25,000 children die each day due to poverty.
According to UNICEF, 25,000 children die every day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”
AMBULANCE FOR HAITI
Alex Miller, an EMT from New Mexico, spent time in Haiti after the earthquake working for a clinic in the town of Petit Goave near Port-au-Prince. He realized the clinic could use an ambulance for transporting patients so when he returned to the U.S. he began to fundraise for one. Longtime Plenty donor and former Plenty volunteer with the Plenty Ambulance Service in the South Bronx 30 years ago, Robert Reifel heard about Alex’s effort and decided to contribute through Plenty. In the photo above Robert presents Alex with a check for $2,000, money that helped buy the ambulance. The two are holding up a display of pictures of the ambulance and of the clinic in Haiti.
US Senate Report Says Haiti Rebuilding Has Stalled
US Senate Report Says Haiti Rebuilding Has Stalled
By Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jun 21, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haiti has made little progress in rebuilding in the five months since its earthquake, because of an absence of leadership, disagreements among donors and general disorganization, a U.S. Senate report says.
Obtained Monday by The Associated Press, the eight-page report is meant to give Congress a picture of Haiti today as U.S. legislators consider authorizing $2 billion to support the country’s reconstruction.
That picture is grim: Millions displaced from their homes, rubble and collapsed buildings still dominating the landscape. Three weeks into hurricane season, with tropical rains lashing the capital daily, construction is being held up by land disputes and customs delays while plans for moving people out of tent-and-tarp settlements remain in “early draft form,” it says.
Read more…
How BP, Big Oil and the Feds Screw Louisiana to Bring You Cheap Gas
By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet
Posted on June 4, 2010, Printed on June 26, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147101/
The first time I saw New Orleans, it was an empty city, save for the National Guard troops and Blackwater mercenaries patrolling the storm-ravaged streets. It was September 16, 2005, a little more than two weeks after the winds of Hurricane Katrina pushed the waters of the Gulf of Mexico up into the heart of the city via the Mississippi Gulf River Outlet, where they met the contents of the Industrial Canal in a fatal mix, overtopping the levees that were all that stood between the waterway and the death by drowning of the city’s storied Ninth Ward.
The stench of rotting things pervaded the abandoned streets, which were coated in a powdery residue of salt, left behind when the Gulf waters receded back into the drink.
It was abundantly clear that the nation had failed the city, under the leadership of a president who at one time fancied himself to be an oilman. What I didn’t know was that the disaster set in motion by the hurricane, which itself had bypassed the city, was ultimately caused by our nation’s greed for oil.
Oil and Water
While Big Oil didn’t create Hurricane Katrina (unless you factor in the possible role of global climate change in the creation of Katrina), it was the alteration of the New Orleans landscape at the behest of petroleum giants that caused the city’s destruction during the 2005 storm.
Oil exploration off Louisiana’s coast began in the 1940s, and was in full swing by the 1950s. In 1962, the federal government leased a large swath of underwater land in the Gulf for oil exploration, claiming jurisdiction over portions of the oil-rich Gulf that lay beyond the three-mile offshore limit allowed the state of Louisiana for its own control.
“Oil companies acquired almost 2 million acres of new leases, much of them in unprecedented water depths (the average water depth of leases in the 1962 sale was 125 feet, compared to 67 feet in 1954-1955 and 89 feet in 1960),” according to a 2004 report (PDF) by the Department of Interior’s Mineral Management Services. By 1963, 90 drilling operations were in progress, according to the report, and the industry was, by one estimate, spending $1 million a day for drilling, a princely sum at that time. (Today, more than 27 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf off Louisiana’s shores are under lease for drilling.)
In 1965, at the urging of the companies excavating oil and petrochemicals in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (abbreviated as MR-GO, and known colloquially as “Mr. Go”), a broad waterway that provided a shortcut between the Gulf and the ports of New Orleans, allowing large tankers to avoid the twists and turns of the Mississippi River. At 76 miles long, the building of MR-GO was “a larger dirt-moving project than the Panama Canal,” according to Joby Warrick and Michael Grunwald of the Washington Post.
What Corps engineers called Mr. Go climatologists named Hurricane Highway — a perfect conduit for a storm surge. If you were looking to engineer the flooding of New Orleans during a storm, you would have designed MR-GO.
It was a tragedy predicted by scientists, and compounded by the fact that MR-GO, as an avenue of commerce, was essentially a bust, little traveled in the last three decades by its intended clients.
Read more…
Kids To The Country 2010
Plenty’s 2010 Kids To The Country begins next week and we are looking forward to another exciting season. It’s so amazing to watch the kids go through their changes as they experience nature, many for the first time. An encounter with a tadpole, to be surrounded by trees, to chase lightning bugs in the night to the sound of whippoorwills, nature has the power to inspire hope like nothing else can.
This year it costs approximately $300 per child, which covers all of their food, lodging and activities throughout the week. If you would like to sponsor a child, please visit our donation page, http://plenty.org/donate.html
This KTC video provides an excellent overview of the program and gives a real look at what the children will experience when they arrive at the 1750 acres that make up our community.
Here’s a news clip that describes children from New Orleans who were victims of Hurricane Katrina that were brought up to Tennessee to participate in the Kids to The Country Program.
Rubble of a Broken City Strains Haitians’ Patience
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/world/americas/30haiti.html
By DAMIEN CAVE
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — With graffiti and protests, from sweltering tents to air-conditioned offices, Haitians are desperately trying to get a message to their government and the world: enough with the status quo.
The simple phrase “Aba Préval” (Down with Préval, a reference to Haiti’s president, René Préval) has become shorthand for a long list of frustrations, and an epithet expressing a broader fear — that Haitians will be stuck in limbo indefinitely, and that the opportunity to reinvent Haiti is being lost.
While few have given up entirely on the dream that a more efficient, more just Haiti might rise from the rubble, increasingly, hope is giving way to stalemate and bitterness. “Is this really it?” Haitians ask. They complain that the politically connected are benefiting most from reconstruction work that has barely begun. They shake their heads at crime’s coming back, unproductive politicians and aid groups that are struggling with tarpaulin metropolises that look more permanent every day.
“We’re going to be in this position forever,” said Patrick Moussignac, the owner of Radio Caraïbes, a popular station broadcasting from a tent downtown. “We could be living on the streets for 10 or 20 years.”
Read more…
Gulf of Mexico oil spill reinforces the industry’s bad will for American Indians
By The Associated Press
May 18, 2010, 6:55AM
Like many American Indians on the bayou, Emary Billiot blames oil companies for ruining his ancestral marsh over the decades. Still, he’s always been able to fish — but now, with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, even that is not a certainty.
An oil spill — 5 million gallons and counting — spreading across the Gulf of Mexico has closed bays and lakes in Louisiana’s bountiful delta, including fishing grounds that feed the last American-Indian villages in three parishes. It is a bitter blow for the tribes of south Louisiana who charge that drilling has already destroyed their swamps and that oil and land companies illegally grabbed vast areas.
Only 26 families remain on the island today.
“Once the oil gets in the marshes, it’s all over, that’s where your shrimp spawn,” said Billiot, a wiry fisherman with tough hands, his fingernails caked with bayou dirt. “Then we’re in trouble,” he said in a heavy French-Indian accent.
In the month since an offshore drilling platform exploded, killing 11 workers, BP PLC has struggled to stop the leak from a blown-out underwater well. Over the weekend, engineers finally succeeded in using a stopper-and-tube combination to siphon some of the gushing oil into a tanker.
In Pointe-Au-Chien, 60-year-old Sydney Verdin felt a tingle of vengeful satisfaction at BP PLC’s misfortune over the oil spill.
“I’m happy for the oil spill. Now the oil companies are paying for it the same way we’ve had to pay for it,” said Verdin, disabled by a stroke, as he sat in his living room and watched his grandchildren play.
Even before the leak, oil’s influence on the south Louisiana landscape was unmistakable. Signs warning about underground pipelines are everywhere. So are plastic poles in canals to show the pipelines’ location. Out in the marsh, oil and gas facilities are often the only lights visible at night.
Since the 1930s, oil and natural gas companies dug about 10,000 miles of canals, straight as Arizona highways, through the oak and cypress forests, black mangroves, bird rushes and golden marshes. If lined up in a row, the canals would stretch nearly halfway around the world.
They funneled salt water into the marshes, killing trees and grass and hastening erosion. Some scientists say drilling caused half of Louisiana’s land loss, or about 1,000 square miles.
Read more…
KIDS TO THE COUNTRY Celebrates Earthday
Kids To The Country launched its 24th year in Tennessee on Earthday Saturday, April 17, 2010, at the Carver Food Park, Garden and Compost Site, in the Greenway along I440 at 10th Avenue and Gale Lane in Nashville. About a hundred folks attended and enjoyed a beautiful day in the park.
94-year-old Mr. Ellis leads a circle Earthday blessing.
Three girls.
Watering a bed.
Earthday folks chat.
L. to R. Joe Harris, Crystal Miller, Ginger and Luke Sands
Peter Kindfield builds a fire for the vegie burgers.
Kids on stage.
Watching the action with Umsullamah.
Sizwe Herring and Mary Ellen Bowen.
Elaine Langley, RN, back from Haiti
Plenty medical volunteer, Elaine Langely, went to Haiti with a team from the Louisiana/Haiti Sustainable Village project and worked with a Haitian EMT, two other volunteer nurses and an American doctor in a makeshift clinic in the southern coastal town of Cayes Jacmel. These are some of the photos she and a Haitian friend shot during her stay.
Elaine poses with kids outside clinic.
Elaine gives medicine to a little girl.
clinic waiting room
Elaine and friends
Wilma Mankiller, Cherokee Chief and First Woman to Lead Major Tribe, Is Dead at 64
April 6, 2010
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
Wilma Mankiller, who as the first woman to be elected chief of a major American Indian tribe revitalized the Cherokee Nation’s tribal government and improved its education, health and housing, died Tuesday at her home near Tahlequah, Okla. She was 64. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Mike Miller, a tribal spokesman. Ms. Mankiller was the Cherokee chief from 1985 to 1995, and during her tenure the nation’s membership more than doubled, to 170,000 from about 68,000.
Read more…
Charting US Wealth/Income Disparities
