BroadSnark

If you ever wondered how to confront the racism, sexism, and homophobia of your family and friends, Model Minority shows us how it is done.

Tech Dirt covers the creative ways music artists are getting it done outside the traditional system.

Alternet has an amazing article highlighting the stories of three children of white supremacists.  I am particularly in awe of Carolyn Wagner.

Kevin Carson wonders when exactly we were in control of our government.

Renee at Womanist Musings posts about how anti-abortion campaigners are targeting the black community.

And yet another student is criminalized for nothing.

Over the weekend, a friend of mine posted a video (below) about a Fox news report that was squashed.

Several years ago, Fox reporters were working on a story about Monsanto and rBGH.  Monsanto, upon getting wind of the story, had their attorneys send Fox a letter threatening to sue.  Fox wanted to squash the story, but were afraid the reporters would tell the world.  So instead, Fox management beat the story into a form that Monsanto would like better.

The reporters were eventually fired for not being willing to lie in their news report.  The Fox station attorney sent them a letter confirming that is why they were fired.  The reporters understood this to be a retaliation claim.  They believed they would be protected under the whistleblower statute.  But the courts ruled that a news show lying on the air was not illegal and therefore there was no whistle to blow.  Ergo, no protection for the reporters.

All of us discussing the post agreed that it was appalling.  The poster suggested that we start a campaign to make lying by the news stations illegal.  It was an instinct I understood, but all I could think of were the potentially disastrous consequences.

If we want to see what happens when it is easier to sue a news organization, look no further than the United Kingdom.  Libel laws there are much different than in the United States.  And corporations are taking advantage of those laws to sue newspapers and bloggers.

News organizations afraid that they are going to be sued are likely to self censor.  In fact, this very Monsanto incident is the perfect example of the kind of self censorship that news organizations are practicing.  Monsanto threatened to sue them, presumably for libel.  And rather than risk the expense of a court battle, Fox’s response was to cave to the threat of a lawsuit.

While this Monsanto case is disgusting, how would yet more laws that people can be sued under help rather than cause even more self censorship?  And even if there was no danger from self censorship, how could we be sure that honest mistakes were not prosecuted?

This is not just an issue of a free press or of free speech.  It is about how we are handling all of our society’s problems.  Our first instinct is – We must do something!  We must pass a law!  It has gotten to the point where we can’t walk out of our house without breaking a law.

Every time we try to resolve a problem by passing a law, we give up that much more of our power.  And we tip the scales that much further in the direction of the wealthy and specially educated.

Access to the justice system, and results from the justice system, are dependent on how much money you have and how much understanding you have of legal codes, precedents, rules of procedure and a million other pieces of specialized knowledge that most of us do not have access to.

When we turn everything into a law, we turn everything into something that requires an attorney and a judge.  We empower those people at the expense of our own power.  If every solution proposed requires a law, then availing yourself of that solution requires an attorney.  Can you afford an attorney?  I can’t.

This post isn’t about bagging on attorneys.  I worked for attorneys for a decade.  And some of the attorneys I worked for were fighting the good fight.  They worked on civil rights cases and sexual harassment cases.  (I’m talking quid pro quo – you can keep your job if you suck my dick kind of cases, not ooh I don’t like the bikini calendar cases.)  I even did a millisecond internship with the ACLU.  But even the attorneys fighting the good fight cannot deny that the courts, for all the publicity that those few breakthrough civil rights cases get, are all too often on the wrong side of history.

There is no way to craft laws that can only be used for good, that cannot be exploited by those with the power and money to exploit.  The solution does not lie in empowering more attorneys and judges.  It lies in addressing those inequities of power and money directly.  It lies in taking back our own power.  It lies in coming up with solutions and problem solving mechanisms accessible to all of us.

Let’s set aside for just a moment the horrors of war.  Ignore the cost in human lives, the suffering, the destruction.  Ignore the repercussions that are felt for generations.  And let’s ignore any debates about what it means to declare “victory” in a place like Iraq, where people continue to fight and die long after we supposedly won.  Ignore questions about whether or not there can ever be a winner when millions die.  Ignore all of that and just ask yourself this:

How do you win a war?

You win a war through strategy.   You win a war by controlling supply chains and by having access to more energy (oil).  You win a war by controlling transportation and mastering communications.  You win a war by having more people on your side.  You win a war by propaganda.  You win a war by being willing to keep fighting after your opponent has quit.

In other words, you win a war by being smarter.

People who scoff at the idea of non-violence do not stop to consider whether or not the side willing to be the most violent and ruthless is the side that wins in a war. If they did stop to think about it, they would have a difficult time making the argument that England was more ruthless than Germany in WWII or that the colonists were more ruthless than the English in the American revolutionary war.

The reason military strategists study prior wars and battles is to learn tactics.  The reason that our military focuses so much on psychological operations is because they know that force is often impossible.  The government needed to trick us in order to get people to support invading Iraq.  The military strategy in Iraq is to “win hearts and minds” because they can only stop fighting if the citizens of Iraq let them.

So if wars are won through strategy, through tactics, through smarts – and not through ruthless violence – why not focus on the strategy without the violence?

I am so tired of hearing about kids being beat up and criminalized.  Are you prepping them for life or prison?  (That was a rhetorical question.)

Racialicious has a really beautiful and brave post by A. Rahman Ford called Race, Disability and Denial.

Far be it for me to tell Americans that they should be more French.  But if we had a little more of this, we might have a little less of this.  And just for kicks, maybe we could throw in a little protest Brussels style.  I do love a good foam party.

Two interesting posts on elections in the last couple weeks.  Jeremy writes an excellent post tackling anarchists ideas about voting.  And Charles points out the amount of wasted resources that go into elections.

Db0 tackles the issue of how anarchists handle crime in the present without compromising their anarchist principles.

Finally, on Trust is the Only Currency, a A Socratic dialogue between a Buddhist Lama (BL) and a Mainstream Economist (ME).

I feel very lucky that I had the opportunity to see Howard Zinn at Busboys and Poets last year.  I wish I had a recording of his talk.  The gist of it was that no politician is going to bring us the change we need.  We have to make the change happen.  Here is an amazing interview (and critique of voting) with Walter Mosley (who I also love).

You may have heard about a conference coming up in San Francisco called Libertopia.

Its purpose is to create a worldwide movement of individuals who choose their own form of governance – a voluntary society based on mutual respect for each individual’s dignity and ownership of his/her own body and property.

Sadly, it appears from looking at the list of speakers, that this voluntary society is going to be made up exclusively of men (men who can afford the cost of the conference registration, hotel, and cruise).

I tweeted a few complaints about the all-too-typical invisibility of women at anything remotely libertarian and ended up in a convo with @solidadrocks about these kinds of conferences in general.

Long story short, there are tons of women out there who aren’t just sitting around talking theory.  They are doing amazing things to “create the new world in the shell of the old.”  But we never hear about them.  And women rarely take the time to step back and talk to each other about what we are doing.

So, I thought, why don’t we have a conference/gathering/meeting/whatever focused on anarchist/libertarian/anti-statist/whatever women who are doing amazing things?  We could learn from each other and find potential collaborators.  I’m thinking it would be:

• Women focused – I don’t think that means men should be banned, just that women, and what they are doing, would be the focus of the sessions.
• Activity focused – That doesn’t mean that we can’t talk theory at all, but I want to hear about actions.  I want to attend sessions on organizing, cooperatives, alternative currencies, radical art…And I’d like to walk away with all sorts of ideas and plans.
• Inclusive and diverse – Transgender, intersexed, straight, gay, bisexual, young, old, differently abled, black, white, Latina, Asian, Native American…And massive effort would be made to make sure everyone would be included (outreach, accessibility, childcare…).
• Cheap – As close to free as humanly possible.

As far as location goes, I am in Washington, DC.  I’d be willing/able to travel pretty much anywhere in North America.  I’m thinking we can see who is interested and then decide which location makes the most sense based on that.  (If there is a lot of interest, maybe we can plan on doing more than one for different areas.  But now I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Step one is gaging interest, so what do you all think?  Share your thoughts in the comment section.  And, if you are interested, send an email to mel@broadsnark.com and let me know:

1. Where you are (city,state, country)
2. If you would want to be on a listserve for general info.  And, if so, what email address to use.  (Clearly, your email would not be sold, published, shared…)

Let’s see where this goes.

People often complain that I’m cynical and pessimistic.  I’m always looking for the catch, the ulterior motive, the dark side.  Every new plan, from health care to tax reform, I am immediately poking holes in.  Many of my friends are liberal, nonprofit types who are very attached to these plans.  And they get pretty frustrated with me.

And maybe I am cynical.  Certainly, I question people’s motives.  But I prefer to see it as being honest.  I see what happens with each of those grand plans and new policies.  I see how putting our future in other people’s hands leaves us feeling lost and powerless.  I see every person who gets power abusing it.  I see the “solutions” to problems causing more problems than they solve.

Willful blindness isn’t going to make those problems go away.  It isn’t optimistic to put all your faith in a charismatic leader and cross your fingers.  It isn’t optimistic to ignore the hypocrisy, backroom deals, corporate giveaways, ethical compromises, obstructionism, and usual screwing of the public.

On the contrary, the pessimists are those people who think that is the best we can do.  I think we can do better.

There has been a lot of internet chatter on what organizations to donate to in order to best help the Haitian people.  Naturally, you want the maximum amount of your dollars to go to the people who need it.  So you read articles like this one about Yele or you go to charity navigator and you check out what percentage of donations go to program vs. administration or fundraising.

The thing is, those percentages can be deceiving. One of the biggest expenses for any nonprofit is salary costs.  So while your idea of “program cost” might be medicine bought and provided for someone in need.  In actuality, program cost might be the salary of the program assistant who does paperwork in the office.

Or let’s say you receive an email report from a nonprofit that also includes a link for donations.  You might think that goes to fundraising, but it probably gets coded with media, outreach, or campaigning.

How an organization codes things depends a lot on the person doing the coding.  Some organizations are more likely to code things to show less administrative costs.  Organizations that have been around longer have more experienced staff who understand that donors don’t want to see high admin costs.  Organizations that receive restrictive grants will have more constraints they are working within.  Large organizations are often more closely scrutinized.

Low administrative costs could also mean that administrative people are being screwed.  The organization could be using a ton of unpaid interns to do work.  Not only are they relying on free labor, they are restricting their labor pool to only those privileged enough to be able to work for free.  Or they could just be underpaying their admin staff.  I’ve seen full time admin positions in New York being offered less than $30,000 a year.  Do you really want to support an org that doesn’t pay its people enough to even pay the rent?

All of that is to say that you should not use program cost percentage as your only decision maker.

Then there is the choice between large and small organizations.  In the case of an emergency situation like Haiti, there are many large humanitarian organizations who have vast experience with catastrophes.  They know how to set up camps and what to do for sanitation.  They are experts at providing potable water and avoiding diseases.  That is invaluable expertise.  They have also been around long enough to have tested systems and they probably have survived a lot of scrutiny.

But there are downsides to larger organizations.  Many of them do not work in Haiti all year round, although they may begin to now (especially if they receive massive funds that have been restricted to use in Haiti*).  Aid workers flown in will not necessarily have knowledge of the language, community, politics, and culture – knowledge that will also be important in the coming days.  Large organizations can be bureaucratic and experience diseconomies of scale.  They are usually heavily populated by managerial class elites from the United States and Europe.

Smaller, local organizations are closer to the community.  They are more likely to have local staff in key decision-making positions.  Your money won’t go to pay salaries of people based in London or DC.  Their people will be sticking around.  They won’t be moving on to the next catastrophe when the immediate crisis is over.  They don’t require large bureaucracies or  thousands of dollars in conference calls.

But small organizations have their problems too.   They can’t respond on the same scale as large organizations.  Their inexperience can be costly.  There may be less accountability, because fewer eyes are on them.  The staff are even more likely to be massively underpaid.  Their equipment is probably held together with duck tape and rubber bands.  They are less stable, especially when new, and have fewer processes.  The loss of one employee (and their institutional knowledge) can set the organization back months or years.

There is no perfect organization.  If you want a guarantee that your money will go straight into the hand or mouth of a Haitian, then you should go to Haiti or Miami or New York and drop a wad of cash on someone.  If you donate to a charity, you need to accept that some of your money will be spent on administration.  Some may be spent on fundraising.  A large portion will pay staff costs (program and otherwise).  Some money will likely be wasted.  Some may even be stolen.  Given the absolute chaos in Haiti, expecting that not to be the case is just unrealistic.

So how do you decide?

Check the organization out.  Go to Charity Navigator or Guidestar or the charity’s website.  Look what people have to say about them.  Read their 990s (the form U.S. nonprofits have to file with the IRS) or their annual report.

Who are the board members? How much do the big shots make – officers and employees?  Board compensation is reported on 990s, as are salaries of some highly compensated employees.

How are their expenses broken down by function?  One organization may have a higher percentage of program costs, but it is all in staff salaries. Another organization may have lower program costs but give that money in direct aid.  One is not necessarily better than the other (humanitarian staff need to get paid), but it gives a more detailed picture than just program v. management or fundraising.

Does the organization have local offices?  Have they been working in country for a long time?  Does it look like they will stick around?  Are they staffed by locals or is it all people from the U.S. or Europe?

What kind of programs do they do?  Are they in keeping with your values?  If you are passionate about environmental issues or health care for all, then you should support organizations whose mission most closely matches your own.

If the organization doesn’t have much history, are you willing to treat it like a startup?  Are the ideas so great that you are willing to risk your donation on the chance that they can use this new (extremely rare)  influx of capital to get their dreams off the ground?

My recommendation is to spread it around.  Give some money to a large experienced organization with the planes and equipment ready to address the rescue, food, water, and sanitation needs. But also give money to smaller and/or local organizations whose salaries are paying locals and who are likely to stick around.  Haiti will need help long after the Red Cross moves on to the next disaster.

You can find a comprehensive list of organizations to donate to here.

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* If you send money and tell an organization that you want it to be used for a certain project or place, they must do that.  In most circumstances, I would actually discourage you from restricting your money.  For smaller nonprofits, funds for basic expenses are hard to come by.  Having all their funding restricted actually weakens the organization and, in the end, could lead to less accountability – no money for auditors, bookkeeping staff, board training, etc.

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Disclaimer:  All thoughts and opinions on my site belong to me alone.  I am usually quite careful not to post anything even remotely related to my day job.  This post is a bit close to the line, as I work for an organization that is working in Haiti.  They are not an organization that I have listed or talked about on my blog.  I have no intention of recommending or not recommending them.  If you know where I work, nothing should be read into that.  I just don’t want to have to vet my blog through my work and, if I spoke about them directly, I would feel that obligation.

Could things get any worse for Haiti?  Of all places in the world for something like this to happen.  It’s beyond words.

I’m from Miami and so have had the privilege of getting to know many Haitian immigrants.  In fact, I had a peak at my ideal world while riding a bus in Miami with Haitian women.

It was in the afternoon and the bus was crowded with Haitian women and children.   There weren’t any open seats left when a woman got on the bus with her children.  She was holding an infant and three or four small kids got on the bus in front of her.

The woman was paying and the children started walking down the aisle of the bus.  As they walked along, random women picked the children up and put them on their laps.  The kids didn’t mind in the least.  When the mother was done paying, someone moved their kid off of a seat to let her and her baby sit down.

The mother that had just boarded the bus didn’t say a word to the other women.  There was no thank you or even a hello.  There was no awkwardness about making room for her and her kids.  There was no hesitation in accommodating the new arrivals.  The people on the bus saw that there was a need and they met it.  No questions.  No complaints.  No bureaucracy needed.

I thought for a while, as I rode the bus, how much more of a production that would have been with some of the spoiled people that I knew (not that most Americans ever ride the bus).  I imagined someone calling the city to complain about lack of bus seats and the city forming a commission to study the subject.

The ease with which those women interacted and helped each other has stuck with me.  And I really hope that, for once, the Haitian people receive the help they need  quickly, generously, and without strings – just like those women would give it.

I know everyone is telling you to donate to massive relief organizations.  And you should.  Many of them are experts at rescue and sanitation and they know how to handle the crisis.  But I know that people tend to forget about a place once it has been off the news cycle, so I hope you’ll consider making connections with some of the organizations that work in Haiti all year round.

Yele Haiti - You have probably heard about Yele by now.  If not, it is Wyclef Jean’s organization and they have grassroots programs all over the country.

Haiti Reborn – Haiti is an ecological disaster.  Deforestation is a particular problem and is the focus of this Quixote Center funded project.

Kiva – You have probably heard of Kiva by now.  They connect you with people around the world who need microloans.  And they work in Haiti through their partner.

Madre – This is a women’s human rights organization that is partnered with a clinic in Haiti called Zanmi Lasante.  You can also donate to the clinic through Partners in Health

The Haiti Emergency Relief Fund – This is a Berkeley based solidarity organization.

Fonkoze – They are a micro-finance alternative bank for the poor in Haiti.

Lambi Fund of Haiti – A Haitian and American organizations that supports democracy and grassroots development.

There are also several organizations that have long connections with Haiti and are good sources of information on current issues and U.S. policy.  They have advocacy campaigns for debt relief, protected status for Haitian immigrants, fair trade…

Alliance for Global Justice

Jubilee

Global Exchange

Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti

TransAfrica Forum

Finally, if you don’t know anything about Haiti, look into it.  Haiti has one of the most fascinating histories of any place I’ve ever heard about.  Unfortunately, entirely too much of that history involves disastrous U.S. policy.  A book I read a long time ago is called Haiti: Best Nightmare on Earth.  It was a good book and imminently readable.

In the meantime, you can check out the Flash Timeline of American Policy Towards Haiti in the 20th Century over at Mediahacker (who I am happy to hear is o.k.).  Or you can check out the comprehensive coverage on Democracy Now.

By now you have probably heard about Brit Hume’s on air proselytizing directed at Tiger Woods. If not, you can watch the video below where Hume suggests that Christianity offers a forgiveness that Buddhism does not and recommends that Tiger Woods convert.

Really Brit Hume? Christianity offers a special kind of forgiveness? Tell that to the more than 3,000 inmates on death row.  According to gallop, 71% of protestants support the death penalty.  Christians say that, since god prescribed how death sentences should be meted out in the bible, the death penalty isn’t a problem.  In fact, the death penalty is love.

When Christians support three strikes laws that give people life in prison for theft crimes, is it all about love and forgiveness? How about the quadriplegic man who died in DC prison, after refusing to promise the judge he would never smoke pot again.  Was he, like the thousands of others put in prison for marijuana, supposed to have felt the love and forgiveness of the (primarily christian) people who work for the justice system?

Or maybe Hume is talking about the kind of forgiveness Iris Robinson has received.  She is the anti-gay bigot who was recently busted having an affair.  She confessed to have treated her family horribly, but says that god has forgiven her.  (Note: Nothing in the article about her family forgiving her.)

I often think that -  even more than fear of death, attachment to tradition, desire for community, or the need to deal with tragedy – it is trying to face their own mistakes that makes people turn to religion. Yet for so many people, their religion gives them the worst of two extremes.

On the one hand, Christianity paints a world in stark black and white, good vs. evil terms.  Christians labels people as sinners and are quick to throw them away when they screw up.  The religion lays on guilt and judgment for things as normal and necessary for life as sex.  And so it creates people unable to accept their own humanity, ashamed of who they are, unable to deal with their own desires and mistakes.

To the other extreme are those Christians who think their religion is like a get out of hell free card.  You can do whatever you want to people and then just say a few Ave Marias and all is well again.   These people act as though forgiveness can be bestowed, like a queen knights her subject.

Forgiveness is work.  You don’t develop compassion for other people until you can face your own worst mistakes and forgive yourself for them. And you don’t get to just accept easy forgiveness from your god without any attempt at reparations to the people and community you hurt.

While there may be those whose find in Christianity a path to the “soul searching” that makes forgiveness and reparations possible, more often than not their religion only seems to get in the way of that process.