I was first introduced to Civitas through my middle school gifted program. My teacher had us participate in the Civitas Model United Nations program, which I found both stimulating and engaging. Since my mother is from the island nation The Kingdom of Tonga, I opted to represent Tonga in the Model U.N. program. This would be a trend that continued as I sustained my participation in the Model U.N. program throughout my high school career.

One of the early resolutions I drafted was focused on providing clean water sources to under-resourced communities throughout the islands. The plan of action was to bring over LifeStraws, a water purification and filtration device that can provide an individual user with clean drinking water for approximately five years. Doing research and drafting this resolution opened up my juvenile mind to real issues that citizens face in Tonga, and for the first time ever, as a thirteen year old, I began to think about plausible solutions.

Fast forward 9 years. I graduated from the University of Missouri – Columbia with a degree in International Studies with an emphasis in Peace Studies and a minor in Leadership and Public Service. Following my May 2018 graduation, I went off to Tonga in August to serve as an English Literacy Facilitator with the United States Peace Corps. It was decided by the Peace Corps that I would serve on the outer island of ‘Eua in the most remote and under-resourced village on the island. They hadn’t sent a Peace Corps Volunteer to this village in over 10 years.

My primary assignment was working at the village’s government primary school, G.P.S. Houma. There were only 3 staff at the whole school, with a student body of approximately 47 students. Each staff person was a teacher for one of the composite classes (grades 1 and 2, grades 3 and 4, grades 5 and 6), and the grade 1 and 2 teacher also doubled as the school principal. My chief role within the school was to teach English to grades 3-6.

While working at the primary school I quickly noticed that the principal was calling half-days most days of the week. When I inquired with her why this was the case, she said it was because there was no drinking water for the children on the school compound, and that the only water available was reserved for the use of teachers and their families living on the school grounds. Given this information, I constructed a grant proposal to install rainwater tanks on the school compound. My grant proposal received many rejections from various organizations. Eventually, I was able to pitch the idea to a Rotary Club in the United States and obtain funding for the purchase and installation of rainwater tanks over two fiscal years. 2020 is the second fiscal year, and as of September the Rotary Club has already initiated the second installation of rainwater tanks in the village.

Participating in Model U.N. and other enrichment activities with Civitas has greatly influenced how I have showed up in the world in my adult life. Had I not begun thinking about global issues at age 13, I may not have completed my first global aid project by age 23. I strongly believe that having conversations with young people about the impact they can have on the world will encourage them to become active global citizens.

The post Nine years later, my Model U.N. idea became a reality appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Two years ago, the  Guardian described how Venezuela’s devastating economic downturn was ravaging its hospitals. Since then, things have only gotten worse. Much worse.

The New York Times reported at the end of last year that in Venezuela today,  hunger is killing the nation’s children at an alarming rate. The Times team tracked 21 public hospitals in Venezuela. The paper reported that doctors were seeing record numbers of children with severe malnutrition. More alarmingly, in the same piece, the Times reported that hundreds of children had already died. And children continue to die.

The most needed medicines have disappeared in Venezuela. Millions of Venezuelan citizens have had to flee their country, and as the diaspora widens, Venezuelans in their thousands continue to exit Venezuela daily. Venezuelans are walking to cities and towns in Colombia, journeys of hundreds of miles, wearing nothing more than flip-flops on their feet.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Maduro was videotaped and photographed last week living high on the hog in Istanbul, Turkey, smoking a cigar, enjoying $400 beef and chitchatting with and cozying up to the executive chef Salt Bae at one of the most expensive restaurants in the world. The video went viral, and immediately, not just in Venezuela, but around the world garnered the indignation that it deserved.

Just in August of this year, Maduro – and economist he is not – announced an unprecedented increase in the minimum wage to 180 of his newly invented currency, Bolívares soberanos (Sovereign Bolivars). In his attempt to keep pace with the hyperinflation that he himself has created (this is his 23rd or 24th – it’s hard to keep track – increase in the minimum wage over the past 6 years), Maduro announced that from September 1st of this year the minimum wage in Venezuela would now be the equivalent of $18 US per month.

Maduro is pegging his new currency to something called the Petro – a crypto currency tied to Venezuela’s oil reserves in the marketplace going forward, a complete unknown. On the introduction of the Petro, Maduro on national television described his new initiatives as “a really impressive, magic formula that we discovered while studying with our own, Venezuelan, Latin American-rooted thinking.”

Forget Venezuelan, Latin American-rooted thinking in the above sentence for just a minute. Magic formula is the pivotal key concept in his pronouncement.

The President of a 30 million+ population is trying to sell his citizens on the miracle of snake oil, on a medicine show that was commonplace centuries ago and whose overenthusiastic misstatements have been disgraced thousands of times since. Maduro wants no more and no less than that his citizens buy into a false cure of what ails Venezuela.

$18 per month is a 35-fold increase from the 50¢ conversion-rate adjusted minimum monthly wage that Venezuelans were guaranteed in just August of this year. It sounds like a huge increment, until you realize that the International Monetary Fund is predicting a 1,000,000 percent increase in the inflation rate in Venezuela by December. And a one-million percent inflation rate applied to $18 is such an infinitesimal amount that it won’t even show up on your calculator. Rest assured that there will be a 25th and a 26th, and perhaps even a 27th and 28th increase in the minimum wage before the end of this year. If it happens, it means nothing. And if it doesn’t happen, $18 per month is still just $18 per month for life’s necessities.

Unable to pay a 35-time increase in the minimum wage for their employees, business owners across Venezuela have reacted to Maduro’s latest proposal by letting longtime employees go, and by closing down their stores or businesses completely.

The result of this new Maduro policy is that there are now many more Venezuelans out of work and without the basic resources for daily life in Venezuela than there were just 30 or so days ago. With Maduro’s latest initiatives, the number of Venezuelans needing to leave Venezuela and take their chances in a completely unknown life abroad has increased exponentially.

How to help

Those of us who live outside Venezuela are observers of a situation that is inhumane and cruel beyond belief. We are witnessing a humanitarian crisis unfold in the Americas like none before. And we have to ask ourselves What can be done? How can we help?

Here are some suggestions as to how we can help our neighbors just south of Key West right now.

The Venezuelan Society of Palliative Medicine collects medicines to help those in Venezuela without resources. The specific goal is to help in the treatment of patients with chronic diseases.

Programa de Ayuda Humanitaria para Venezuela accepts financial donations via PayPal, and also accepts donations of medicines and food in Florida and Puerto Rico. You can see a complete list of drop-off locations or contact numbers here – and scrolling down the page you will find a useful list of hard-to-find medicines in Venezuela.

Cuatro por Venezuela works to provide help in the areas of health, nutrition and education. The organization partners with 74 hospitals and institutions in more than 14 Venezuelan states to help provide food to senior citizens and children facing hunger.

Chamos is a UK-based non-profit focused on the needs of Venezuelan children through education and healthcare programs going forward.

In July 2018, WPLG in Miami ran a piece on how to be more immediately involved with the Catholic organizations offering assistance to those arriving in Cúcuta, Colombia daily. Cúcuta, Colombia is the gateway to the world for the vast majority of Venezuelans leaving Venezuela. Among WPLG’s suggestions are these:

The Casa de Paso Divina Providencia provides healthcare and food to Venezuelan refugees. Rev. José David Cañas, 57, has distributed some 500,000 lunches since the house opened June 14, 2017.

The Scalabrini International Migration Network runs a center, or “casa del migrante,” in Cúcuta. They manage several programs including a kitchen responsible for a regular distribution of breakfasts and lunches and a school. For more information, call 011-57-7-573-5533 or email scalabrinicucuta@gmail.com.

The post Venezuela’s sick economy is killing its citizens. Here’s how to help them. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As is self-evident, Republicans are gung-ho on cutting taxes because there is very little that government does that they truly value. The bigger the gaps are in the safety net, the better it is for many Republicans. The less protection of the environment, the more freedom there is, particularly for abusers. The more unregulated the financial institutions are, the more opportunity there is to create “funny money,” and the poor will only get a piece of that when it becomes a known counterfeit commodity.

We talk about the value of having a bird’s eye view of our society. If you could fly over every nook and cranny of our country, swooning down when desirable to get a better look, what would you see as America’s greatest, and most obvious problems? Since your flyover would include observations of the hollars in Appalachia as well as the neighborhood of Chicago’s west and south sides, you would see the abject poverty that reflects how tens of millions of Americans live.

You would also fly over Hempstead, the North Shore of Chicago and Beverly Hills. To a reasonable person, it might appear that the residents have more wealth than is necessary to live a comfortable life. That is particularly so when compared to the squalor in which so many of the others who we have seen are forced to live.

So, the obvious question arises. How can a country of so much wealth have so much poverty in it midst? This seems like such an obvious question to me. But that may be the problem. I am projecting my vision of America on everyone else, whether they agree with me or not. I don’t like the presence of poverty in our society, but clearly for many more, it is either a minor inconvenience or a badge of honor representing that some people clearly have it better than others.

For those who subscribe to the Bible, there is a line about the meek inheriting the earth. I guess that like virtually every other line in the Bible, it has a throw-away factor; a shelf-life only as long as it is convenient for someone the believe, or at least, espouse it. So, if I’m hung up on the economic disparity in our society, it may be that this is my problem and I need to “get over it.”

Like most people, I can be fairly stubborn and don’t like to sacrifice my values on a whim. But this leaves me in a position where I’m quite distant from the American mainstream.

I can be a bit of a policy wonk, but what good is advocating a set of policies if the public does not back them? The only other option is to grab an inordinate amount of the levers of power as so many well-healed Republicans seem to have done.

I could try to be preacher and spread the gospel of income inequality. But I think that many of our problems are papered over because there is the “preacher-industrial complex” telling us what to think and do.

I guess that the answer is for me to own my problem and hope that in small ways, the logic of the undesirability of income inequality will prevail. I can take a knee for that.

The post Is it my hang-up, or society’s, that we are so tolerant of poverty? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Since the harrowing, soul-crushing Democratic defeat in the 2016 elections (and ever since), liberals have been desperately wracking their beleaguered brains trying to devise a strategy to reclaim any modicum of control before the 2018 election cycle. Triumphantly, they announced their new platform, “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future,” thinking they had seized upon a guaranteed win. I beg to differ.

The new platform revolves around three principal aims: “(1) Raise the wages and incomes of American workers and create millions of good-paying jobs; (2) Lower the costs of living for families; (3) Build an economy that gives working Americans the tools to succeed in the 21st Century.” In short, their plan is to court white working class voters. The party appears to have assessed its electoral failures to be the result of focusing too much on “identity politics” and framing too many issues in terms of social justice, rather than concentrating on the economic woes of the middle class.

And so, they’ve removed references to race, religion, immigration, gender identity, sexual orientation, sex, even SES/class from the new platform. (Don’t worry, A Better Deal still explicitly promises to “make it a national priority to bring high-speed Internet to every corner of America” though. Y’know, the most urgent matters.)

Now, I’ll readily admit the Democratic establishment’s messaging on economic issues was perhaps subpar during the last election cycle, especially after they worked to push Bernie further and further off stage. But relegating “social justice” issues to some dark, dusty, forgotten corner of the attic until it’s a more convenient time to trot them out? That undermines the most fundamental values the Left purports to swear by.

The Democratic establishment is saying with A Better Deal, “people of color, religious minorities, women, LGBTQIA folk, immigrants, poor people, and other underprivileged communities: we value your vote and agree that you face some challenges in America today. But, please, for the sake of the greater good, we have to put your struggles on the back burner. It’s not that we don’t care, promise, it’s just that your struggles are… divisive. So we’ll focus on white working class concerns for now, and then once we win more elections, we’ll get back to you. Pinky swear, we will. Until then, remember to vote Democrat. K thx, bye.”

Not only does this egregiously belittle and denigrate the continued— and now intolerably heightened— threats to minority and underprivileged communities under the Trump administration, but it actively undermines social justice causes in the most duplicitous repudiation of the Left’s professed desire for a more egalitarian society.

“But wait!” you cry. “Economic justice is social justice! Once we fix growing income inequality, regulate Wall Street, and stop companies from outsourcing American jobs, it will naturally result in better conditions for minorities! And once we appease the white working class, even they will be more amicable to minority concerns!”

Now, I concede there are, for instance, some highly racialized aspects to many of our most pressing economic concerns. We can see it in the way that impoverished communities are disproportionately communities of color and the continuing wage gap. Economic and racial justice are, most certainly, inextricably tied. But economic justice is not enough for racial justice. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said in 2015, calling upon the doctrine of Dr. Martin Luther King, “Economic justice is not — and has never been — sufficient to ensure racial justice. Owning a home won’t stop someone from burning a cross on the front lawn.” Making the argument that just addressing the economy will also solve racism is much the same as claiming that a colorblind worldview will solve racial problems: “if we ignore race, then racial disparities will melt away of their own accord.” But the thing is impoverished people of color face different, unique challenges from impoverished white people (that’s the whole principle of intersectionality, y’all), and if you don’t address the very real effects of compounded inequality you simply cannot achieve a just, egalitarian society.

And that intersectional, inclusive, holistic understanding of egalitarian justice is now more necessary than ever in Trump’s America. Marginalized communities are under attack from all sides; no one’s been spared. From Trump’s deafening silence on hate crimes to his apparent endorsement of police brutality, and from his continued insistence on the Muslim ban to his newly found insistence on the Trans Military ban, one thing is indisputably clear: this is not the time for the Left to distance itself from social justice causes.

Many political scientists and pundits are speculating that the key questions of the 21st century are “who belongs?” and “who is an American?”, and Trump is making it increasingly clear that, for him, women, immigrants, religious minorities, people of color, the poor, and LGBTQIA folk, among others, have no place in his vision of America.

But the thing is, with this Better Deal platform, those communities don’t have much of a place in the Democrats’ vision of America either. Suggesting that the concerns of marginalized communities can wait for a later, more convenient date ignores the aforementioned threats to those communities. And in the meanwhile— while Democrats are focused on “more important things”—  people are literally dying. This whole idea of “waiting until a more convenient time” is antithetical to social progress. It’s not neutral, it’s actively harmful. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” MLK wrote:

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was ‘well timed’ according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘wait.’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’ It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

And when the Left starts to actively hinder social justice causes like this, it has turned its back on those high and mighty principles of egalitarianism and progressive justice that it has long promised voters. Democrats love scorning the GOP for calling itself the party of “family values,” pointing out all the hypocritical ways the Right then turns its back on those same values. But with this erasure of so many social justice concerns from the Democratic platform, the Left is no better. It has abdicated any semblance of moral high ground it might have once held.

Look, I can understand the desperation behind this new approach. The Left is scrambling to try to present a unified front in the face of its crippling 2016 defeat. I get that. But the Left has also repeatedly turned away every effort to embrace a more progressive agenda in favor of the same establishment views that led to that defeat in the first place. When Hillary beat Bernie in the primaries but then tried to pick up some of his more radical positions to court his voters, the Democratic party should have realized, right then and there, that rather than trying to become a moderate party, it needed to move further left. And yet, when the Democrats had the option of taking that step by selecting Keith Ellison to be party chair, they doubled down on the centrist wishy-washiness and went with Tom Perez. And this Better Deal is more of the same. But the Democrats for whatever reason expect different results. So my sympathy is wearing thin.

Even if we set aside the moral principles that cause me to be viscerally repulsed by this Better Deal, from a purely pragmatic standpoint this platform is not going to hand Democrats electoral victories by winning over white working class voters. It’s not that easy. The Left screwed up in the 2016 cycle when it basically handed that demographic over to the GOP by not opposing Trump’s populist messaging; and creating this milktoast, watered-down version of populist economics after the fact isn’t going to suddenly change that. And, quite frankly, white working class voters aren’t likely to choose this populist vision of economics when the GOP’s is still so potent. As Michelle Cottle wrote in The Atlantic, Trump’s “cruel fantasy, scapegoating certain groups to fuel false hope in others [is] such a soothing, satisfying bedtime story for many Americans that it’s almost irresistible.” Thomas Mann, a senior fellow in governance studies with the Brookings Institution, told Cottle, “the Democrats’ Better Deal can’t compete at a rhetorical level with Trump’s Make America Great Again.” Simply put, A Better Deal isn’t compelling messaging. Without concurrently advocating for things like an end to for-profit private prisons, reproductive health rights, and more grants to help people of color and the poor go to school that would set the Left’s populism apart, the Democratic Better Deal simply can’t compete.

And there’s another reason A Better Deal is very pragmatically setting up the Left to fail: it’s taking minority voters for granted. Under this new platform, voters from marginalized communities feel invisible. Democrats are so sure that the GOP vision of the US is so off-putting that they don’t feel the need to court minority votes at all. Basically, the Democrats are so sure that I won’t risk the ability to see my family overseas again by voting Republican, that they don’t think they need to appeal to me at all. Again, I’ll ask, did the Democrats learn anything from 2016? Remember how Hillary was so sure she would carry Blue states that she didn’t bother visiting a bunch of them? And remember how they went to Trump after that? Just saying the other guy’s worse and then resting on your laurels isn’t guaranteeing victory. I want to vote for something I believe in; I don’t want to vote for the Left just because the other side wants to kill me. Democrats— instead of taking minority votes as a given— need to fear the very real threat that if voters feel like the best they can do is choose the slightly lesser of two evils, then they won’t show up to the ballot box at all. Or they’ll risk it on a third party candidate. The Left has to present a convincing image of a more egalitarian society that will protect the rights of its base and continuously demonstrate its commitment to justice if it wants to retain minority votes.

If Democrats really want to learn from 2016, move forward, and wrest control from Trump and his cronies, they have to do better than A Better Deal. Ignoring social justice concerns in a hypocritical betrayal of their promise for egalitarian justice, offering a pale vision of populist economics, and taking the votes of their base for granted isn’t going to win Democrats more elections. It’s handing the election over to the GOP on a silver platter.

The post Dems’ Better Deal: Courting white voters, abandoning social justice appeared first on Occasional Planet.

This week we have another heart-warming story from our St. Louis Community. A man named Jake Austin runs a special service, a Shower the People truck, that offers free showers and other hygiene services to homeless people in the St. Louis area. We’re often reminded of how the homeless and other poor people need food, and what an excellent job so many of the food pantries do. We recognize that if a person has shelter, they have overcome some of the barriers to homelessness, but far from all.

There are still people who are literally living on the streets and what they face is incomprehensible, especially in the wealthiest country in the world. To eat and to find clothing, some actually engage in dumpster diving. But what then?

That’s where Austin and his cohorts come in. In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on “Shower the People,” Austin said, “Hot water and soap are wildly underrated in the world. You don’t realize what it means to you until you don’t have it.”

That resonated with Austin, who bought a truck he found on Craigslist for $5,000 and started Shower to the People.

Tangibly, the truck is equipped with two shower stalls and moves to different neighborhoods. Intangibly, it’s equipped with a ray of hope for many of the region’s homeless.

When it began operations a year ago, it offered showers two days a week. Now it’s four, with plans for more growth, Austin said. “We don’t have clients, we have friends and neighbors, and I’m excited about our growth.”

This is another “feel good” story for St. Louis. Fortunately, we’re fed a steady diet of them because we have Channel 5 (NBC affiliate) “on our side” [that’s their slogan] and Channel 4 (CBS affiliate) “never stops watching out for you” [their slogan]. With those two agents as our allies, we should have an army of charitable people and organizations that ensure that we never have people in our community who are hungry, homeless, or so left out in the cold that they have not showered in two months.

It was not a television station that broke the story of the “Shower the People” to us. It was St. Louis’ flagship daily newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And they certainly care about us. No words could provide a greater call to action than Joseph Pulitzer’s platform, written on April 10, 1907.

I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

Joseph Pulitzer clearly got it. He talks about broad societal change to ensure that justice takes the lead over charity. He sees the well-being of citizens as a major concern of government and that responsible government must provide a safety net to protect all in need.

Perhaps it was inevitable as time went on the Post-Dispatch would have to trim its sails a bit to appeal to readers who were not nearly as progressive in thought or action as Pulitzer. At the time that he wrote his platform, there were nearly a dozen daily newspapers in St. Louis, so the Post-Dispatch could securely cater to the progressive niche.

As the Post worked to broaden its appeal, it had to seek out advertisers that were not comfortable with words like “never lack sympathy with the poor” or “always remain devoted to the public welfare.”

The TV stations crow about the great service they do for our community and the newspaper does indeed find time to provide some in-depth coverage to real acts of charity. But what is lost is how far we are from the words of Pulitzer’s platform.

A just society with a responsible government would never have need for a shower truck, much less homeless shelters or food banks. The society would recognize what is in Article I of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience3 and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

It is appropriate that we now cheer for Jake Austin and others who bring us the “Shower the People” truck. It is also appropriate that we cry that we are as far from justice as we are in 2017. No amount of “being on the side” of our charities will make up for a commitment to a solid government social and economic safety net. Whenever we cheer for the charity, let’s remember the omission of justice. And whenever the television station or newspaper tells us of the charity, let them remind us of the injustice that gave cause to the charity.

The post Charity: It feels so good it hurts appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The Keep Hope Alive Project, founded in 2016 in Hudson, New York, provides an outlet for those opposed to the divisiveness and rightward drift of the Trump era to express publicly their hope and commitment for a more inclusive, progressive, and just future for all Americans.

The concept to create an advocacy network of artists, businesses, nonprofits, and communities originated with Hudson Valley resident Cheryl Roberts. Roberts initially sought to create a symbol that would signal support for a positive vision for the future rather than the frighteningly negative and destructive one emanating from Trump, his administration, and his Republican enablers. A rectangular field of violet and white emerged as the subtle, yet powerful, graphic Roberts came up with to encourage public statements of solidarity for a wide-ranging and ambitious agenda. That list of issues includes support for the arts; racial and gender equality; universal health care; environmental sustainability; a free and independent press; freedom of religion; immigration and criminal justice reform; support for local businesses; and workers’ rights.

The project rolled out on inauguration day, January 20, 2017, when the first Keep Hope Alive flag was proudly hoisted in the City of Hudson, an upstate community located approximately two and one-half hours north of New York City.

Since that first roll out, Hope flags, banners, and signs have cropped up along Warren Street, the commercial drag in Hudson, as well as on the facades of private homes along Hudson’s side streets. The second upstate community to join the project was Chatham, New York, just a twenty-minute drive from Hudson, where residents and visitors are greeted by an impressive show of violet and white along Main Street. 

Of course, the organizers of this project have much larger ambitions than just flying the flags in small villages and towns in Upstate New York. The project seeks to expand across the country and internationally.

According to Linda Mussmann, co-director of Time and Space Limited, an arts space in Hudson and co-sponsor of the project, outreach to communities in other states is beginning to bear fruit.  This summer Asheville, North Carolina, becomes the first community outside of New York State to proudly fly the Hope flags and banners at twenty locations throughout the town.

If you’d like more information, would like to purchase a flag or banner, or find out how to organize your community to join in, go to www.keephopealiveinternational.org/about.

The post Upstate New Yorkers want to Keep Hope Alive appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I was recently in Albuquerque, NM and amazed at the extensive and exceptional coverage that one local TV station gave to the proposed Republican health care bill in the U.S. Senate to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Where I live in St. Louis, MO, local news is primarily crime, oddities and self-promotion of the station itself and the St. Louis metropolitan area.

There have been election nights when the results get third or fourth billing. This tends to follow a huge vacuum of coverage of who the candidates are, who they try to project themselves as being, and who they might actually be behind the veneer.

Is it any wonder that the people of the country put the Electoral College in a position to select Donald Trump to be president? Between schools favoring standardized tests over active citizenship and most of mainstream television choosing not to address the complexities of contemporary issues (CNN, MSNBC, PBS & BBC are major exceptions), many citizens of voting age have little awareness of public issues.

This is why it was so refreshing to see the Wednesday, June 21^st 10:00 PM newscast on KOAT-TV in Albuquerque. The news of the Senate Republicans proposal did not lead the news, because indeed there had been new revelations in what was a far from ordinary crime spree in the area. But once they got to the governmental policy story, they devoted over four straight minutes to it. The reported included the following important information:

1. What is in the proposed bill, with a bullet-point visual.
2. The reaction to the bill from Donald Trump.
3. Response from several Congressional Democrats as well as House Speaker Paul Ryan.
4. Prospects for the bill in the Senate.
5. The impact that it will have on the KOAT viewing area, specifically the state of New Mexico, including the 900,000 who are on Medicaid.
6. An extensive interview with a man with a severe physical disability who would be severely impacted if the bill became law.
7. A video response from the Republican governor of the state, Susana Martinez.
8. A statement on the floor of the Senate by Senator Thomas Udall (D-NM).
9. An interview with their other U.S. Senator, Martin Heinrich (D-NM).
10. A statement by one of the two Democratic members of the House or Representatives from New Mexico.
11. A refusal to comment by the one Republican member of the House from New Mexico.

KOAT-Health-Care-Transcript

This type of coverage is no more expensive to provide than most of what fills the air as local news. The fact is that this issue in Washington, DC has far more impact on local areas than any single crime. In fact, it does more to affect the quality of life of citizens than any number positive acts of volunteerism in the community.

Many in the media do not realize that when they fail to give factual coverage of national news, they are working hand-in-glove with Republicans who prefer for people to be jaundiced about what government can do for them. It is good that government does not have the level of control over local news that it could dictate content. But if those in local news truly want to live in communities that have excellent qualities of life, they must take the lead in informing their audiences of those events of the day that have the most impact on them. Congratulations to KOAT-TV in Albuquerque for doing so.

The post A Local TV station that knows how to cover national news appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 2016, the six-nation East African Community—whose members are Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and South Sudan—agreed to a ban on imported second-hand clothes and shoes. The embargo was set to start in 2019, but it has sparked economic and political controversy that reflects the complicated relationship developing nations have with the United States and other exporters of second-hand clothing. More recently, under fire from both internal and external forces [meaning US second-hand clothing exporters], the EAC modified its proposal, substituting a phaseout for an outright ban.

What’s this all about?

In African nations, imported second-hand clothing is an economic driver and a big business. Today in Uganda, for example, second-hand garments account for over 80% of all clothing purchases. Kenya receives an estimated $4.8 million in import duties annually from second-hand clothing. The huge second-hand clothing market also creates many jobs: clearing agents at ports, truck drivers, cart pullers, loaders, ironing and clothes repair workers, store clerks, and security guards, to name just a few.

East Africa imported $151 million of second-hand clothing last year, most of which was collected by charities and recyclers in the UK, Europe and North America. According to Oxfam, more than 70% of the clothes donated globally end up in Africa. In 2015 Kenya for example imported about 18,000 tonnes of clothing from Britain valued at around $42 million.

These figures explode the widespread assumption in the US that the shoes, outgrown kids’ clothes and no-longer fashionable dresses dropped off at charity shops are donated to needy people in African countries. In fact, according to one recent report, the US generates 1.4 million tons of used clothing annually, of which only 20 percent is sold domestically in thrift stores. As a result, the US exports 800,000 tons of used clothing annually, a significant portion of which is resold in African markets. One of the biggest used-clothing resellers, is Mid-West Textile Company of Texas, which purchases clothes that were donated to non-profit organizations such as Goodwill Industries.

The trouble with Mitumba

While the used-clothing trade creates jobs and government revenue in African countries, it engenders problems, as well.

According to Wikipedia,

 “n Africa, imported second-hand clothing is known as  mitumba. Mitumba is a Swahili term, literally meaning “bundles,” used to refer to plastic-wrapped packages of used clothing donated by people in wealthy countries. The term is also applied to the clothing that arrives in these bundles. One major receiving port for Mitumba is in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam.

Critics of the Mitumba trade note that the influx of cheap clothing is responsible for the decline of local textile industries. Here’s how one website describes the situation:

According to Andrew Brooks (Kings College, London),a debt crisis hit many African economies in the 1980s and 1990s following economic reforms recommended by the World Bank and the IMF. The reforms, amongst other things, opened up local economies to second-hand clothes.

The abbreviated version of the complex story is: declining incomes in subsequent years made locally produced clothes harder to afford. Imported secondhand clothing started flooding into African markets to provide an affordable option that was considered to be at least as good quality as locally produced garments.

Local manufacturing struggled to compete with international competition and factories were forced to close. Prior to this, the East African Community (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi) boasted a vibrant clothing manufacturing sector which employed hundreds of thousands of people.

In Kenya for example, a garment industry that employed 500,000 people was reduced to only about 20,000 garment workers today. It’s led some academics to argue that old clothing from the U.K. and U.S. was creating a post-colonial economic mess.

Pros and cons of the ban

These issues led the EAC to propose its ban on second-hand clothing imports in 2016. The goal was to revitalize the local clothing manufacturing industry and to create new jobs. One big challenge would be to ensure that the the hundreds of thousands of secondhand clothing workers – like the 65,000 mitumba traders in Kenya – largely in the informal sector, would not be left without work.

The ban idea quickly met some very strong resistance. While protecting local textile manufacturers, it was seen as a threat to a multi-billion-shilling group of importers, and they pushed back.

And, of course, US exporters of mitumba feel threatened, too. Under the African Growth and Opportunites Act [AGOA] enacted in by Congress in 2000 [and recently extended], East African nations get duty-free access to markets in the US if they meet certain conditions, such as improving the rule of law, human rights, and respect for core labor standards. Apparently, influenced by industry lobbyists seeing the import ban as injurious to textile exporters, the US has threatened to end EAC members’ eligibility for duty-free-market access.

Then, in May 2017, internal and external pressures led Kenya to back out of the EAC ban. But Rwanda announced that it would maintain its plan to ban mitumba. Finally, at a summit held in Dar Es Salaam on May 20, 2017, EAC partner states agreed on a compromise proposal, saying:

…for now, the best approach to phaseout second hand clothes is by supporting local industries instead of banning importation of the clothes once and for all.

The phaseout may be helped along by raising import duties on mitumba and by adding taxes on purchases of secondhand clothing, with the effect of making imports more costly in comparison to locally and regionally designed and manufactured clothing. It will be interesting to see howthe EAC nations manage this delicate balancing act.

So, we don’t have to stop donating to our neighborhood thrift shops just yet. But we all need to be aware of what happens to our easily discarded fast-food apparel and the effect that our wardrobe profligacy may be having on people in other parts of the world.

The post Do African countries want your second-hand clothes? Yes and No appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I recently had two experiences which crystallized why I think that so many Americans, particularly younger ones, do not understand the importance of the federal government to a progressive agenda.

Our non-profit was working with a group of high school students. We visited a homeless shelter in St. Louis, hopefully in a way that was not intrusive to the residents. As we were leaving, we asked the public information official who had given us the tour what suggestions for solving homelessness in America she might give to Senator Claire McCaskill, if she had an opportunity to speak directly to the senator.

The official thought for a moment and then said that she would tell Senator McCaskill that homelessness is a serious problem and more people need to care about it. I found the answer to be disappointing because caring without a strategy can only get us so far. American history has shown us that charity can only put a dent in solving safety net issues. Local governments do not have the resources and states have neither the money nor in many cases, the inclination.

Following the tour, we returned to the school and I mentioned to the students that I was somewhat disappointed in the shelter official’s response. I asked them what suggestions for solving the homelessness problem would they have for Senator McCaskill.

Having looked at other charities over the course of the year, they were convinced that the answer meant government involvement. But then when we pressed the issue, they said that local government would be best because those officials would best know the community. When we cited that St. Louis is poor and would probably not have the money to successfully address the issue, they then said that homelessness would best be solved by the state of Missouri.

Knowing how resistant the state of Missouri has been in recent decades to being part of a solid social safety net for the less fortunate of its citizens, I was initially disappointed and even frustrated. Didn’t these students know that the programs that have come closest to addressing the needs of those in poverty have come from the federal government? The ability to think with compassion and to provide resources has historically been much greater in Washington, DC than Jefferson City, MO.

But as I thought about it, why should these students know it? When in their lives have they experienced a national government in Washington that is fundamentally committed to promoting economic as well as legal justice? Perhaps a few were born in the waning days of the Clinton Administration so their only real experience with a Democrat in the White House has been Barack Obama.

They know that Obama fought for racial, gender and ethnic tolerance. They know that he accepted climate change, that he was not bellicose in foreign affairs. But they know little about his economic policies. If they began to research what steps he had taken to improve the economy, they would find that his legacy is largely framed by big bailouts; first for Wall Street and then for the automobile industry. While the auto bailout saved and even increased blue-collar jobs, the Wall Street measures basically made the rich wealthier, kept the middle class stagnant, and put those in poverty at a further distance than ever from top earners.

They did not hear Barack Obama proposing the creation of a huge safety net as FDR did in the New Deal. They did not hear him calling for the expansion of that net as LBJ did with the Great Society. They did hear Obama advocate affordable medical care for all Americans, but they knew that the final product was riddled with inadequacies.

In short, they had no idea what progressive government would look like.

It’s not just the students. A teacher has to be close to seventy years old to have lived through the Great Society with awareness. Educators don’t like for history or social studies teachers to be challenged with the question of “how can teach about something that you never experienced?” Obviously, all teachers, all human beings are limited by how much they have personally experienced or witnessed in life. But why is it that so many teachers and students are acquainted with the story of the Star-Spangled Banner than they are of the fight for workers’ rights?

We have a myopic view of the world that those who are not progressives are happy to see us have. What students can’t imagine is hard for them to desire or advocate.

How do we solve this? The easiest, but highly unlikely way, would be for America to elect another Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and once in office, have them turn from moderate to progressive. Better would be to elect the likes of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warner (although about twenty years younger for both). In the absence of that, all who are progressive need to do all that they can to expose students and teachers to the New Deal and the Great Society. And don’t do it in a boring way. Make it fun and meaningful. It’s a tough chore, but our backs are against the wall and we have to act with that knowledge in mind.

The post A Skewed View of Washington, DC from the Heartland appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’m sad to report that it’s Diaper Need Awareness Week here in St. Louis, and across the country–a program promoted by the National Diaper Bank Network.

It’s sad, of course, because it’s necessary. And it’s necessary because low-income people can’t afford to buy enough diapers for their infants and toddlers. And they can’t afford diapers, of course, because they don’t have enough money, and diapers are expensive. And they don’t have enough money because it is United States policy to not allow low-income people to buy diapers with SNAP [food stamp] funds or with WIC funds, which are specifically aimed at Women and Infant Children..

Yes, you read that correctly. Diapers—an absolute health necessity—are not on the list of items approved for purchase under the SNAP program. [SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.] Food stamps and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) benefits can’t be used for diapers, which get grouped with pet food, cigarettes, and alcohol.

The Food and Nutrition Act of 2008 defines eligible food as any food or food product for home consumption.  The Act precludes the following items from being purchased with SNAP benefits:  alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, hot food and any food sold for on-premises consumption. Nonfood items such as pet foods, soaps, paper products, medicines and vitamins, household supplies, grooming items, and cosmetics, also are ineligible for purchase with SNAP benefits.

While it apparently doesn’t specify diapers, the wording of the act makes it clear that diapers, as a non-food item, are not eligible. If what they’re trying to do is to prevent people receiving government assistance from buying things that the Republicans running this show consider unnecessary, they’ve gone way overboard. Diapers are not a convenience item. I can understand prohibiting SNAP funds for hair-dyeing products, for example. But diapers?

[As an aside, the wording of the act also precludes feminine hygiene necessities like menstrual pads and tampons. But that’s another story for another day.]

The consequences of disallowing diapers are enormous, and the phenomenon now known as “diaper need” is widespread. According to the National Diaper Bank Network:

-Babies need an average of 6-10 diapers a day to stay clean, healthy and happy. That’s a total of up to 3,650 diapers a year for one child.

-1 in 3 mothers struggle to provide the diapers their children need. It’s estimated that an adequate supply of disposable diapers can cost as much as $100 per month for one child.

-Families try hard to extend the use of the disposable diapers they have on hand by changing diapers less often or by trying to clean and reuse them.

-Babies who go an entire day without a diaper change are uncomfortable; they develop rashes and infections; and, often, they cry more, unnerving their parents, who are already feeling guilty about not being able to afford the basics for their kids.

-Child-care providers even have a phrase— “Monday morning rash” — to describe how babies from low-income families sometimes arrive after a weekend of infrequent diaper changes.

-Most childcare centers, even free and subsidized facilities, require parents to provide a day’s supply of disposable diapers. Cloth diapers are not accepted at the vast majority of child care centers. And many parents cannot go to work or school if they can’t leave their babies at child care.

These problems are not evidence of bad parenting but of bad public policy.

So, absent a humane public policy, community groups have gotten together to form Diaper Banks. The St. Louis Area Diaper Bank is a typical example. Founded as a nonprofit in 2014 in response to tremendous diaper need in the region, the diaper bank raises money to buy diapers in bulk at deep discount. It distributes them through 10 partners that work directly with children and families.

The National Diaper Bank Network [NDBN] describes itself this way:

We are leading a national movement to safeguard one of the most basic needs of all babies and their families, access to clean, dry diapers. Fair access to clean diapers improves the physical, mental and economic well-being of babies, families, and communities.

NDBN connects and supports the country’s more than 315 community-based diaper banks that collect, store and distribute free diapers to struggling families.

In 2015, the network distributed nearly 46 million free diapers, including 20 million donated by NDBN founding sponsor Huggies®. The Network serves more than 346,000 children throughout the country each month.

It’s a noble mission, but one that wouldn’t be necessary if our Republican-led Congress wasn’t dead-set on punishing poor people–and their children– for the “sin” of being poor.

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