle along with more moderate achievements. The analysis is drawn from the work of Ashutosh Varshney of the University of Chicago, who has also done some very interesting work in conflict resolution.

“Why might democracy militate against poverty reduction in poor countries? Mr Varshney has two suggestions. First, democracies have a bias towards “direct” methods of tackling poverty, such as subsidies and hand-outs, which, in the long run, are less effective than “indirect” methods—ie, those that generate faster economic growth. In India, this seems undeniably true. Governments have built up whopping budget deficits, thanks largely to subsidies. Many farmers, for example, receive subsidised or free fuel, fertiliser, electricity and water. But little public money is spent on improvements that would do most to lift the growth rate: in infrastructure, primary education and basic health care. Everybody wants better roads, and nobody votes against them. But every politician promises to build them and hardly any do. Cutting subsidies, on the other hand, is a sure vote-loser.

Second, the poor are not necessarily a homogenous group. In a democratic system, they may organise themselves along lines other than economic class and “the shared identities of caste, ethnicity and religion are more likely to form historically enduring bonds”. If you are born poor, you may die rich. But your ethnic group is fixed. In India, with its myriad linguistic and caste-based groups, the upshot is a dispiriting beggar-thy-neighbour politics. Just as subsidies are easier to deliver than are roads and schools, so are affirmative-action schemes, giving jobs to members of specified castes.

The relationship between caste and class helps explain the wide regional discrepancies in India. Mr Sen has noted that in one Indian state, Kerala, infant mortality has fallen from 37 per 1,000 in 1979, the same as in China, to ten now, compared with 30 in China. He suggests that the improvement relates directly to India’s democratic strengths. The collapse of the public health system in China in the reform era was possible because there was little political resistance, whereas the deficiencies of Indian primary health care are subject to constant public scrutiny.”

In the news today, Pascal Lamy of France has prevailed over candidates from developing countries to become the next director general of the WTO.

There is concern that this might worsen the growing rift between developed and developing countries in the WTO. In particular, developing countries worry that someone from a developed country with powerful agricultural interests would be unlikely to do much in the way of cutting back agricultural subsidies, which often spur overproduction and depress prices for crops, making it difficult for developing countries to compete.

“On mission along the border of Chad and Darfur, Human Rights Watch researchers gave children notebooks and crayons to keep them occupied while they spoke with the children’s parents. Without any instruction or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: The attacks by the Janjaweed, the bombings by Sudanese government forces, the shootings, the burning of entire villages, and the flight to Chad..”

It’s a delicate line, but I think the site succeeds in using the work to humanize rather than sensationalize or exploit.

Each drawing is accompanied by the child’s explanation.

Nur, Age 9

Nur: This is my brother. He is hiding in Sudan. He is not happy.
Human Rights Watch: Why?
Nur: He wants to learn, to go to school, but he has nothing. Our school was burned.

Mahmoud, Age 13

Human Rights Watch: What’s happening here?
Mahmoud: These men in green are taking the women and the girls.
Human Rights Watch: What are they doing?
Mahmoud: They are forcing them to be wife.
Human Rights Watch: What’s happening here?
Mahmoud: The houses are on fire.
Human Rights Watch: What’s happening here?
Mahmoud: This is an Antonov. This is a helicopter. These here, at the bottom of the page, these are dead people.

SaveDarfur
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