Once #1, Now #42!

A very significant report has been released and reviewed in a variety of places, but I haven't seen or heard reference to it in the mainstream American media (not counting an abstract in the oh, so popular (Ha!) The New Yorker. (You know, the magazine that featured a cover cartoon of Baraka Obama as a jihadist.) If you want to know where we stand, for real, not in wishful thinking, follow the links below:
About the Report
The Measure of America: American Human Development Report
2008-2009, produced by the American Human Development Project, is modeled on the United Nations Development Programme’s global Human Development Report, which has provided authoritative analysis and a ranked index for countries around the world for almost two decades. The Measure of America, published by Columbia University Press and The Social Science Research Council, is the first time the human development approach has been applied in the United States or any other industrialized nation. The report features forewords by Nobel laureate and Harvard Professor Amartya Sen and California venture capitalist William H. Draper III.
Using official government statistics and robust peer-reviewed analysis, the American Human Development Report presents human development rankings for U.S. states, congressional districts, and ethnic groups. It reveals where America is today and sets a benchmark for monitoring progress tomorrow. Unlike the many existing measurements used to assess health, education, or income alone, the American Human Development Index (HD Index) combines these factors into one easy-to-understand measurement. This more comprehensive measure allows for a better understanding of the opportunities open to different groups of Americans.

http://www.measureofamerica.org/2008-2009-report/about/
Take a test using the Well-O-Meter to see how you personally rank among your American peers: http://measureofamerica.org/rewrite.php?well-o-meter/

International Comparisons

• A poor child born in Germany, France, Canada, or one of the Nordic countries has a better chance to join the middle class in adulthood than an American child born into similar circumstances.
• The U.S. ranks second among 177 countries in per-capita income but 12th on human development, according to the global Human Development Index, published annually by the United Nations Development Programme. Each of the 11 countries ahead of the U.S. has a lower per-capita income than the U.S., but all perform better on the health and knowledge dimensions.
• The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland.
• If the U.S. infant mortality rate were equal to that of first-ranked Sweden, twenty-one thousand more American babies would have lived to celebrate their first birthdays in 2005.
• In 98 countries, new mothers have 14 or more weeks of paid maternity leave. The U.S. has no federally mandated paid maternity leave.
• The United States ranks second in the world in per-capita income (behind Luxembourg), but thirty-fourth in survival of infants to age one.
• The U.S. ranks forty-second in global life expectancy and first among the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty.
• In the 2006 OECD international assessment of fifteen-year-olds, in math, the U.S. came in twenty-fourth, and in science, the U.S. came in seventeenth.
• The U.S. incarceration rate is five-to-nine times greater than that of our peer nations.

The Guardian covered the report here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/17/internationalaidanddevelopment.usa
Statistics and graphs were generated by a company called Humantific. Here’s something from their homepage:
At Humantific we apply hybrid methods from the emerging/converging fields of design thinking, innovation acceleration and transformation science. Working with this hybrid toolbox we help our clients construct new value by creating pathways through fuzzy strategic complexity of all kinds, by communicating complex ideas, and by building more human-centered organizations that maximize collective brainpower and are adaptable to continuous change.
Regardless of whether we are working on an InsightsLab, StrategyLab, UnderstandingLab, or LearningLab project, it is SenseMaking that is the connecting thread through all of our ChangeMaking work.
See more here: http://www.humantific.com/

Progressives Together on May Day

AN APPEAL TO
THE PROGESSIVE COMMUNITY

From the Troops Out Now Coalition

UNITE & MARCH TOGETHER
ON MAYDAY 2008
IN NEW YORK CITY
GATHER ON THURSDAY, MAY 1 AT 12:00 P.M.
4:00 P.M. RALLY, MUSIC & MARCH AT
UNION SQUARE PARK ON 14TH ST.

Sponsored by: THE MAY 1ST COALITION FOR IMMIGRANT & WORKERS RIGHTS
WORLD EVENTS have made May Day 2008 a turning point. AT NO OTHER TIME in our lives has it been more critical to march together and work together.
WE NOW FACE AN ECONOMIC CRISIS the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetimes that is throwing millions out of their homes, jobs and making it more difficult to get healthcare, an education or even gas and food.
A WAR AGAINST IMMIGRANTS whose true intent is to render millions of workers powerless, and have working people fighting each other when they should be standing together.
AN ILLEGAL COLONIAL WAR that is destroying lives as well as creating a fortune of wealth, making the economic crises far worse.
A SURGE OF RACISM that has immigrant families living in fear that their homes and work places could be raided at any moment.
- That makes more police executions of Black youth inevitable.
- That has become the biggest factor in the presidential elections.
MORE THAN EVER, economic and social justice, peace and the eradication of racism, imperialism, poverty, inequality, exploitation, sexism, homophobia, and the future of our planet has never been more dependent on our solidarity.
OUR CAPACITY TO TRANSFORM--through struggle--a world beset by economic crises and war, into a world where people come before profits is profoundly dependent on forging the level of solidarity that May Day, International Workers Day, has historically always been about--OUR SURVIVAL IS DEPENDENT ON SOLIDARITY.
SPREAD THE WORD, coming together on May Day is a declaration that we will not be divided, we will fight back and we will survive.
MARCH ON MAY DAY
MARCH FOR IMMIGRANT WORKERS RIGHTS:
STOP THE RAIDS
STOP THE DEPORTATIONS
MARCH FOR THE RIGHTS OF WORKERS AND POOR PEOPLE EVERYWHERE and for their right to organize and fight
MARCH TO END THE WAR:
And in solidarity with those in the labor movement, like the International Long Shore Workers Union on the West Coast – that will be walking off the Job on May 1 to protest the war.
MARCH TO STOP HOME FORECLOSURES AND EVICTIONS
While the Banks are bailed out
MARCH TO STOP LAYOFFS AND UNION BUSTING
And for the right to healthcare
MARCH TO ROLL BACK RISING GAS & FOOD PRICES
MARCH TO FIGHT RACISM AND REPRESSION from New Orleans to the Mexican Border

• ENDORSE the call to unite and march together on May 1 http://www.may1.info/endorse.shtml
• DONATE to help with organizing expenses http://www.leftshift.org/may1/donate.shtml

Ex-Bishop Leads Left-Right Coalition as Paraguay's New Leader

What an amazing achievement for Fernando Lugo and his party, the right and the left of them! Let's look forward to a better future for Paraguay.
ASUNCION, Paraguay: The world's longest-ruling political party lost its six-decade grasp on power in Paraguay with the presidential victory of a former Roman Catholic bishop.
Opposition candidate wins presidential election in Paraguay
Political newcomer Fernando Lugo, a charismatic 56-year-old who resigned from the church to run for president, put an end to the Colorado Party's 61-year reign in Sunday's election, rallying voters against political corruption and economic disarray.
Emerging from a 1947 civil war, the Colorado Party was marked by the right-wing dictatorship of the late Gen. Alfredo Stroessner until his ouster in 1989.
Lugo said Monday that his first priority would be to help Indians mired in poverty and to seek more revenues from Brazil from a dam on a river border between the two nations.
[...] The triumph of Lugo's eclectic opposition coalition — the Patriotic Alliance for Change — is the latest in a series of electoral wins by leftist, or center-left, leaders in South America.
Mark Weisbrot, at the Washington think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research, said Lugo's election is a sign of "deep and irreversible ... changes sweeping Latin America."
The U.S. on Monday signaled willingness to work with the new government. State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters that the elections are a "step forward" after Paraguay's "rather difficult history in terms of the development of democracy."
[...] But Lugo faces many challenges: 43 percent of the country's 6.5 million people live in poverty, illiteracy is high, 300,000 landless peasant farmers are clamoring for help and Paraguay's corruption is notorious. Lugo, who has never held public office before, forged his anti-Colorado coalition just eight months ago.
[...] Lugo became a bishop in 1994 but resigned the post in December 2006 to sidestep Paraguay's constitutional ban on clergy seeking office. He says he is neither on the left nor the right and has distanced himself from the region's more radical leaders, such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.
Eight months ago, Lugo melded leftist unions, Indians and poor farmers into a coalition with Paraguay's main opposition party, the conservative Authentic Radical Party. [Attention, K-Mart Shoppers! We have a winning product in Aisle Paraguay!] He now vows to use his five-year term, which begins Aug. 15, to right economic problems dating back decades.
About 100,000 Paraguayans are identified as Indians from 17 ethnic groups, according to the most recent national census. Lugo is fluent in the Guarani Indian language, an official language in Paraguay alongside Spanish
Associated Press Writer Pedro Servin contributed to this report.
http://iht.com/articles/ap/2008/04/21/news/Paraguay-Election.php
For more on this region, see November 17, 2007, Sinister or Silly? Bush Buys Paraguay Property

Balance Your Food Intake...and Walk

Here is another example of how industrialization may not have been the great, universal boon to mankind. While we burn gas to get a soda, these people are eating dirt. But the old ways can be used with better science and application to create new solutions. There's hope.
ARIANA CUBILLOS/AP PHOTODemonstrator eats grass in front of a U.N. peacekeeper at a food riot April 8, 2008 in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince -- Ariana Cubillos/AP Photo
Let them eat dirt?
Soaring food prices are causing riots in many poor nations. The good news is that there are solutions if the West can muster the political will
April 20, 2008
David Olive, Business Columnist
It would be inhuman to understate the global food crisis.
With food prices up as much as 45 per cent since the end of 2006, El Salvador's poor eat about half as much food as they did a year ago. In Haiti, a destitute population is turning increasingly to mud patties made of dirt, oil and sugar, which at least quieten the stomach.
[...] For the estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide who live on just $1 to $2 (U.S.) per day, today's severe food inflation means forsaking health care, withdrawing children from school, cutting meat and vegetables from one's diet, and subsisting on cereals alone.
[...] "World agriculture has entered a new, unsustainable and politically risky period," Joachim von Braun, head of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute told The Economist, after G8 finance ministers ended their summit last weekend declaring that global hunger had eclipsed in importance the worldwide credit and climate-change crises they had gathered to discuss.
There is a consensus among agricultural economists that a 30-year era of cheap food is over.
In contrast to the localized food shortages of recent decades, caused by weather- or war-related crop failures and supply disruptions, this crisis is marked by shortages of affordable food in scores of nations simultaneously. And this debacle is not tied mostly to floods or civil wars. Instead, it arises from a variety of factors, ranging from food-demand growth in super-charged economies in the developing world, soaring energy, transportation, fertilizer and other farm costs, and the diversion of corn to biofuels production – a new phenomenon described by one international food-aid expert as "a crime against humanity."
[...] And there may be at least some transitory factors at play, such as the prolonged drought in Australia and crop failures in Tanzania, along with suspicions that speculators have fled the crippled financial sector to manipulate prices of agricultural and other commodities for gain.
[...] It must seem, with global warming, international terrorism, soaring energy costs and a worldwide credit crisis, that the world at the dawn of the 21st century faces more than its share of larger-than-life spectres. Yet in the current food crisis, it becomes plain how these challenges are related and ultimately curable.
[...] The biggest single boost to incomes in the developing world, as foreign-aid experts have long argued, would be less emphasis on grants and loans to poor countries, and instead the removal of Western subsidies and tariffs that block food imports from Africa, Asia and Latin America. More prosperous farming in troubled parts of the world still heavily reliant on farm incomes would curb social unrest and the export of violence.
That might seem an idealist vision. But there is no compelling alternative.
In a join-the-dots exercise, it's not difficult to see how paying Nebraska farmers not to produce while denying Mexican maize producers access to the U.S. and French markets discourages developing-world farmers from acquiring the means to boost their production capacity, creating first resentment and ultimately food shortages. That this should coincide with unprecedented soaring costs for fuel and other essentials was unforeseen. But the outlines of the current catastrophe were long evident.
Today's rampant food-price inflation is yet more evidence that the world's ills are interconnected and leave no part of the planet untouched. Seen as a communal project to lift world incomes through meaningful reform in global agricultural policy, rather than as another necessary exercise in passing the begging bowl on behalf of "failed" nations, the food-inflation crisis is an undisguised opportunity to make the world a more prosperous and thus safer place.
And no one should have to eat dirt.
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/416328

"This is My First Time Out of Gaza"

Gaza's falling wall changes Middle East map for ever
The tide of humans pouring over the frontier from Gaza into Egypt for days has now become a vast convoy of carts, cars and lorries. Peter Beaumont joined the jubilant throng who watched as the borders of a conflict that has lasted for generations were crossed.
The Observer, Sunday January 27, 2008
They came and went in lorries and gas tankers, in flatbed trucks loaded with cattle and sheep, in coaches and mini-buses, loaded by the dozen in the backs of trucks, all shuttling across Gaza's southern border. Four days ago they went on foot like refugees, but yesterday for the first time the trucks drove through and it felt like an unstoppable momentum had been reached.
[...] Ameera, 24, texts her husband to ask if there is anything he wants brought back from Egypt. 'Oh!', she says suddenly in a quiet, happy voice, surveying a pretty vista of open fields, without walls or boundaries that cannot be crossed without risk. 'This is my first time out of Gaza.' http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2247566,00.html
Here are two pictures with different stories. One shows an orderly cue of cars waiting to cross the border, the other shows chaos and fear. Below is another side of a day in Gaza.

IMF and WB are Too Close for Comfort

It's not too soon to start planning actions for October. Here’s an ambitious event for the strong of heart (and body), via the North East Anarchist Network (NEAN):

Call to Action: Dignity, Autonomy, and Solidarity over Greed and Corporate Power!

Disrupt the IMF and the World Bank meetings: Washington DC, October 19-21, 2007

Our demands are simple:

• Cancel all impoverished country debt to the World Bank and IMF, using the institutions' own resources.
• End neoliberal structural adjustment policies, which prioritize profit for the few over the lives of the many.
• End the social and environmental devastation caused by oil, gas, mining and big dam projects.

October Rebellion http://octoberrebellion.org/

Labor's failure

James Carroll has written very insightful books about Vietnam and our current imperial quagmire. Check out “Prince of Peace” for a heartbreaking indictment of the Catholic Church in Vietnam. Meanwhile, here’s his Boston Globe essay for Labor Day:

Labor's failure

By James Carroll, Globe Columnist | September 3, 2007

Goodbye borders. Goodbye regulation. Welcome to the free market, a free-for-all that destroys freedom. The very conditions of transcendent inequality that gave rise to the labor movement in the first place are now being rapidly re-created on a global scale, with unions reduced to the role of sputtering kibitzers.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/03/labors_failure/