| LIFE-NET NEWS |
| by Ret Z. |
| Covering Poverty Widely in a Net of Many Voices |
| 2003 August 27 | No Profit; No Proceeds |
| Volume 7 Number 11 | All-Volunteer |
| "Give a family a fish, and they'll eat a meal; give them a Net, and they'll have fish for Life." |
| A Slave Escapes in New Hampshire |
|
Tim Bradley, 43, and his longtime girlfriend, Kate O'Dell,
48, went on trial in US District Court on Tuesday (Aug 19)
for violating federal forced labor laws in their business,
Bradley Tree Service. It is the first time federal
authorities have prosecuted New Hampshire residents for
allegedly abusing non-citizens hired as seasonal workers.
The Litchfield couple were indicted in April for using fear and coercion to force two Jamaican men to keep working against their will and for cheating these men and two others by misrepresenting how much they would pay them to come here to work. David Hutchinson, 38, a father of six, and two other Jamaicans testified that O'Dell took their passports away so they couldn't run. Defense lawyers are trying to show that the three men just didn't want to work hard. A fourth worker is expected to testify next week for the defense. Hutchinson said toward the end of his six-month job the police showed up at Bradley's property with strobe lights flashing. The police questioned him and two other workers individually about how things were going. "I told him they treated their dogs better than me and I wanted to go home," Hutchinson said. The police, he said, told him they couldn't send him home because he was under contract. After the officers left, he and two other Jamaicans were ordered to go into Bradley's house because "Mr. Tim" wanted to talk to them, Hutchinson testified. He said Bradley was demanding to know who called the police and grabbed him by the neck, tilting his chair back. "He grabs me by the neck and starts to strangle me. The chair is falling back," he said. O'Dell, he said, grabbed the back of his shirt and started hitting him. "I don't know how, but I got the power and threw them off," he said. Hutchinson said he was running from the house but Bradley tripped him and while he was on the ground Bradley yelled to his dog, "Get him, Kita." A prosecutor showed jurors photos taken by the police of what he said were dog bites on Hutchinson's lower leg and on his side. Hutchinson said when he got up and ran Bradley rushed him again, but he slipped away. Source: Union Leader |
| Resource Wars |
|
Abundant natural resources--such as oil, minerals, metals,
diamonds and other gemstones, drug crops, and timber--have
helped fuel a large number of armed conflicts in developing
countries. Resource wealth plays an important role in the
outbreak of conflict and tends to make conflicts last
longer, although it has a more varied influence on their
intensity.
Altogether, in about a quarter of the roughly 50 wars and armed conflicts of recent years, resource exploitation helped trigger or exacerbate violent conflict or financed its continuation. In those cases, natural resource wealth has turned out to be a curse, triggering a torrent of arms trafficking, human rights violations, humanitarian disasters, and environmental destruction. A rough, conservative estimate suggests that more than 5 million people were killed in resource-related conflicts during the 1990s--at least 2.5 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone. In addition, close to 6 million fled to neighboring countries, and anywhere from 11 to 15 million people were displaced inside the borders of their home countries. The money derived from resource exploitation in war zones has secured an ample supply of arms and military equipment for armed factions and has served to enrich a handful of people--warlords, corrupt government officials, arms merchants, mercenaries, and unscrupulous corporate leaders. Critical human needs have been trampled in the process. In oil- and diamond-rich Angola, for instance, almost 30% of children die before the age of six. Nearly half of all Angolan children are underweight, and a third of school-age children have no school to go to. Unsafe drinking water, a pervasive lack of health services, and food shortages have limited Angolans' life expectancy to 47 years. In places like Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Colombia, the pillaging of resources allows wars to continue that were initially driven by grievances or liberation and ideological struggles. Elsewhere, such as in Sierra Leone or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, nature's bounty attracts predatory groups that initiate violence as a means of establishing control over resource deposits. Finally, resource extraction can itself be the source of conflict where the economic benefits accrue to foreign companies and local elites, while the local population shoulders an array of the burdens. This has led to violent conflict in places like Nigeria's Niger Delta, Papua New Guinea's Bougainville island, and several provinces in Indonesia. Natural resources will continue to fuel deadly conflicts as long as consumer societies import materials with little regard for their origin or the conditions under which they were produced. Source: Worldwatch Institute |
| A Forgotten Story: American Indian Slavery |
|
In the 17th century, Europeans, Africans and American
Indians all accepted slavery as a legitimate social
institution. Treatment and status of the enslaved varied
greatly from group to group. War captives provided most
slaves, though the Europeans made slavery inheritable.
Africans and Indians did exchange slaves as commodities,
but Europeans introduced an international market economy
for labor, as colonial plantation societies developed an
insatiable demand for workers, spurring the African slave
trade as well as various forms of bond labor for
impoverished Europeans.
In the American South, European traders, mostly British colonists operating out of Charleston, South Carolina, engaged local and distant Indians to undertake slaving against their neighbors, who could be made to walk to ships that would carry them to Barbados, New York, Antigua and other ports in the Atlantic world, where they would work as slaves. The South Carolinians used some of these slaves to work their own plantations, but because of the ability of captives to escape over familiar territory among familiar peoples, their captors preferred to export most of them elsewhere. Capital from selling Indian slaves was used to fund plantations and purchase Africans. It was as if one could create capital out of thin air: The only effort lay in capturing the prey and transporting it to market. Native peoples engaged in slaving for a variety of reasons. In exchange for captives, they received European trade goods. Many also hoped to forge closer relations with the British. To refuse to become slave raiders, they risked becoming categorized as potential victims, with their enemies then filling the role of slavers. The result: A frenzy of slaving infected the region, as natives captured not only their enemies, but people they had never met. Some went farther and captured their friends and allies. Small-scale raids with attacks on fewer than a dozen people evolved into large-scale wars, with the British and their American-Indian allies seeking captives in the thousands. Extending southward from Charleston, British and native raiders followed attacks upon the native peoples of Georgia with a massive onslaught against Indians on Spanish missions in northern Florida. Systematically, the raids extended all the way to the Florida Keys. Simultaneously, the English established important ties with the Chickasaw, who became the key slavers of the lower Mississippi Valley, extending their attacks west of the Mississippi and south to the Gulf of Mexico. The story of Indian slavery complicates the historical narrative we have created of a white-black world. Source: Arab News |
| The Making of an Iraqi Guerilla |
|
One night at the end of June, a young Iraqi man goes out
to ambush an American convoy near the central Iraqi town
of Fallujah. He is wearing his favorite blue tracksuit.
He is a small guy, solid and compact, with cropped dark
hair and a chin that juts out slightly. He likes tough
sports, especially handball. He can stub out a cigarette
on the calluses of his left palm. It will be his first
time in combat.
The man's motivations for attacking the convoy are simple: to resist the American "insult to Iraqi and Arab tradition." "They might have helped, but they destroyed things," he says of the Americans in Iraq. "They provoked." He mentions the "unfulfilled promises" of the Americans (to bring democracy, to make things better), their mistreatment of Iraqis (especially when male US soldiers encounter Iraqi women in raids or at checkpoints), their unwillingness to stop looting, help Iraqis in need, maintain stability. "Now nothing is under control," he says. The man in the blue tracksuit is no Baathist; he complains about the old regime's corruption and other failings. He cites his two years as an Army conscript. For enlisted men, he says, military service was like living in a jungle full of lions--the rapacious, bribe-soliciting senior officers. His career as a handball player stalled because he wouldn't or couldn't pay a bribe to get on the national team. At about 11pm, the US convoy rolls into view: Five Humvees and three or four Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The man has seen a Humvee up close, thanks to a short- lived job as an interpreter for a US military unit in Habaniya, not far from Fallujah. He applied for the job "so that I would be close to them and know about their vehicles and see whether [the Americans] have good intentions." They do not, he concluded. "American soldiers have a lot of hatred for the Iraqi people." He left, he says, after three days. The man says the experience of being among the Americans turned him against them. Crouching in the bushes by the side of the road, gripping the handle of an RPG launcher, the man in the blue tracksuit hesitates, unsure whether he can hit his target. He has only used the weapon twice before, at secret trainings conducted by his organization just four or five days earlier. His moment arrives. He fires. Source: Christian Science Monitor |
| Redevelopment is Contagious in Camden |
|
Spillover from waterfront development in Camden (NJ) has
sent prices soaring in the Cooper-Grant neighborhood, a
tree-lined area of 90 rowhouses between the Benjamin
Franklin Bridge, the waterfront and Rutgers University,
according to city leaders and real estate agents. And this
week, the first residents are moving into Carl Dranoff's
renovated apartments in the historic RCA Nipper building,
now called the Victor, next to Cooper-Grant.
The neighborhood, named for two former elementary schools, has attracted young professionals and retained longtime families who hung in while the neighborhood slowly cleaned up. In other pockets of Camden, too, neighborhood leaders and real estate agents report property-value increases, although less dramatic than Cooper-Grant's. The neighborhoods include parts of Cooper Plaza, Parkside, Fairview, and East and South Camden. In a 5 1/2-month period in 1999, 163 Camden homes were sold for an average of $33,187, according to real estate data. In the same period this year, sales have risen to 208, for an average of $46,820--which includes three six-figure sales. These are optimistic signs for government officials running the city--now vested with unprecedented power under the state's recovery act--who are drafting a redevelopment plan to lure residents with a mix of incomes. In their hands are sweeping redevelopment powers to seize, zone and sell properties. "It's creating an environment of different economic levels," said Arijit De, the city's director of development and planning, and a resident of the Cooper-Grant neighborhood. "Obviously the effect will be more buying power, more retail opportunity, more money, more disposable income ... creating that kind of critical mass that's needed." Sue Brennan, a neighborhood economic-development leader in Fairview, attributed higher property values there to redevelopment activity and a widely publicized $40 million revitalization plan two years ago. About 50 of Fairview's 1,800 structures are vacant, down from 200 two years ago, she said. Sean Closkey, director of the state Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency, said other neighborhoods were following Cooper-Grant because of the state's recovery act, which is pouring $175 million into Camden. In the last decade, more than $140 million in state funding --including the $40 million invested in Fairview--has gone toward revitalizing Camden neighborhoods, including demolitions and sprucing up homes and parks, Closkey said. Additionally, the current statewide "smart growth" push has forced developers' eyes back to urban areas such as Camden, he said. But others worry that the property-value spikes--combined with more aggressive tax collection by the city and redevelopment plans by suburban groups--are a harbinger of gentrification that could price out longtime residents. In Lanning Square, veteran community activist Roy Jones said he worried about the effects of the tax-collection push. Lifelong residents, he fears, will be forced to leave. "It's going to remove people who have been in the city for years and can't afford to move anywhere else." Even some Cooper-Grant residents worry that a property revaluation could suddenly cause their taxes to leap and drive them out the way longtime residents were driven out of Fairview more than a decade ago. Twenty years ago, two-thirds of the buildings in Cooper-Grant were abandoned. Now only five of 90 are empty. And those five are being renovated. "Cooper-Grant is the Society Hill of Camden," said developer Dranoff. "It's the kernel, the magnet for the rejuvenation and growth. "Just remember when Society Hill [in Philadelphia] started to recover in the 1950s and '60s. It unfolded in all the surrounding neighborhoods, like Queen Village and Old City. And now all those areas are thriving. ... There is a domino effect once a neighborhood catches on. We're seeing the beginning of that." Source: Philadelphia Inquirer |
| Life-Net News Extras |
| AIDS Kills Parents and Nations |
|
In the dry fields of their village, Beatrice Nanjala showed
her 9-year-old daughter Lily how to harvest maize and
sorghum. She instructed Lily, a thin girl with arms as
willowy as the stalks in the fields, to use both hands to
lift the bulky wooden farming tool and pound the cluster
of dense flowers into seeds.
She taught Lily how to build and repair mud huts. They fetched water from about two miles away. They poured it into chunks of dirt. They churned. Slowly, her mother packed the hulking mounds of mud onto the roof and walls. Then, one day two months ago, when Nanjala's knees were weak, when her stomach was swirling and her body feverish with AIDS, she showed Lily her last lesson: how to dig a grave. Lily had seen her mother do it before. Lily's father, John, a police officer, died of complications of the disease and was buried on a cold day in August 2001. With the help of Lily's brothers, Phelix, 16, and Clinton, 7, they scooped the dirt out of the red earth before sunset. The siblings buried their mother a week later. Lily and her siblings are part of the lost generation. More than 3.5 million children across sub-Saharan Africa have lost both parents to AIDS, according to the UN AIDS organization, and more than 13 million have lost at least one. Children are already going hungry because parents who were farmers are dead. "Economies are collapsing and famines are growing in areas that always had food," said Aloys Nyabola Mbori, who leads a committee to find ways to feed and care for the swelling number of orphans in East Kagan, a village in western Kenya that is a day's drive from Nairobi, the capital. "Africa has seen poverty, but this will be worse than anything we have ever known." Families are breaking apart because they cannot feed all of the orphaned relatives who come to the door, desperate for help. "Relatives have too much in their mouths to chew," said Gideon Oswago, the head public health officer for the African Medical and Research Foundation, an organization based in Nairobi. Oswago cares for four orphans, along with six of his own children. "It's reached the point where if you see an orphan coming, it's a huge burden," he said. There is also concern among health and education workers that a generation growing up without parental guidance will worsen political instability on a continent already struggling to overcome terrorism and civil and ethnic strife. Rebel groups have tapped into the vulnerable orphan populations by enticing abandoned children to earn money, food and respect with guns--leading to more chaos and increasing the chances of rape and HIV transmission. "The implications of this are monstrous. The profound trauma of losing a mother or both parents has devastating long-term implications, not only for a child's well-being and development, but for the stability of communities and, ultimately, nations themselves," said Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF. "Children and women caught up in the chaos and forced displacement of war are more vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation, which facilitates the spread of HIV." In Nairobi, orphaned boys wander the streets barefoot and dirty, many sniffing glue. Crusted white layers are stuck to their nostrils. They are known across the continent as "glue boys," and some fall into committing petty crimes like stealing cell phones and wallets, aid workers report, mostly because they have no other way to survive. When the disease first came to the village of East Kagan, it was called "the slim," meaning a curse causing dramatic weight loss. But now, as the population of orphans has ballooned, the villagers and many like them across East Africa call the AIDS pandemic "the disaster." Source: Washington Post Foreign Service |
| Rail-Riding Orphans in the Historic American West |
|
A story long neglected in American history books is the
plight of the Orphan Train Riders. For more than 75 years
beginning in 1853, more than 250,000 mostly homeless,
abandoned and neglected children were sent west on trains
from New York, Boston and other overcrowded East Coast
cities.
More than 4 million immigrants entered the United States between 1840 and 1860, and most settled in the port cities along the Atlantic coast. But living and working conditions there were deplorable. Jobs were scarce, hours long and labor cheap. Job safety was a low priority and job-related deaths were commonplace. Diseases from overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions contributed to the high mortality rates of youths. The problems were exacerbated by the lack of extended-family support systems. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles had been left behind, and young families had to fend for themselves in the new hostile environment. Charles Loring Brace and a group of businessmen formed the Children's Aid Society in New York in 1853 to help care for the neglected and orphaned. The CAS initiated the concept of using the expanding railroad network to inexpensively move children west where they would be placed in God-fearing farm homes. Many other organizations adopted the same methods of placing children. It was believed the families would welcome the children and the new environment would benefit the kids by exposing them to good food, clean air and a proper work ethic. But the system had mixed results. In many cases it worked wonders by giving the family and the child what they both needed--a sense of family and belonging. In other cases, though, families simply wanted cheap labor with no bonds. And some of the children resented being "placed out." Most former "orphan train" riders were told to forget the past and look to the future. And many shared a sense of abandonment. They felt they rode the one and only orphan train, not realizing that there were thousands of orphans like themselves. Source: Houston Chronicle More Info: Orphan Train Riders |
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