| LIFE-NET NEWS |
| by Ret Z. |
| Covering Poverty Widely in a Net of Many Voices |
| 2005 December 14 | No Profit; No Proceeds |
| Volume 9 Number 17 | 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 Better Key Indicator than Gross Domestic Product |
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What we measure is literally a sign of what we value as a society. If critical social and ecological assets are not counted and valued in our measures of progress, they receive insufficient attention in the policy arena. The current reliance on economic growth statistics alone as the basic measure of prosperity and progress implicitly
devalues the importance of our natural and social capital, including natural resource wealth and environmental quality, unpaid voluntary and household work, leisure time, health, and knowledge. This practice also fails to distinguish economic activities that contribute to wellbeing from those, like crime and pollution, that cause harm.
There will be no concerted action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or conserve energy so long as we count fossil fuel combustion as a contribution to prosperity and wellbeing. As long as we keep counting the depletion of our natural resources as economic gain, we are unlikely to practice sustainable forestry, farming, and fishing. Until we stop assessing our progress according to paid work alone, declines in voluntary work will remain unnoticed and undiscussed. To remedy these flaws, the Genuine Progress Index (GPI) can provide a practical, policy-relevant measure of progress that is more comprehensive and accurate than current measures based on the GDP. GPI Atlantic was founded in 1997 as a non-profit research group and is constructing such an index of sustainable development for Nova Scotia as a pilot project for Canada. The GPI's 22 social, economic, and environmental components are aimed at becoming annual benchmarks easily replicable by other jurisdictions. The GPI values a wide range of social, economic and environmental assets and records any depletion or depreciation in their value as "depreciation" in the same way that we currently value manufactured capital. In this way the GPI can provide policy makers with accurate information now lacking and send early warning signals of potential weaknesses that can allow timely and rational responses to emerging needs. Source: Resource and Environmental Management in Canada |
| Camden Past and Future |
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Adapted from a piece by Monica Yant Kinney:
When researching and writing his book Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City, history professor Howard Gillette of Rutgers University Camden wanted to learn how the city had sunk to its present state. The mess, he learned, wasn't made overnight. It won't easily be cleaned up. But Gillette can't help remembering something he heard Ed Rendell, of all people, say in the 1990s. Camden's future, Rendell predicted, will depend on empty-nesters. Gillette was stunned. But recently, one of his own scholarly colleagues moved out of idyllic Moorestown and into the swank Victor building on the Camden waterfront. "That was unimaginable back then," Gillette says, "so the things that are unimaginable now could happen." Some blame the 1926 opening of the Ben Franklin Bridge for dividing and conquering the city. Gillette thinks the riots of 1971 did far more lasting damage. During the 1960s, Gillette writes, 12,000 well-paying, skilled industrial jobs skipped town. 28,000 white residents hightailed it to the suburbs. 1950 population: 124,555 -- 97,900 white, 17,434 African American. 1950 jobs: 59,489. 1980 population: 84,910 -- 26,003 white, 45,009 African American. 1980 jobs: 27,926. In the 1960s, Mayor Al Pierce began the shameful trend of pimping out the city's assets to pay for ever-mounting bills and budget shortfalls. Twenty years later, Mayor Randy Primas sold off the North Camden waterfront for a state prison. It meant money and jobs. It meant Camden was drowning and willing to grab at any life preserver floating by. Prisons, sewage plants, trash incinerators -- if suburbia or the state needed a dumping ground for its waste and distaste, they had it in Camden. Cooper University Hospital and Rutgers and Rowan Universities didn't leave. Expanding with help from the $175 million recovery plan, they've put downtown on firmer ground. "Camden cannot be turned around by institutions," Gillette says, "but Camden without these institutions is irreparable." To survive and thrive, Camden doesn't just need to lure the middle class to waterfront condos. It also needs to keep the working-class residents from packing up for Pennsauken as their fortunes improve. "Gentrification is not a horrible thing if it's done sensitively," Gillette says, noting how carelessness with the Cramer Hill plan led to lawsuits. [Hear Professor Gillette for yourself on Life-Net Radio December 28.] Source: Philadelphia Inquirer Book: Camden After the Fall |
| Between North Korean Hunger and Chinese Sex Slavery |
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Thousands of North Korean refugees are working as sex slaves in China under threat of deportation should Chinese authorities catch them, said John Miller -- director of the US State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons -- on Friday after two days of talks with Chinese officials. He said many victims of the trade were women and girls forced into prostitution or marriage.
"Sometimes they're trafficked out of North Korea. North Korean officials are complicit," Miller told reporters. "If they are caught by the Chinese authorities, they are sent back to North Korea and punished." China views North Korean refugees on its territory as illegal economic migrants who should be sent back. But the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the US, and other countries have pressed China to treat at least some of them as legitimate refugees who should not be repatriated. Miller said there were no accurate statistics of the number of North Korean women forced into prostitution or marriage in China. But he said charities and church groups working in the region estimate between 30% and half of the many thousands of North Koreans who cross into China every year are "trafficking victims," forced or tricked into slavery. Chinese press reports on the cross-border trade have said North Korean women are sold to Chinese brokers for several hundred to a thousand dollars each. The repatriated women can face prison sentences of five years or longer, or even execution. But most often they are held for several months in forced labor camps, said London-based organization Anti-Slavery International in a recent report on the slave trade between North Korea and China. About these camps the report said, "There are countless testimonies of beatings, torture, degrading treatment, and even forced abortions and infanticide from those who have escaped." Most of the North Korean women caught in slave trafficking were forced into marriages with Chinese farmers, the report said. China's growing population imbalance means many poor farmers cannot easily find brides. The women often face abuse and beatings, but several interviewed said "their current situation is better than risking repatriation or starvation." Miller, a former Congressman, said China was emerging as a source of women sold into prostitution in Southeast Asia, the US, and elsewhere, partly displacing traditional sources such as Thailand. But he said he was encouraged by some steps China had taken. Chinese police officials told Miller the government had stopped fining women who escape and return to China. He said that Chinese officials had also asked for information about the North Korean sex slaves and their legal status. Source: Reuters |
| New Homeless Count Covers 50+ Counties and Cities |
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The Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty at the Weingart Center has published a report presenting recent data on the number of homeless people, including families and chronically homeless individuals, in 54 major US cities and counties. "The number of men, women and children who are homeless in America’s cities is
astonishing," noted Paul Tepper, one of the report’s authors.
The report, which synthesizes data from 53 cities in 23 states plus DC, found 406,033 homeless people in those communities, which had a combined total population of 93,087,933. Overall, homeless families accounted for 35% of the homeless population, while chronically homeless individuals represented 22%. Co-author Joseph Martinez noted that "a number of communities told us that over 1% of their entire population was homeless." These included Detroit, Boston, and Washington DC. Some of the report’s findings:
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| Kenyan Women Improve Reading and Business Skills |
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The thirty-member Amani Women's Group, located in Mathare Valley, a slum area outside Nairobi, is taking part in a year-long project to improve its members' reading and business skills. The women, whose small businesses include selling charcoal, cabbages, and water; tailoring and selling clothes; and building and selling furniture at a rented shop, were already involved in literacy classes when they decided that they needed more help to manage their businesses and earn better livings.
The group's furniture business is closed temporarily after it went bankrupt. What they needed was economic literacy and a seed fund. They found both with the help of Church World Service (CWS) and two partners, Kenya Adult Learners' Association (KALA) and Organization of African Instituted Churches (OAIC). The women meet twice a week with a KALA-supplied literacy teacher to help them build upon their literacy and writing skills by studying savings, loans, and small-scale business planning. KALA is a partner with ProLiteracy WorldWide -- also a CWS partner -- and has adopted ProLiteracy's literacy training for social change guidelines. OAIC, experienced in small business programs, helps to motivate and train groups in creating their own savings and loan projects, and it trains them in small-scale business planning and management. CWS is providing the group with $2,000 in start-up capital to jump-start their enterprises and provide seed money for a revolving loan fund. The literacy and business training is indirectly benefiting 350 family and extended family members. KALA's policy on community and gender education is helping to bridge the gender gap and increase the women's independence. Source: Church World Service |
| Bronx Shuns Politics, Welcomes Venezuelan Oil Help |
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A green Citgo tanker truck chugged up a hill with a grim view of tenement buildings, elevated subways, and treeless sidewalks to deliver Venezuelan heating oil, a "humanitarian" gift from Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Moments before the orange-gloved worker snaked the hose to a Bronx tenement, Eartha Ferguson, a manager and resident of a low-income building, said, "I call it a gift of survival. It comes at a good time, a very needed time."
Chavez's gift, distributed earlier this month, may be nothing more than a chance to tweak the nose of the Bush administration, which has long opposed the South American leader. But few residents in the South Bronx, where 41% live on incomes below the federal poverty line, are inclined to worry about international politics. Citgo Petroleum Corp., which is controlled by the Venezuelan government, signed a deal with three Bronx housing nonprofits to sell 5 million gallons of heating oil at 45% below market, an estimated savings of $4 million. The discounted oil will heat 75 Bronx apartment buildings, housing 8,000 low-income working poor and elderly tenants. Officials with Mount Hope Housing Co., Fordham Bedford Housing Corp., and VIP Community Services -- which have organized tenants and rehabilitated low-income apartments for several decades -- say savings from the cheap oil will allow them to reduce rents temporarily and invest in neighborhood social programs. Chavez has sold the discounted oil in two US markets, New York and Massachusetts. Similar oil deals are in the works for other parts of NY and some New England states. In the Bronx, where scrawled graffiti warns pedestrians of rats, fleas and maggots, it did not escape the notice of tenants that a foreign government stepped in after Congress did not. Source: Washington Post |
| # LNN # Small # Hauls # |
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| Life-Net News Extras |
| States Scramble to Help Needy with Rising Heat Costs |
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Twelve states have upped their spending from last year to supplement the federal government's Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), says Mark Wolfe of the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association. The total in new funding: more than $280 million and growing, he says.
More states are taking steps than at any time since the last price spike in 2001, says Kate Burke, an energy policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures. This year, 23 states and DC have programs to help with heating bills, up from 21 last year. The newcomers: New Mexico and Virginia. Governors have requested additional money from their legislatures, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. Under the LIHEAP program, the federal government provides grants to states, which parcel it out to the needy. Last year, Congress allocated $2.2 billion to LIHEAP. The non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that Congress must allocate at least $4.6 billion to serve the approximately 6 million people who will apply for LIHEAP aid. Source: USA Today |
| State Department Not a Good Head for US Aid |
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The Bush administration is considering a shake-up of the way it administers aid in a bid to make it more effective. Such a revamp is badly needed, but the proposed remedy -- folding the main agency into the State Department -- is not the right way forward.
The administration has a track record of emphasizing aid. The 2002 National Security Strategy ranked development alongside defence and diplomacy. President Bush has twice launched big foreign aid programs: the Millennium Challenge Account and the HIV/AIDS initiative. But the administration failed to secure full Congressional funding for the MCA, and the US remains miserly among rich nations in the share of national income spent on development. Nonetheless, the shift is real, reflecting not just the imperatives of national security strategy but also the emergence of new political constituencies for aid on the Christian right. The problem is that the administration of US aid is hopelessly fragmented. Over the past decade, aid schemes have proliferated across government. Both the MCA and the HIV/AIDS initiative were given their own structures, while the main development agency USAID has been marginalized. Funding is tightly earmarked to particular programs. The result is that US aid is less well coordinated and less effective than it should be, and imposes high transaction costs on its recipients. There is general agreement that this system needs to be consolidated. The plan to fold USAID and possibly other agencies into State has the benefit of making aid a direct tool of US foreign policy, with a powerful champion in government. But the plan would risk diverting money from long-term development to fire-fighting in countries of immediate national security priority. This flies in the face of the basic insight of the 2002 strategy: that development is in the US national interest even when there is no immediate threat. Institutional subordination would also aggravate suspicions that US aid for pro-democracy organizations is crudely tied to specific political aims. Instead, the US should create an independent cabinet-level development department, similar to the UK's Department for International Development. Such a body could champion and coordinate aid spending, while insulating it from short-term political pressure. This would be better for development and, in the long run, do more for US national security too. Source: Financial Times |
| Most material here is adapted, not quoted. Views expressed do not |
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