A Poet's Legacy : No Rest for the Weary?

Image from Steve and Sara's Photostream / Flickr.
Edna St. Vincent Millay and
The profitability of charity

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / April 12, 2010

"Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!"

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay (from Renascence, 1912)

Quick, which famous American poet was named after a long lived charity hospital in New York's Greenwich Village?

In 1892 Charlie Bussell, older brother to Cora, soon-to-be mother of Edna was a stevedore on the El Monte. A rather laid back New England lad, while at dock in New Orleans he decided to take a snooze on a bale of cotton. Imagine his surprise when he awoke beneath deck in the hold.

Days later he was discovered, weak and emaciated, and was brought to New York City and put under the care of the Sisters of Charities at St. Vincent’s Hospital. His odd story became a bit of local news and his recovery at the lower Manhattan hospital a huge event in the recorded history of a small Maine mother-led family.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born at that time and would have been named Vincent if she’d been a boy. After high school she came in second in a national poetry contest, partially by dropping her first name and publishing as Vincent Millay. That recognition got her a scholarship at Vassar and despite a troubled rebellious hyper-poetic existence she created a body of work in a bold daring neo-classical style that inspires to this day.

Perhaps the kinship Ms. Millay felt with the hospital was the result of their common commitment to compassion. Certainly St. Vincent’s was a hospital that cared.

Sadly, the hospital that Edna St. Vincent Millay took part of her name from is today no longer with us. Up until Monday, St. Vincent’s Hospital on Seventh Avenue in New York City had served the Village since 1849.

One of the reasons the facility had to close was that in serving the local poor predominantly, they “couldn’t make a profit." What a surprise. I wonder how St. Francis managed to make a profit. (Perhaps he wasn’t paying minimum wage.) Medicare cuts and the uninsured also defunded the operation.

Maybe good old Catholic charity was actually part of the Obama socialist agenda. Lord knows we can’t have any of that.

The other well publicized reason for the hospital’s bankruptcy was the profligate board of directors who allegedly ran the place into the ground passing around percs and paying off expensive New Hampshire lawyer pals. Another big surprise in this day and age I suppose. To some people a hospital is just a pile of money with a sideline in serving humanity.

St. Vincent’s was supposed to be building a new facility between 12th and 13th Streets. After frittering away millions on Vice Presidents, property acquisition, lawyers, and world class architects, now it seems there is no money left to construct anything.

St. Vincent’s also had a major aesthetic problem, the low rise “modernist” pop art building they decided to build in the 1960s. Like the Huntington Hartford lollipop creation on Columbus Circle, St. Vincent’s second building was supposed to evoke smiley face hippie pop music sensibilities.

The trouble is happy circles cast in concrete don’t weather well and in St. Vincent’s case the structure looks like it would be next to impossible to renovate. I think New Yorkers would have been better served with a stark Catholic facility that showed it’s heart inside. And survived.

Now folks from the Village will have to ambulance crosstown to Bellevue or NYU Medical centers. Good luck finding anyone who cares there.

[Carl R. Hultberg's grandfather, Rudi Blesh, was a noted jazz critic and music historian, and Carl was raised in that tradition. After spending many years as a music archivist and social activist in New York's Greenwich Village, he now lives in an old abandoned foundry in Danbury, New Hampshire, where he runs the Ragtime Society.]

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COMIC / Tom Keough : Baseball's Handout to Haiti

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Political cartoon by Tom Keough / The Rag Blog / February 5, 2010

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Haiti : Anger and Courage in the Ruins

Haiti: Surveying the damage. Photos from AFP (top) and Reuters.
As aid efforts flounder,
Haitians rely on each other

By Ansel Herz / January 15, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- The roof of Haiti's national penitentiary is missing. The four walls of the prison rise up and break off, leaving only the empty sky overhead.

The gate to the jail in downtown Port-Au-Prince is wide open; the prisoners and police are all gone. Bystanders walk freely in and out, stepping over the still-hot smoldering remains of the facility's ceiling.

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday afternoon broke it to pieces.

"I don't know if he's alive or not alive," said Margaret Barnett, whose son was a prisoner. "My house is crushed down. I'm just out in the street looking for family members."

"Where is the help?" she asked. The former government employee spits the question again and again, hands on her hips. "Where is the help? Is the U.N. really here? Does America really help Haiti?"

In the absence of any visible relief effort in the city, the help came from small groups of Haitians working together. Citizens turned into aid workers and rescuers. Lone doctors roamed the streets, offering assistance.

The Red Cross estimates that 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday's earthquake, with some three million others left homeless and in need of food and water.

At the crumbling national cathedral, a dozen men and women crowded around a man swinging a pickax to pry open the space for a dusty, near-dead looking woman to squeeze through and escape.

The night of the quake, a group of friends pulled bricks out from under a collapsed home, clearing a narrow zig-zagging path towards the sound of a child crying out beneath the rubble.

Two buildings over, Joseph Matherenne cried as he directed the faint light of his cell phone's screen over the bloody corpse of his 23-year-old brother. His body was draped over the rubble of the office where he worked as a video technician. Unlike most of the bodies in the street, there was no blanket to cover his face.

Central Port-Au-Prince resembles a war zone. Some buildings are standing, unharmed. Those that were damaged tended to collapse completely, spilling into the street on top of cars and telephone poles.

In the day following the quake, there was no widespread violence. Guns, knives and theft weren't seen on the streets, lined only with family after family carrying their belongings. They voiced their anger and frustration with sad songs that echoed throughout the night, not their fists.

"Only in the movies have I seen this," said 33-year-old Jacques Nicholas, who jumped over a wall as the house where he was playing dominoes tumbled. "When Americans send missiles to Iraq, that's what I see. When Israel do that to Gaza, that's what I see here."

Late at night, Nicholas heard false rumors that a tsunami was coming and he joined a torrent of people walking away from the water.

Nobody knows what to expect. Some people said Haiti needs a strong international intervention -- a coordinated aid effort from all the big countries. But there was no evidence on the streets of any immediate cavalry of rescue workers from the United States and other nations.

"My situation is not that bad," said Nicholas, "but overall the other people's situation is worse than mine. So it affects me. Everybody wants to help out, but we can't do nothing."

Haitians are doing only what they can. Helping each other with their hands and the few tools they can find, they lack the resources to coordinate a multi-faceted reconstruction effort.

U.N. agencies and humanitarian organizations on the ground are struggling to help survivors of the quake, but many are hindered by large-scale damage to their own facilities, as well as lack of heavy equipment to clear rubble.

Logistics remained the main obstacle on Friday, according to news reports, with damage to the main airport, impassable roads and problems at the docks continuing to bottleneck the outpouring of international relief workers and basic supplies.

The United Nations is issuing a flash appeal Friday for more aid as part of a coordinated immediate response and long-term reconstruction plan.

A popular radio host here reminded everyone that the strength of the Haitian people cannot be underestimated, posting on his Twitter: "We can re-build! We overcame greater challenges in 1804" -- the year Haiti threw off the yoke of colonial slavery in a mass revolt.

As the days tick by and the bodies pile up, it will take bold vision and hard work on that scale for Haiti to recover from Tuesday's tremors.

[Ansel Herz, a former Austin activist, is a multimedia journalist and web designer based in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. He blogs at Mediahacker. This article was distributed by IPS.]

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Turk Pipkin : A Simple Truth... or Two

Turk Pipkin with students at Mahiga Primary School in Kenya.
One Peace at a Time:
A simple truth… or two

By Turk Pipkin / The Rag Blog / November 30, 2009

With the problems of the world appearing more challenging with each passing year, there has never been a greater need for simple truths that can guide us to a better way. Shooting my new film One Peace at a Time in 20 countries gave me the opportunity to interview brilliant people who share a common trait -- the ability to cut to the heart of the matter.

“We are not the last generation on this planet,” Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus told me from his Grameen Bank office in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “We have to think about Generation Number Two after us, and about Generation One Hundred after us.”

Having dedicated his life to bringing millions of people out of extreme poverty, Yunus has benefitted both from his long-term view, and by making his work easy to understand. Imagine that you’re a village woman who wants a microloan to start a small business to support your children. In addition to repaying the loan, you have to agree to grow fresh vegetables year-round, to feed your children fresh vegetables every day, and to keep them in school. In the past 30 years, that simple deal has brought millions of Bangladeshi families out of extreme poverty (while dramatically reducing malnutrition and Night Blindness caused by Vitamin A deficiency).

Here’s a simple truth that’s considerably less inspiring. There are a billion people on earth who don’t have access to clean water.

One Peace at a Time opens at Austin’s Arbor Cinema this Friday, December 4, continuing through the 10th, and will be bouncing around the country between now and its DVD release in April. You can watch the trailer, which is loaded with simple truths from Yunus, Willie Nelson and many others, at www.nobelity.org.

My film looks at the possibility of providing basic rights to every child. I spent three years shooting this film in a lot of places where children have very limited access to clean water, adequate nutrition, healthcare, education or opportunity. That may sound like a wall-to-wall bummer, but I’m willing to wager that One Peace at a Time is one of the most inspiring films you’ll ever see. Like the Ben Harper song that carries the trailer, there is A Better Way.

From halfway around the world, it’s not easy to imagine any way to provide basic rights for every child. But if you look closely at communities where simple solutions are already working, the possibilities are astounding. Consider the Austin-based nonprofit, A Glimmer of Hope, which works to bring Ethiopians out of poverty by partnering on integrated development -- water, education, healthcare and opportunity.

Water is the foundation on which the others are built. For eight dollars a person, Glimmer has provided a clean and reliable source of water for well over a million Ethiopians, reducing infant mortality rates and water-borne illnesses, and enabling women to trade a life of lugging water for a life of education and productivity. Nearly 3000 of these water projects have been hand-dug wells.

“We buy the pump; they dig the wells,” Glimmer’s founder Philip Berber told me at a new well celebration in Northern Ethiopia. My daughter’s photo of a group of Ethiopian boys welcoming us shows one of the boys holding a hand-painted sign that says, “Water is life.”

Photo by Katie Rose Pipkin / The Rag Blog.
“It’s about people,” Philip Berber told me as he examined the school report card of a boy who hadn’t missed a single day of school. “You think it’s about projects, but it’s not, it’s about people.”

Having watched wells go dry in much of Texas, I was skeptical of the long-term success of Glimmer’s large-scale well digging. But Ethiopians, as it turns out, are smarter with their water resources than Texans. The same people who benefit from those wells also participate in the Food for Work programs that pay one meal a day for workers who build mountainside terraces and other simple structures that catch the rain water, prevent soil erosion and increase the amount of water going into the aquifers. More wells doesn’t have to mean depleted aquifers.

Water is life. That’s why Ethiopia has educated vast numbers of hydrologists to coordinate this work. With America facing dire water shortages in the coming decades -- particularly in the American West where climate change is greatly reducing the snowpack and threatens to destroy the world’s most productive agriculture economy -- perhaps we should take a Generation 2-to-100 view of our education priorities and our response to climate change. Do we need more investment bankers or do we need more scientists?

Everywhere I show the new film, young people tell me that instead of working on Wall Street, they’d like to engage with the world through a non-profit or NGO. Can our nation harness their talent and energy in a partnership that restores America’s reputation as the world’s greatest beacon of hope while bringing meaningful change to people in need?

I have another photo of a simple truth -- this one from the Shia Festival of Muharram in Calcutta. I was told that hanging with 200,000 Muslims in the wake of America’s fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq was too dangerous for an American. But here I am with a group of smiling teens, one of them wearing a t-shirt that reads, “If you are looking for a big opportunity, seek out a big problem!”

Photo by Vance Holmes / The Rag Blog.

Replicating A Glimmer of Hope’s work with communities in need across the planet is a tremendous opportunity. At the Glimmer rate, we’d need $8 billion dollars to tackle the water challenge alone. That’s a big sum, but only half of what America spends on bottled water each year. The enormous negative impacts of bottled water include massive amounts of energy, and millions of tons of carbon emissions for transporting the water. All this when almost all Americans already have a clean source of water. (Don’t like the chlorine in municipal water? Build a rainwater system and you’ll be drinking the purest water possible.)

With a plastic recycling rate of 23%, Americans toss 38 billion polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles into landfills each year. Those bottles are made from oil, and making them creates even more carbon emissions. Glass bottles are much heavier and require even more energy to make and transport them. And where do we obtain the raw materials for the glass?

I was visiting The Nobelity Project’s tree-planting partnership in Southern Kenya, and had my first look at Tata India’s soda ash factory operating on the shore of Lake Magadi. Magadi is one of the prime breeding grounds of East Africa’s 4 million pink flamingos, and I was expecting to see perhaps a million flamingos. Instead I found a train track laid across the dry lake bottom and heavy industrial equipment mining the soda ash that comes up with the hot mineral waters that used to sustain the flamingos. Lake Magadi is already imperiled by reduced rainfall resulting from climate change and from deforestation due to illegal logging for producing charcoal. Add long man-made dikes that split the lake in half to enable a massive level of mineral extraction and the result is a potential for disaster. Instead of a million flamingos at Magadi, after two days of searching, we finally found a hundred.

By now you’ve probably concluded that the soda ash being mined from the lake is used to make glass bottles. A ton of new glass requires 400 pounds of soda ash. And the world blasts through a lot of glass, primarily because the great majority of us are too lazy to recycle. So how’s this simple truth for an advertising slogan? Tap water – the source that doesn’t kill pink flamingos when you drink it.

The world is not likely to ban bottled water. We’ve seen over and over that jobs for Generation 1 trump sustainability for Generation 2-100. But maybe it’s time for some Lasik surgery on our short-term vision. For the sustainability of the world, the price of all products -- including bottled water, glass and plastic -- must include their real costs to every generation, from Gen 1 to Gen 100.

To make that a reality, America needs a nationwide deposit law on glass and plastic bottles. You want to throw it away anyway? Fine, but you’ll have to pay for the privilege. In an ideal world, a small portion of that deposit money would go to provide clean drinking water for children in the developing world.

The new wells in their communities could each have a sign with a small American flag on it. That would create more friends and greater security in the world than the trillions we spend on weapons and war.

I’ve lately been hearing that our response to climate change should be adaptation to the new conditions. That may sound innovative but what about the Masai people whose way of life is being destroyed by diminishing rainfall? Or the tens of millions of Bangladeshis who will be displaced from their low-lying homes by rising sea levels. How do they adapt?

“For us it is a life and death issue,” Muhammad Yunus told me as the Muezzin sang the call to prayer outside his office window in Dhaka.

“It’s not only my life,” he concluded. “I have to think about my children’s life, and my grandchildren’s life and their grandchildren’s life. From that I have to decide what I have to do.”

[Turk Pipkin is an Austin-based writer, actor, and filmmaker, and the director of the new feature documentary, One Peace at a Time, which looks at the possibility of providing basic rights to every child. He is the author of 10 books including the New York Times bestseller, The Tao of Willie, which Turk coauthored with American music legend, Willie Nelson. Turk's acting work includes the feature films Friday Night Lights and A Scanner Darkly, and a recurring role in HBO's The Sopranos. Turk also directed the feature documentary, Nobelity, and is the co-founder of the education and action nonprofit, The Nobelity Project, online at www.nobelity.org.]

• Turk Pipkin will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio Tuesday, December 1, from 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. To stream the show online, go here.


• From December 4-9, Turk Pipkin will have an audience Q&A following the evening screenings of One Peace at a Time at Austin’s Arbor Cinema. Learn more about the film and about The Nobelity Project’s work to build Mahiga Hope High School in Kenya, at www.nobelity.org

Also see:

• FILM / Turk Pipkin's Remarkable 'One Peace at a Time' by William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / June 2, 2009
• FILM / Turk Pipkin, and a Brief History of the Documentary Form by William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / June 2, 2009

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Ted McLaughlin : The Backpacks of Moberly

A quiet way of helping:
The backpacks of Moberly, Missouri

...we began to realize that some of these children go home to houses where they literally may not eat over the weekend. And we couldn't just sit back and not do anything to help them.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / November 23, 2009

"Every Friday afternoon, the backpacks are placed carefully on the floors of the hallways in the elementary schools of Moberly, Missouri. There are 106 of them: 106 backpacks, each of them with no child's name and with no individual owner."

Those are the opening words in a heart-rending story by CNN contributor Bob Greene that I recommend you read. It is a story about the harshness and unfairness of life, but it is also a story that will restore your faith in humanity.

What's so special about those backpacks? Not much. It is what's in them and the fact that they are placed there every Friday that makes them special.

Here's how Francine Nichols, the staff member in charge of the backpack program, tells it, "We serve breakfast at school, and we serve lunch. But we began to realize that some of these children go home to houses where they literally may not eat over the weekend. And we couldn't just sit back and not do anything to help them."

So the teachers and administrators of the Moberly elementary schools started the backpack program. When a staff member learns of a student in need, they contact the parent(s), and if they will allow it, the child is added to the backpack program and is told privately that a backpack will be waiting for him/her in the hallway on Friday. Most of the food is supplied by a food bank 30 miles from Moberly.

The idea is that the child can grab a backpack, sling it over his/her shoulder and walk out with the other kids. No one says or does anything that would single out the child -- there is no profit to humiliating a child in need. They just pick up the backpack and go.

Ms. Nichols says, "We'll fill each backpack with soup, with ravioli in a can, with canned fruit, with cereal bars, with juice. We make sure that the food is the kind that a young child can prepare himself or herself, if need be. Because some of these children live in single-parent homes, and when that parent works, not only does it mean that there might not be enough food in the house, but there may not be anyone to fix the meal for the boy or girl."

And for those of you who may be thinking the recession is getting better, the backpacks tell a different story. Last year there were 34 backpacks set out in the hall. This year there are 106 of them.

Moberly is not the only school district to try and help kids on weekends away from school. But I especially like the way Moberly does their backpack program. They go out of their way to try not to humiliate the child in need -- these children face enough hardship without having to endure that.

Too often today we forget just who the poor are. The fact is that most are just decent people who are going through a tough time and trying their best to struggle through and put their lives back together. For most, the struggle is temporary and help is needed for only a finite period of time.

In our distant past, neighbors could help out by discreetly providing what was needed, and a friendly storekeeper would give and carry credit for a longer period than normal without demanding immediate payment, or a community church would help with food or rent without bragging or demanding religious devotion. But those times are gone forever.

Today, most people don't even know their neighbors (let alone want to help them), and credit is something given only to those who really don't need it by banks and businesses that charge exorbitant interest rates. Even churches that offer help often want to do it publicly so as to get maximum publicity for their "good deeds," or they demand a certain fealty to their religious beliefs.

Although many right-wingers don't want to admit it, it has become necessary today for the government to assume responsibility for helping the poor. This is right and proper, because here in America we are the government. And it is the responsibility of every citizen to help those less fortunate than ourselves.

There are still those who believe the help must come from private sources and not the government, but in our modern world that is simply not possible. Government has had to assume the responsibility because the private entities are either no longer there or have utterly failed to get the job done.

Sadly, even "we the people," acting through our government, have not done a very good job. Although some programs like Food Stamps and Aid To Families With Dependent Children have been passed, the grinches in government have made sure those in need must humiliate themselves and dance publicly through hoop after hoop to meet the most onerous of conditions -- just to receive too little help, insuring that many remain in a circle of poverty.

We could and should do much better, but we seem to prefer spending our money on wars and war materials, corporate welfare and bailouts, foreign aid which allows dictators to amass fortunes and other such nonsense.

That is why I was so impressed by the unobtrusive little backpacks of Moberly. By people wanting to help without fanfare and without humiliating those in need. Well done. We could all learn from your example.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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The PATRIOT Act's War on Charity

'New powers granted to the Treasury Department currently allow the government to shut down charities based on unfounded claims'
By Maya Schenwar / August 5, 2008

Since the PATRIOT Act's passage almost seven years ago, many of its adverse effects on activist organizations and peace groups have become plain. The law grants the government broad new surveillance privileges and access to private property, and protests and demonstrations have been heavily monitored and contained in the wake of 9/11. But according to a new report, the worst effects on nonprofit organizations have garnered little attention. New powers granted to the Treasury Department currently allow the government to shut down charities based on unfounded claims; to bar nonprofits from operating in some international disaster zones, and to freeze the assets of "designated" charities, leaving large sums of money intended for humanitarian causes to fester indefinitely in Treasury vaults.

Post-9/11 regulations forbid any organization to provide or attempt to provide "material support or resources" to groups or individuals designated as "terrorist." It's also prohibited to "otherwise associate" with groups labeled "terrorist." No charges need to be filed for the government to take action: If the Treasury Department has a "reasonable suspicion" that an organization is violating these rules, it can seize its assets and shut down the group.

"U.S. nonprofits operate within a legal regime that harms charitable programs, undermines the independence of the nonprofit sector, and weakens civil society," states the recent report, co-authored by the watchdog organization OMB Watch and the philanthropic network Grantmakers Without Borders (GWB).

Seven US nonprofits have been completely shut down for "supporting terrorism."

According to Kay Guinane, OMB Watch's director of nonprofit speech rights and one of the report's co-authors, the government has a free hand to act based purely on suspicion when it comes to the nonprofit sector. Executive Order 13224, which outlaws contact with "terrorist organizations," is vague about the criteria for how the "terrorist" label - or the "terrorist supporter" label - is to be designated or investigated.

In fact, Guinane told Truthout, "The PATRIOT Act itself allows organizations to be shut down 'pending an investigation.'" One such organization, Kind Hearts for Charitable Human Development, has not even been designated as a supporter of terrorism, though it was shut down a year and a half ago.

All of the organizations shut down by the government have been Muslim-affiliated charities, according to Guinane.

The PATRIOT Act and its cousins deal a particularly hard blow to US charities that operate internationally. The OMB Watch/GWB report notes that after the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, groups attempting to distribute food and water in areas controlled by the Tamil Tigers risked violating the executive order, which forbids providing "material support" to members of terrorist organizations.

For the nonprofit Humanitarian Law Project (HLP), counterterrorism laws hit at the core of some of its goals, such as introducing conflict resolution techniques and human rights practices to groups like the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a designated organization. HLP has fought the PATRIOT Act since its inception. According to attorney David Cole, who has argued for HLP's rights to operate in "terrorist"-controlled areas, counterterrorism legislation often criminalizes purely humanitarian aid.

"This law is so sweeping that it makes it a crime for our clients to provide medical services to tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka and to provide assistance in human rights advocacy to the Kurds in Turkey,” Cole said during a 2005 hearing.

Moreover, according to the OMB Watch/GWB report, for some groups, counterterrorism laws make it tough to adhere to their ethical and moral codes. The principles of the International Red Cross state, "The humanitarian imperative comes first. Aid is given regardless of the race, creed or nationality of the recipients and without adverse distinction of any kind. Aid priorities are calculated on the basis of need alone." However, if an organization must avoid the possibility of granting humanitarian aid to anyone affiliated with a terrorist group, priorities can take a very different shape.

Some experts, such as Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute, argue that the PATRIOT Act and laws like it are directly counterproductive, due to their stifling effect on nonprofits.

"For only a remote chance of affecting terrorist activity, the US counterterrorism regime may be interfering with charitable work that would weaken the impetus for terrorist activity in the first place," Harper said during a press briefing in mid-July. "That's penny-wise and pound-foolish."

Particularly pound-foolish, according to the OMB Watch/GWB report, is the way in which the Treasury Department deals with funds seized from "designated" nonprofits. When a nonprofit is deemed to be supporting terrorists, the government can freeze all of its assets indefinitely.

Several organizations whose funds were seized have asked that that money be released and put toward government-approved charities. For example, the Islamic American Relief Agency, barred access to its funds, requested that they be used for humanitarian purposes, such as aid programs to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina and of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. Those requests were categorically denied.

According to Guinane, the amount of money seized from nonprofits under counterterrorism laws has not been disclosed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), although OMB Watch has repeatedly asked for the information.

OFAC did not return Truthout's requests for comment.

This type of secrecy is typical of the government's post-9/11 treatment of nonprofits, according to the OMB Watch/GWB report. To shut down an organization, OFAC need not explain the reasons for its actions, or back them up with evidence. No independent review is granted to charities that attempt to challenge their terrorist designation, and most of their due-process rights are denied. They do not have a chance to present their own evidence to counter the government's accusations. What's more, the government has no obligation to notify an organization before it is deemed a terrorist supporter and its funds are seized.

Under the PATRIOT Act, the whims of the administration take precedence over nonprofit groups' constitutional rights, according to Cole.

"The legal regime employed in the name of cutting off terror financing gives the executive branch a 'blank check' to blacklist disfavored individuals and groups, imposes guilt by association, and lacks even minimal attributes of fair process," Cole said during a July press briefing.

So far, Congress has not moved to keep the administration's counterterrorism programs in check. According to the OMB Watch/GWB report, in order to repair the PATRIOT Act's damage to the nonprofit sector, Congressional action is a first step.

"Congress should conduct effective oversight and re-assess the current approach to charities, grantmakers and other nonprofits," the report states.

Source / truthout

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Keep Your State Out of My Church...

Obama, Keep Your Hands Off My Faith-Based Initiative
by Jim Moss / July 6, 2008

[Jim Moss is a Presbyterian minister from York, South Carolina. He publishes a blog and a quarterly newsletter called "Discipline for Justice," which focuses on ways North Americans can live lives that promote peace and economic justice.]

Last week, Obama spoke out in favor of expanding Bush's faith-based initiative program, part of a predictable and consistent move to the center.

"I'm not saying that faith-based groups are an alternative to government or secular non-profits. I'm not saying that they're somehow better at lifting people up. What I'm saying is that we all have to work together — Christian and Jew, Hindu and Muslim; believer and non-believer alike — to meet the challenges of the 21st Century."

Naturally, the secular left is not happy about this development. But neither are many on the spiritual left. Speaking as a progressive, as an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), and as someone who has successfully organized a church-based food pantry, I have a message for Obama and any other politician who is making the sacred task of outreach ministry a tool of political pandering:

Get your hands off my faith-based initiative! We don't want any of your government money getting in the way of our work.

It's a bad idea for a number of reasons:

1) Over-Regulation. The government never just gives you money. There are always rules and regulations, mountains of paperwork, and any number of hoops to jump through - sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't. This extra work always seems to stand in the way of doing the real work at hand.

2) The Fickle Nature of Politics. Government funding can get turned on and off like a faucet, depending on the political climate . Entire agencies can get the ax simply because a new administration comes in with different priorities. Charities need to depend on consistent money sources that are not politicized.

3) Strings Attached. There really is no such thing as a free lunch. Government funding equals a government agenda, and the political issues of the day will certainly affect where the funding goes. Instead of the meeting the greatest needs of the people, the money will tend to go where it makes the elected officials look best.

4) Separation of Church and State. This is one area where I agree with atheists. Looking back through history, it's clear that when government and religion are in cahoots, bad things tend to happen. They need to be a check on one another's power, and the line between them needs to stay crystal clear. This program blurs that line.

5) A Higher Calling. Feeding the poor, tending the lame, caring for the widow and the orphan. These are some of the most sacred tasks for Christians and for other religions. Using government money to do these tasks is not acceptable. Individuals are called to give of their time and money because giving is a central part of what we believe. It is part of building a community that takes care of one another. Being funded with government money raised through taxation cheapens this noble task. The government certainly has its role in meeting the needs of the people, but this does not come through doing for the faithful what they should be doing themselves.

So thanks, Barack, but no thanks. Our charities are not another pawn in the chess game of this election.

Source. / The Seminal

Also see Obama’s Faith-Based Folly / The Progressive

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