Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » International

On the Farm in Paterno: Organic versus Fair Trade

Mariehurt — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:12:03 +0000

Paterno I had been to Paolo Guarnaccia’s family farm in 2009 when a group of us had dinner with his family while talking about the Simeto Valley. Now I saw it differently as we joined his wife for a simple and delicious lunch there. I had not fully realized that the farm was still in Paterno, simply on the other side of the hill from the Norman castle, old church and cemetery I had visited several times this trip. With 23 hectares of land assembled over 30 years this was a large set of groves tended by Paolo, tenants, and volunteers that came throughout the year to help and to learn organic farming techniques. Everything about this operation had a “social” purpose, as they say here, right down to the room that hosted school field trips and the vegetable plot tended by various people in rehab or other programs.

For the first time I toured the huge “warehouse,” as Paolo calls it, which is leased from the regional government, but is a combination packing shed, orange sorting and processing operation, olive oil manufacturing plant, and much more. Consorzio Terre Di Sicilia is a model, organic, educational, and experimental farming location, but it is also largely empty, inoperative, and laden with debt. At one point serving 1000 customers all over Sicily with certified organic products, it now was little used, waiting for an EU loan of 200,000 euros over the last number of years, which still hadn’t arrived, and only a place for a couple of small farmers to sort their oranges by size with one of the giant machines. Paolo had tried to turn it all into a cooperative over 5 years, but it didn’t work out…just not enough interest.

Similar to our friends with COMUCAP in Honduras and their coffee and aloe vera looking for markets, I started asking what it would take to get the marmalade made here over to North America where ACORN International could move it through Fair Grinds and other places to support the survival of farming in Sicily. Get ready for a headache.

The blood oranges as fresh fruit are impractical to even consider because of cost and requirements to prevent Mediterranean fly from coming to our shores. Scratch that.

How about fair trade, organic marmalade? Well, organic is easy. Rigorous Italian and European Union inspections are already in place which would meet any requirements. Fair trade, though, probably not it seems. This is not a co-op. Looking at the FLO affiliate website FairTrade Italia it seems they only bring in products from the rest of the developing world. When my friends have described Sicily as the Appalachia of Europe and of Italy, that doesn’t seem to count.

There has to be a way. This stuff is too good not to save and survive.

Hard Choices, Right Process: Deal Making in Paterno, Cairo, & New Orleans

Mariehurt — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:40:49 +0000

Everyone is Happy with the Decision and Crowds around Candidate Vittorio Lo Presti (middle/blue sweater)

Paterno After days of discussion sometimes heated and dramatic, the leadership of the La Citta civic movement in Paterno had come to the crossroads where they had to make decisions. The right-leaning party had chosen a candidate for mayor and attracted some support from the center as well. This meant that if La Citta could come up with a choice that was attractive, then there was a viable coalition that was possible with the left-party. Other movements were beginning to announce their lists of candidates for councilors. A newly organized movement like La Citta needed time to work through its program and get its people organized, but time was now the last thing it had. The right steps might propel the movement from nowhere to the top, if they could figure out a way to reach consensus.

The leadership assembled in the campaign office and for two hours I listened to what I knew was a serious, well reasoned debate even with my marginal understanding of Italian and an occasional word of translation from my friend and comrade, Paolo Guarnicca, who had invited me to Paterno to help on technical questions and organizational development. The debate involved classic questions. Is it important to win or to make a point? Is the process more important for the organization than choosing the right candidate? How would any choice be received by the movement’s emerging constituency that wanted change and something different, if an existing politician was supported and the endorsement was not transparent? Order was required and the speakers went around the room, one after another, sometimes at length and sometimes loudly, but always yielding to the next turn. Some were adamant for someone new. Others felt that they had someone who could win in the head of the water society, a lawyer who had joined their movement. Others worried that he had previously been involved in the right party and the message would look expedient, rather than principled and kill the movement. Paolo was even suggested as a possible candidate.

Team La Citta: President Biaggio Di Caro, Vittorio Lo Prestion, Paolo Guarnaccia

Finally, Paolo offered a compromise. Vittorio should be supported but the president of La Citta should be the official bridge to the movement and Paolo should be part of the team as a consultant to the future mayor’s government to implement needed reforms, if he was victorious in the election. Quickly, it was clear that there was now something for everyone. A candidate would be on top of the ticket that might be able to win and a sense of a team guaranteeing change that would also be a signal to the left. The men were ecstatic. Bonds were formed. Handshakes and hugs were everywhere, and pictures were taken. It was the right decision for the organization. Who knows if they can now do the work to win, but finally they are in position to do so.

Making deals is so difficult after long struggles, when even victory can seem bittersweet and not quite enough to settle the stomach. Certainly this was true here in the small city of Paterno, but I had the same thought reading the story in the Times of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt now preparing to finally call for the military to step out of power on the eve of Mubarak’s resignation as they realize their base is now all of Egypt and not simply their members, long cloistered in secrecy and silence. If reporter David Kirkpatrick is right, the liberal parties seem to still not be willing to join the Brotherhood on even a call they support, but rather seem to want the Brotherhood to rise and fall on their own steam. A deal is hard in the middle of a revolution half-won and half-lost.

I looked at a picture sent to me from New Orleans. Vanessa Gueringer of A Community Voice, formerly New Orleans ACORN, was wearing her ACV button as she put her foot on a shovel along with Mayor Mitch Landrieu and other city dignitaries as they broke ground for a park in the Lower 9^th Ward. Vanessa has been a constant advocate and thorn in the side of the city officials for years about how little is done to rebuild the Lower 9^thand she is constantly showing them how half-full the glass is from the residents’ perspective. Nonetheless, as a great leader, she knows when the situation requires grace and it’s time to put the shovel in the dirt and celebrate a true victory no matter how many times she might have wanted to swing that tool at the nearest city official!

ACV Leader Vanessa Gueringer, Councilman Jon Johnson, and Mayor Mitch Landrieu at Ground Breaking of Oliver Bush Park in Lower 9th Ward

We are often so long out of power that when we win, it is hard to make the deal, no matter how badly we want it. If the process is right, then the hard choices will be right, too.

Citizen Participation in Paterno and Banks Settle for Billions On Small Foreclosure Aid

Mariehurt — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:11:13 +0000

Paterno Every place is different whether town or country, but there’s something about waiting for a meeting to start in many countries that always feels the same. My presentation in Paterno before the members of La Citta civic movement and many others who had been invited was scheduled for 7 pm. I had been warned that we would not possibly begin until 730. At 730 there were hardly 20 people inside visiting and smoking in the street. When we finally began another 15 or 20 minutes later, most chairs were full and there were perhaps 40 as the president of La Citta introduced me. By the time I started speaking at 8PM, there was a standing room only crowd, many of which finally had to stand behind me, and we might have squeezed 80 to 100 people into the room. What do I know?!?

I made the case for citizens’ participation and the power organization and collective action could build, as I always do, citing examples from 40 years and experience around the world. They were polite and attentive to the translation, and especially interested in what I argued was a unique opportunity that civic movements had to directly engage politics and access to the ballot in Sicily. As always, it was the questions and answers that I enjoyed most, teaching me even as I got a better feeling for what was really on their minds. They wanted to believe something was possible, but they were skeptical. Paterno was a smaller city based on the agriculture all around them and they saw themselves under attack including by a new mall – Etnaopolis, I think it was called – on the outskirts of town that was squeezing small shops dry. There was interest in our work in curtailing the growth of Walmart in Florida and our FDI Watch campaign in India.

Access to banks, credit and loans are huge issues that I hear my friends talk about all of the time. I was surprised when I mentioned our home mortgage and community reinvestment campaigns that there were not more questions about this. I think this is more than skepticism and something more akin to cynicism now. ACORN Italia or any future ACORN Sicilia will have to research this more thoroughly.

Some of our past victories against banks seem hollow as I read the headlines on the foreclosure settlement about to be announced by the government and driven by the hard work of the attorneys general in the states. The number looks huge – $26 billion! Unfortunately, it seems the relief for the borrowers who are “underwater” on their loans seems small compared to the huge number of families in this sinking boat. Since the Obama Administration and the Treasury Department have been so weak and wimpy in this area, the AGs had little stroke in correcting past banking misdeeds to win more on writedowns, I suspect. The relief to homeowners already screwed is mostly symbolic and almost an insult. Some number of them will get $2000, but even that seems to be in payments over 3 years?!? Are you kidding, $600+ a year for a couple of years hardly offsets having lost your home because of mortgage shenanigans from the big banks who are party to this play (Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, and so forth). It is amazing how bad the banks have been in driving this recession, administering true and deep harm to families, being bailed out, and still largely getting away without huge consequences. Meanwhile this new settlement, gives them a “get out of court free” card for future litigation.

I should feel lucky that people in Paterno didn’t ask me more questions about banks and credit. I might have been embarrassed by the morning newspapers when they finally catch up on the 7 hour time zone change!

Apple, Times, and Others Advocating for Sweatshops

Mariehurt — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:55:11 +0000

New Orleans As improbable as it may sound; sweatshops seem to have a lot of high placed advocates who simply swear by them. Yes, sweatshops!

In the recent deification of Apple and its co-founder Steven Jobs, there has been unstinting praise for Apple and its high priced, sleek products as a great American success story. The credible allegations and proofs of how much of Apple’s manufacturing operation rested on the backs of sweatshop labor, particularly at huge manufacturers like FoxConn, were sometimes mentioned in passing, but largely swept under the rug. Not surprisingly a front page article on the death and demise of American manufacturing featuring both Jobs and Apple prominently also tried to bury the sweatshop reality on which so much of this manufacturing “miracle” exists in a few paragraphs of the very long story.

The reporter and others marveled at how on a whim 8000 workers could be pulled out of bed in company owned and run dormitories and put to work on a last minute changeover. Wow, the article and others seemed to say, that couldn’t happen here in America.

Well, that’s wrong. It could happened here in America, but Apple would have to pay for it, and that’s still the real difference.

One fool asked where you could find some thousands of workers in the United States, who would be ready to roll to work. Hey, just about anywhere, jerkwater! Has word of the recession gotten to none of these folks?

Even in the pages of the New York Times, if they were interested they can read about the skilled workers by the thousands that have trucked themselves into North Dakota (of all places!) to live in, yes, bunks, trailers, and all manner of man-caves in order to work in the oil industry on the plains. But, whoops, once again, I should add that they are doing so, because they get paid, and paid pretty damned well to do so! We saw thousands of workers flood into New Orleans to help on the recovery, but once again they did so on their own dime, because they thought they could make a dollar. In all of these cases these are workers with crazy, mad skills, too.

The article seemed to say Apple employed 700,000 workers in manufacturing around the world, oh, and 40,000 or so in the USA. Their spokesperson wanted to make sure all of us knew that the American economy is not “their problem.” Their problem is only “making a good product.” Life and business is not that simple, and the responsibilities go much deeper.

This seems to be a problem throughout much of the Times. Nicholas Kristof did a column that I had to read because it was about Olly Neal from Arkansas, who I had worked with in the 1970’s when he was running the Lee County Clinic. Posting the article, more than one of my buddies reminded me how they too had to hold their noses to read anything Kristof wrote because he is such a relentless apologist for sweatshops.

Good news that we are really talking about manufacturing. Bad news that the ideology underpinning the conversation is that there can only be manufacturing at the expense of workers’ rights and wages in sweatshop conditions.

Shame on Apple, the Times, and the rest of the tribe that makes these rationalizations!

Turning Up the Heat on FDI and Remittances

Mariehurt — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:10:50 +0000

New Orleans This report almost writes itself, especially since the pictures virtually tell the story as various organizations in the ACORN International global federation step up to turn on the heat.

Ottawa ACORN opens another year of our Remittance Justice Campaign picketing Western Union for predatory pricing of transfers from working, immigrant families back to their relatives back home. As we posted our demands on the front door of the Western Union office, a spokesperson for Western Union in a Denver suburb was talking to the Ottawa Citizen and conceding that they are not necessarily “the lowest priced service provider.” Sorry, Daniel, that just isn’t good enough for ACORN International and ACORN Canada!

This weekend the report from ACORN India’s Bangalore organizer, Suresh showed the same spirits when he included the pictures of the hawkers we organized who were protesting the attempt to modify foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail which could threaten millions and millions of informal jobs in that sector currently employing 20 million workers. The hawkers hit the streets wearing gunny sacks as part of the protest march. ACORN International and our affiliates ACORN India and the India FDI Watch Campaign are pretty clear that unilateral action by the government had to be stopped and a mere suspension isn’t enough to make us happy until there are real protections for workers and communities.

2012 is off to a fast start!

Egyptian Military Crackdown on Government Funded Civic Groups

dine — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:12:27 +0000

New Orleans There seems little argument left that the Egyptian military is aggressively pursuing a counter revolutionary program. The latest evidence was shocking in its boldness when a coordinated shutdown three U.S. Government funded civic and democracy groups, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and Freedom House, as well as a similar civic support German funded civic training foundation and a non-profit, the Egyptian Budgetary and Human Rights Observatory, whose mission is to study the Egyptian military budget and expenditures, making them invaluable but wildly controversial these days.

Other than the Observatory, the other groups are all funded either 100% or close to 100% by the U.S. Government or the German Government. A U.S. Congress funding deal apportions money (and therefore patronage, jobs, travel, and so forth) to both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to ostensibly run nonpartisan civic training and support programs, which would teach citizens in foreign countries how to make democracy and government work just like back home. I will ignore the obvious contradiction that the way our government is now working is a challenged model at best in many foreign lands. Similarly in Germany their international aid money is distributed through foundations that are run by each of the political parties receiving a threshold share of the parliamentary vote qualifying their stifung to initiate civic and training programs in other countries. To call any of these non-governmental organizations is a stretch since virtually all of their money is funneled directly from either the US or German government depending on the entity.

So when the Egyptian military seizes offices and operations of such organizations there is no way to understand this other than as direct, premeditated slap at the governments in question. This may seem like a shot across the bow, but it is more a missile fired close enough for powder burns and medic calls.

When the Organizers’ Forum delegation visited Cairo several months ago, our “political” committee met with an NDI representative, so we were pretty well briefed on their program. Until the revolution it had been tiny and below the radar because it was hardly a program at all. Since the revolution given the election activity they had added extensive staff, but we got no impression that any were organizers or folks that one could claim could cause the military many problems. Freedom House had inelegantly tried to take perhaps too much credit for some training they had organized for activists in recent years. When we met with young revolutionaries who had been key spokesmen for the Tahrir Square protests, they thought some of the training was valuable, but they had sent lower echelon people to participate, not having time themselves or a whole lot of interest from what we could determine.

The Egyptian military likely presumes that they can get away with some of this outrage because of the ham handed way the State Department and the U.S. Ambassador handled some of this after the revolution with announcements of multi-million dollar funds available to support “democracy building” projects that let to large lines around the embassy of folks desperate for the money, repelling any serious groups from being able to get near such support. The Ambassador did everything but erect a giant neon sign saying that they intended to interfere in as many ways as possible, thereby making involvement or support by the US Government toxic to any of the activists or revolutionaries.

We met with numerous legitimate NGOs and there is no question that any NGO without a local base or registration is operating in very tenuous circumstances. Without revealing more, the stories of the gyrations and contortions that allowed them to operate in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt were as innovative and startling as they were admirable.

The military seems to have pointedly sent a drastic and unsettling message to other world governments as they continue to try to divert attention from their own tragic mishandling of recent protests and the blood on their hands from almost 100 deaths in recent weeks. We can only hope that as chilling as this will be to the rest of the non-profit community in Egypt that the military will be content with its international muscle flex rather than initiating a wave to even more drastic and draconian attacks on the human and civil rights of its citizens. Without doubt there are many we visited with only short months ago who are now lying low, backing up hard drives, and staying with friends and family as they prepare for what could be worse to come. Our hopes and prayers are with them.

Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Time Banking, and Know Your Care

jstuart — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:23:50 +0000

John and Amy get an ACORN Canada calendar

Detroit The ACORN Canada staff finished an excellent Year End / Year Begin meeting in “southern Canada” across the river from Windsor in Detroit, where 15 of the team discussed campaigns, results of last year’s work, and goals for the coming year. In order to get a sense of other organizing while they were in Detroit, they took advantage of the opportunity to meet with some other organizers on the community, political, and labor fronts.

Kim Hodge, executive director of Michigan Time Banking, and a great former ACORN and Local 100 organizer, visited with the crew and detailed how people can do “deep” community organizing by creating time bank exchanges where various skills and tasks are traded with other neighbors in the community. The sharing involves an array of things from rides to yard work, child care, cooking, gardening, and whatever you might be able to do that someone else might need. The ACORN Canada organizers were particularly interested in the “political” or “organizational” exchanges for attending meetings and actions or getting involved in voter registration. One could see the wheels turning, and given Kim’s history with the ACORN model, she knew how to work it!

In a similar fashion John Freeman, who also had worked with both ACORN in Dallas, Sioux Falls, and Albuquerque and Local 100 in Baton Rouge, was able to bridge the very different politics of America with the Canadian experience. Amy Chapman joined him in discussing the mechanics of US political work now as well as her perspectives having run the Obama campaign in 2008 in Michigan and closely observing what the coming 2012 campaign might portend. John detailed his work with a new organization, Know Your Care, which is running an educational effort to explain and build support for Obama-care before the 2012 vote. Questions were flying about databases and voter “modeling.” Getting a feel for the size and scale of the field operation in 2008 and what already exists in places like Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania for the re-election campaign was interesting and disturbing. If Michigan is a tossup for Obama, this is going to be a nail biter of an election.

The recent Teamsters election won by Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. over a couple of candidates including Teamsters’ for a Democratic Union (TDU) supported (and old friend) Sandy Pope was the opposite of a nail bitter from the story told the staff by TDU’s long time sparkplug, Ken Paff who has led the oldest labor reform movement in US labor for more than 30 years. The stories of the convention were harrowing. The resistance to democratic practice in unions is longstanding and controversial, so that doesn’t separate the Teamsters as much as the extreme and aberrant degree they take intolerance to dissent. Ken had kept his sense of humor and vision alive and that was invaluable for the ACORN Canada crew.

Add all of this to ambitious membership goals for 2012, excellent planning for the Remittance Justice Campaign embraced by all of ACORN International, and the camaraderie of the staff, and it made for a great meeting.

Jill O'Reilly from Ottawa picking up an award

People Before Profits

Ken Paff of TDU talks to staff

Assange is Right about Internet Archives

dine — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:50:28 +0000

New Orleans The much maligned Julian Assange of Wikileaks on his forced sabbatical in England where he is “to the manor” adopted while awaiting extradition to Sweden to confront the errors of his ways with women, revealed an important insight in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that was excerpted in the recent issue of Harpers’ Magazine. Assange was expressing concern, as he rightly might, over how information (knowledge?) can be “disappeared” over the internet. He was raising various issues both corporate and conspiratorial about bits of unpleasantness on the Guardian website and elsewhere that had been removed based on pressure from the rich and powerful. He likened it to the Russian rewrites of history, though power, as we know, routinely rewrites history to suit its purposes, his point was that the information on the web disappears without a trace, making any future retrieval or recovery in different times impossible.

I can remember during the election in 2008 getting pushed to delete a story from Social Policy magazine that was already widely distributed on the internet, but that some people within the presidential campaign apparatus wanted removed despite the fact that it accurately demonstrated a relationship between ACORN and the candidate, Barack Obama. As publisher of Social Policy, my webmaster and I kept putting the piece back up every time someone tried to take it down. Weird times!

Assange’s point is actually broader and more archival. He argues that to the degree archives are attached to URLs, when a company or URL owner folds, the information can be made inaccessible and lost. His proposal is that the information be linked to a mathematical number and preserved regardless, which makes sense.

When we published Battle of the Ninth Ward: ACORN, The Rebuilding of New Orleans, and the Lessons of Disaster some of the citations went to information that was linked to www.acorn.org. Unfortunately, given the fact that ACORN went under a bit over a year ago, none of the information exists on that URL any longer. The references are permanently (temporarily?) lost in space.

This is a common problem and some of the archival projects by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others will be stuck in this situation from what I can see. How will future historians and others get accurate views of the past, if the past disappears like so many grains of sand in the desert?

Assange is right. We need something different and better. It’s hard to imagine that he will be the best person to fix this problem or raise the money to get it done for quite a while anyway. Hopefully someone is ready to pick up the challenge. Maybe these big buckers in Silicon Valley will hear the call? I hope so.

Indian Government Deals Small Businesses a Hard Blow

jstuart — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:26:34 +0000

New Orleans For years the India FDI Watch Campaign supported by ACORN International has campaigned to make sure that any modification in foreign direct investment would protect the 20,000,000 small retailers, birani shop keepers, brokers, and others would be done responsibly. Working to build a large, diverse national coalition, the India FDI Watch Campaign has managed to forestall initiatives which would have allowed foreign big box operators like WalMart, Carrefour, Tesco, Metro and others from the India market. This week the government issued new regulations which would allow 51% ownership of multi-brand retail outlets. The protest in Parliament by parties of both the left and right was so significant that all business was suspended in reaction to the unilateral movement of the government in this area.

Dharmendra Kumar, campaign director of India FDI Watch (www.indiafdiwatch.org), issued a detailed, factual rebuttal to the government’s claims, which clarifies the issues:

The Issue of FDI in Retail

Proposed Conditions	Comment
FDI in multi-brand retail may be permitted to the extent of 51 per cent with government approval.	This means that foreign retailers would have commanding position in the venture. This is not in the spirit of the `calibrated’ approach suggested by DIPP.
Retail sales locations may be set up only in cities with a population of more than 10 lakh (1 million) as per 2011 Census and may also cover an area of 10 km around municipal urban agglomeration limits of such cities. Retail locations will be restricted to areas as per the master zonal plans of the cities concerned and provisions will be made for requisite facilities such as transport connectivity and parking.	It allows them to open stores in around 53 cities. These cities generate more than half of income in India. The condition gives a free run to foreign retailers to directly compete with existing businesses in the established and natural markets with different sizes of superstores in as many numbers as they wish.
Minimum amount to be brought in as FDI by a foreign investor would be around $100 million.	It’s a pittance considering that super-retail is a business of scale.
At least 30 per cent of the procurement of manufactured processed products shall be sourced from small industries that have total investment in plant and machinery not exceeding $250,000 (around INR1.25 crore). This investment refers to the value at the time of installation, without providing for depreciation.	It has potential to threaten our MSME sector by opening a floodgate of imports denying the country any opportunity to enhance its skill and base of production. It has nothing to do about protecting domestic small industry as the cap is applicable for MSMEs world wide.
The government will have the first right to procurement of agriculture products.	This is far from being sufficient and Govt. need to have power to buy agricultural products from superstores at pre-specified prices in case of food sortage.
Fresh agricultural products, including fruits, vegetables, flowers, grains, pulses, fresh poultry, fishery and meat products may be unbranded.	It is likely that with reduced tariffs under various multilateral/regional/bilateral free trade agreements superstores would import these products.
At least 50 per cent of the total FDI brought in shall be invested in back-end infrastructure. Back-end infrastructure will entail capital expenditure on all activities, excluding that on front-end units. For instance, back-end infrastructure will include investment made towards processing, manufacturing, distribution, design improvement, quality control, packaging, logistics, storage, warehouse, agriculture market produce, infrastructure, etc. Expenditure on land cost and rental, if any, will not be counted for purposes of back-end infrastructure.	Back end infrstructure defined as any expenditure other than on front end is fallacious. Office expenditures would also be counted as investment in back end infrastructure.
Self-certification will be done by the company to ensure compliance of all the conditions.	This actually undone all the riders. There is no monitoring machanism proposed to ensure compliance of conditions.

Myths being propogated by vested interests	Fact
States can deny trade licences	Corporate retailers have already used court to get trade licences. So even if an authority (state/municipal/panchayat) deny a trade license, corporations are likely to get court order citing trade as fundamental right.
Corporatizing the supply chain would reduce gap between producers and consumers prices	There is no such obvious evidence. Superstores squeeze both ends of the supply chain by buying cheap and selling dear. Its widely found that final product sold in the superstores are higher.
Small farmers would benefit	Superstores generally deal only with big farmers. There is no such international precedent.
FDI in retail would help curb inflation	It could infact lead to the opposite. Prices in India are comparatively stable.
It will wipe out middlemen	Superstores are giant middlemen and do deal through a chain of agents.
Corporatizing retail would create 10 million jobs	The projection is baseless and meant to influence debate. The efficiency of corporations comes from being low labour intensive. While one billion USD of turnover currently generates 104,821 jobs in current Indian retail, it only generates 3,241 jobs in average global retailers. The autonomus growth of Indian retail market with the projected annual compound rate of 10 to 12% is capable of generating many more jobs without FDI in retail.

Caveat Emptor / Buyers Beware the Fair Trade Mess

jstuart — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:35:55 +0000

New Orleans Part of the global dispute that ACORN International highlighted in our recently released report, “Unfair Fairtrade” www.acorninternational.org, burst into the business section of the Times in a weird piece of Thanksgiving celebration. The issue engaged most directly continued to be the rouge retreat of Fair Trade USA and its chief, Paul Rice, from any pretense of real support for producers to what can only be correctly described as a corporate convenience and branding operation for large companies and their sources. There can be little doubt that Rice and the US operation are on the wrong side of this dispute and are leading a wholesale assault on any notion of fair trade principles, despite the fact that from our research and report there can be little doubt that some of his criticisms of the Fairtrade International (FLO) and its certification program are also correct.

The terrible truth is that both competing business models are perhaps fatally flawed endangering the survival of the fair trade movement and real values at all. The slim hope raised at the end of the William Neuman might be found by grasping the straw held out by Seth Goldman of Honest Tea (owned by Coca Cola) who is debating whether to sell certified products from Fair Trade USA or Fairtrade International when he “called the dispute a mess, but added, ‘Opening up a can of worms gives a chance to understand what’s in the can.’” Perhaps hard looks would force needed change in FLO as well, because right now these continued contradictions are mainly hurting the intended beneficiaries, the producers, while treating the consumers almost as shabbily by abusing their good graces and picking their pockets often without any benefit to producers in the fields.

When Rice and Fair Trade USA argue they want to start certifying large plantation operations to get more market share of fair trade sales, the producers would no longer be small farmers, but simply wage earning farm workers and the decades of watching what has happened to farm workers and their efforts to unionize and achieve higher standards leave us no room to believe that this will be a happy outcome. It is also easy to prove since ironically most of the tea that Fairtrade International currently certifies is from the same large plantation operations that Fair Trade USA is now proposing to whitewash for consumers in America. Having visited tea plantations in India and directly supported unions and strikes for higher wages among tens of thousands of workers around Darjeeling and the many communities around the foothills of the Himalayas, I can personally guarantee you there is nothing fair about this part of the trade and the FLO stamp changes the situation only by the smallest degree.

In that sense Dean Cycon, founder of Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee, and a long time supplier for our Fair Grinds Coffeehouse in New Orleans (and a Katrina hero for his support to the previous owners by supplying free coffee for them to keep hot in the pot for the long rebuilding six years ago) is right he argues: “Starbucks, Green Mountain and other coffee companies will be able to become 100 percent fair trade not because they’ve changed their business practices one iota but because Fair Trade USA has changed the rules of the game.” Quite right, but where Dean does not go far enough is that the rules of the fair trade game in fact do need to be changed, not simply to achieve more scale, which is the only correct argument that Rice and Fair Trade USA are making, but to reform FLO so that once again coffee coops and other small producers are benefited rather than trapped in the hopeless and expensive FLO bureaucracy, and consumers can finally get the real deal.

Sadly the best hope in this mess may in fact be for consumers, who really do drive this partnership, to finally understand what is in this can of worms and begin to support something real that defines trade as really fair for both producers and consumers, rather than the system now which increasingly seems to be too much about corporations and the certifiers themselves.

Unfair Fairtrade

jstuart — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:28:41 +0000

New Orleans ACORN International released a hard-hitting report that was the result of extensive research during the summer, largely conducted by Melanie Craxton, an economics major at the University of Edinburg, interning in the New Orleans headquarters. Because of our partnership with COMUCAP, the women’s coffee and aloe vera growing cooperative in Marcala, Honduras, and our new relationship with Fair Grinds Coffeehouse (www.fairgrinds.com), the oldest fair-trade only establishment in New Orleans, which has made support of ACORN International’s Central and South American organizing a major priority, we have become increasingly knowledgeable of the curious and contradictory world of fair trade certification by the global agency formed for this purpose, Fairtrade (FLO), based in Germany.

The report, “Unfair Fairtrade,” was released yesterday on the ACORN International website (www.acorninternational.org) and asks some tough questions about the contradictions and inconsistencies involved in the Fairtrade organization. The mission and purpose of Fairtrade were exemplary. Founders came together to unite cooperatives of developing world producers in a process that would yield them a better market price for their crops by allowing consumers to know that common standards and guarantees existed.

Over the years though the costs have grown and in many cases neither consumers nor producers seem to have ended up where either one of them hoped to be in these transactions. ACORN International in a meeting last summer with the best of the national Fairtrade affiliates in Canada found that our own partners, COMUCAP, both could become the first or one of the first aloe vera certified organizations and were somehow suspended. In the burgeoning bureaucracy that many now believe characterizes, the Fairtrade organization, even with the intervention of our Canadian friends, COMUCAP has been stuck in this stalemate status, likely because of delay in paying the significant fees required to maintain their status. Is their coffee somehow less fair trade now? Less organic? Are the members of the cooperative less dependent on the sales through COMUCAP? The answer is “no,” to all of those questions, but stuck they remain. Our research found that they are not alone, and in fact this is a common problem.

The longstanding controversy perhaps best demonstrated by the USA affiliate has now boiled over with the USA outfit leaving the Fairtrade “club.” And, not necessarily for good reasons! The USA group had already been seen as somewhat rouge, because of the fair trade green-washing they had been willing to give to various big coffee outlets in order to increase market share (which helps their bottom line) even when the impact in the fields was marginal or worse. It is no wonder that Rainforest Action Network, Starbucks, Green Mountain Coffee, and others have simply created their own “brands” for fair trade, further muddling the market and confusing consumers.

None of this is good and all of it should raise red flags in the progressive community and among consumers. ACORN International affiliates in our dozen countries and our partners are right in the thick of this, so we once again are asking the hard questions of some sacred cows in hopes that we can help trigger a dialogue that finally achieves the great mission of these organizations and fair trade and brings us back on track.

Rent Reduction Campaign in Rome and Occupy Octopus

Chieforgasst — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 16:43:44 +0000

Rome With hustle and grit, David Tozzo, our intrepid volunteer organizer in Rome, had secured a free office for ACORN Italy in a community center of sorts called Case de la Quartier…the House of the Quarter. Most of our beginning work is in the 4^th Quarter, the largest of the 19 quarters or districts with 350,000 residents. We finally kicked off our meeting in the basement of the office with the first 20 people and gradually as the meeting went on the number rose to 30 or so. Not only were we introducing ACORN International and ACORN Italy to some new people, but we were also moving forward on our campaign to win rent reductions for tenants with unregistered contracts where a new national law is a tool in breaking down the black market.

In the cutthroat “jungle” of housing shortages, landlord tax evasions, and a tight market in apartments for students, the poor, and many others, frequently landlords are renting simple rooms on the black market for 500 euros. The new law allows tenants to turn in their landlords if they have an unregistered “leases” and win huge reductions of up to 90% of their rent and have that amount frozen for 8 years on the lease and options. Furthermore, since the state designed this law to catch tax evasion, it also forbids the landlords escaping the penalty by selling the aprtment, since in effect they are paying back the tenants they exploited, rather than the government they cheated. Amazing!

Yet real life is more complex than simple self-interest. At the meeting in Rome and earlier in Palermo, questions were raised, particularly by young women tenants, about the uncomfortable interpersonal situation created in turning in a landlord where they were essentially also living in the same house. There were also concerns about intimidation, harassment, and threats. These were not easy conversations, partially because we need to reach some critical mass in this effort. Most bizarrely in Rome two journalists, playing the devil’s advocate, felt sorry for the landlords, but when I pointed out it was the first time that I had ever been chastised for organizing people to follow the law, since usually we are accused of advocating that people ignore the law, they answered simply, “Welcome to Italy!” What a country!

Earlier I found myself meeting with a mayor of a small suburban town on the outskirts of Rome and several young and coming political figures at the grassroots basis at a superb lunch with excellent conversation thanks to Lucio D’Ubaldo, an elected Senator and publisher of a monthly political magazine, who also happened to be the co-author of a book on the correspondence between the French philosopher Maritain and Saul Alinsky. He and our firecracker, David Tozzo, have a volume coming out next year discussing Alinsky and community organizing, and no doubt I owe Saul thanks after 40 years for this connection – a gift that keeps giving!

Not surprisingly they ALL wanted to talk about Obama, the USA, and now, the stirring of a possible Occupy movement in America. It was easy to be positive, because the reach of the activity is so wide, even if not yet deep. There is clearly a stirring of the forces on the ground who have been desperate for a banner. I can partially judge this as I see so many veterans of our work in community organizing joining the lists. There was Helene O’Brien, ACORN’s former field director, in the bottom left hand corner of the New York Times picture from Occupy New Orleans yesterday. My offer of meeting space at Fair Grinds is being welcomed. All of our folks in New Orleans were in the march. Dewey Armstrong from ACORN in the late 70′s and 80′s sent me his thoughts on having attended the organizing meetings of Occupy Miami. Ex-ACORN state operations are widely reported as involved in New York, California, and Massachusetts. Craig Robbins from Citizens United in Philadelphia reached out to say how interesting it looked in his state and how close he was following the activity. John Anderson in Vancouver couldn’t control his frustration at the disorganization of Occupy there, but was definitely in the room during the planning.

Rome or the USA, there is pent up frustration at the inability of the progressive forces to unite and move effectively to actually win change. This is an opportunity that we should not squander, but should advance at every turn. It may not be perfect or exactly what we might have put together, but we have to go with what is moving, and right now Occupy has a new heartbeat and a quick step, and that’s worth our investigation and effort.