The Great Debate

December 13th, 2007 at 4:56 am

When people talk about ONE the topics are generally, in no particular order: Africa, celebrities, wristbands, and politics. But if ONE is about poverty, and poverty is fundamentally an economic problem, it might be a good idea to focus more on economics in our discussions. Maybe, or maybe I’m a biased economics major.

The following link leads to a debate translated from Spanish between two big names in development economics, Jeffrey Sachs (left) and William Easterly (right), both known it seems as much for their entertaining debates and pithy aphorisms as their contributions to the field.

Easterly vs. Sachs

If you want a more academic tone, I linked below to a paper by Steven Radalet that has a more middle of the road perspective. He works at the Center for Global Development in Washington D.C.

A Primer on Foreign Aid

What Candidates Say About Us

December 12th, 2007 at 3:50 pm

One heck of a video of some of the presidential candidates talking about ONE and the ONE Vote ‘08 initiative.

What’s an ROA Part VI: Rachel J.

December 12th, 2007 at 3:42 pm

For Part 6 of What’s an ROA we head across the country to meet Rachel Johnstone in Washington state.

My name is Rachel Johnstone, I am from a town of 485 people out in the middle of nowhere in Oregon grew up in the country, and worked for City of Monroe for 2.5 years during my last years of high school where I originally became interested in politics and began to study a much bigger picture of world economics. After high school I left the small country town to go to school in St. Louis where my life was completely transformed and became even more involved in humanitarian issues. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2007 that I became actively involved with the ONE campaign and starting research more world-wide poverty, the effects of Aids/HIV/ Malaria, unclean water, and uneducated children. At the point I took on a personal commitment to raise awareness among the school I was currently attending and the church organization that I was heavily involved in.

I have recently moved back to the West Coast to Washington State where I am attending Yakima Valley Community College about 2 hours east of Seattle where we are standing up and joining the fight against extreme poverty!

Voting FRESH

December 11th, 2007 at 4:09 pm

The Senate is voting on the Lugar-Lautenberg FRESH Amendment to the Farm Bill right now. Check out the action on C-SPAN2.

UPDATE:  Lugar-Lautenberg failed 37 Yea – 58 Nay.  Focus your calls on the Grassley-Dorgan amendment.

What’s an ROA Part V: Maisie

December 11th, 2007 at 3:51 pm

 Part 5 (about half way done!) of our What’s an ROA series takes us to Virginia to meet Maisie:

Hello! My name is Maisie Pigeon, and I am a senior (!!) at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA studying Political Science, Anthropology, and Africana Studies. I represent the states of VA, GA, FL, AL, and MS. While I haven’t pinned down precisely what I want to do after graduation, I’m looking into international human rights law or global economic policy. I have been a member of the ONE Campaign since the summer of 2005 and will continue to work with it until the fight against poverty has been won of course!

Last summer, I took part in a study abroad program in Kenya where we traveled through the entire country. I picked up some invaluable experiences there and was able to put faces to a lot of the statistics I’ve studied over the years; for one, we stayed with families, so we understood living conditions. (I would pretty much be a worthless Kenyan, because I am absolutely no good at milking cows…) I’ve also spent time in Tanzania, Costa Rica, and a handful of European nations.

When I’m not concentrating on schoolwork, more likely than not, I can be found outside. I love snowboarding, hiking, kayaking, climbing, running with my dog Clyde, and learning how to do a lot of other stuff. I also love to travel (I’ve had a toe in 3 of the 4 oceans thus far), cooking, going to concerts, reading, and painting & sculpting. I love my dog, and I hate blueberries. I am ALWAYS game for an adventure.

The culmination of all of my experiences and hobbies has taught me about the difference one person can make in the world, be it a kind word of encouragement to a fellow snowboarder or a call to a Congressman to put pressure on poverty legislation. Our generation has so much potential to really change the world so remember to keep doing exactly what you have been doing; we have the ability to accomplish so much!

It’s Now or 5 Years from Now

December 11th, 2007 at 2:43 pm

About a month ago, we asked you to call the Senate to help reform the Farm Bill. Thing is, they delayed the vote, and the amendments we want to see for the Farm Bill are just now coming up for a vote.

1. You can help out by calling your Senators using the capitol switchboard:(202) 224-3121
2. When you get through to the office, ask them to support the Lugar-Lautenberg Farm Ranch Equity Stewardship and Health (FRESH) Amendment and Grassley-Dorgan Payment Limits Amendment. You can use these talking points to help you with your call.
3. Then, when you are done, report your phone calls here.

Our beef with the Farm Bill as it stands is that millions of dollars of subsidies go to big-business farms (small farmers get some too). These subsidies help the big farms sell their crops below cost. The result is that small farmers here and around the world simply can’t compete.

The Lugar-Lautenbern and Grassley-Dorgan amendments both help fight poverty by putting caps of the size of subsidy payments that can go to big-business farmer, and puts the savings into things like nutrition programs.

The Farm Bill only comes around for review and renewal every 5 years, so this is our last chance for a good while to fix this thing. I Hope that you find a moment during a study break to pick up the phone and make a couple of quick calls to your Senators.

UPDATE:  Lugar-Lautenberg just failed 37 Yea – 58 Nay.  focus your calls on the Grassley Dorgan amendment.

Pho-ho-hoto of the Week

December 10th, 2007 at 2:52 pm

 We’re not sending out weekly OCC updates and actions these days (figure that you have enough going on with finals and the holidays), but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t still doing things like photo of the week.  There were some fun ones this last week, but the clear winner has to be University of Missouri’s picture with Santa in a ONE Mizzou shirt.

Runners up include the Sarcred Heart University women’s hockey team:

And Boston University’s collection of ONE Faces:

What’s an ROA Part IV: Steve

December 10th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

We start this week’s “What’s an ROA” series with Steve, a long time volunteer, and now gung-ho ROA.

Hi, my name is Steve White and I’m the ROA for Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. I go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA but I live within a mile or two or Fenway so it’s basically in Boston. I’m a freshman so I haven’t committed to a major yet but I’m learning towards Economics and with a minor in Math and plan to work in development economics or epidemiology later in life.

I was born in a small town in central Florida, and lived in nearby Spring Hill, mostly a mix of Wal-Marts, churches, and old people, for most of my life. My parents taught me to respect life and consider other people when I voted. When there was a big election while I a kid, my mom said “this candidate is for the poor, and the other is for the rich.” I’ve been supporting the candidates who have plans to deal with poverty ever since (there have not been many until this year, thanks to ONE), and joined the ONE campaign around the time it was started and have been volunteering for over a year.

I spend most of my time procrastinating, reading articles on health and poverty, and trying to keep up with the election. I love to read statistics, starting as a kid memorizing the numbers on football cards and now in college reading polling data. A friend and I made a pact that one day we were going to run for president for a week if we could raise enough money to do it. Besides ending poverty, homelessness, enormous mortality from preventable disease, and a few other horrible things in this world, that is my dream.

Living History

December 7th, 2007 at 6:08 pm

A number of candidates recently went On the Record with ONE yesterday. It’s been a long time since influential politicians were talking seriously about development.

When one of these candidates becomes the next president and enters office it will mark the 60th anniversary of President Truman’s inaugural address which marked the beginning of foreign aid. In it, Truman outlined a bold vision for future prosperity for all in a way that would be hard to imagine today in a country highly skeptical of politicians after the scandals of Watergate, Whitewater and the Downing Street memo.

Yet ONE is uniting Americans again–from the left, right and center, which has the promise of again bringing people-centric politics back to Washington.

A brief excerpt from his address:

“More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas.

For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.

The material resources which we can afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible.[. . .]

Only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people.”

The full text of the speech is available here.

The Virus to Counteract the Virus

December 6th, 2007 at 1:12 am

This one is dedicated to Weldon! Actually more or less- I finally got an organization on campus to partner with me on Drexel’s campus – the American Medical Student Association. It’s really hard to table much less get an event going on campus without being a registered student organization. But we got around to doing it which is really exciting and very encouraging to even me. Around Philadelphia I got people from different schools to wear the WorldVision- Acting on AIDS orange t-shirts, primarily my own: Drexel. The statistic is that 1 in 20 kids in Sub-Saharan Africa are orphans because of AIDS. To leave it at that would be an understatement because its these kids that are less likely to be educated, nourished but more likely to become depressed, be abused and exploited. The statistics themselves on these facts are staggering! Children who have lost their parents are twice as likely to drop out of school than those whose parents are living. Households affected by HIV/AIDS in some contexts have a drop in food consumption up to about 40%. In Zambia orphaned children are more likely than non-orphans (23.1% to 15.7%) to engage in risky sexual behavior. Children in countries with unstable governments can be turned into child soldiers, and families who don’t have enough can sell their children to brothels in places like Cambodia’s “Street of Little Flowers.” It’s all too disturbing and all too real.But these are just statistics. What Acting on AIDS thought to do was turn an otherwise cold statistic of 1 in 20 into a visual representation by having as many people on their campuses wearing these  shirts, infecting their campuses one by one with the truth in bright orange shirts in an effort to get kids to say – “Wow…I didn’t realize it would be that many.” It definitely provoked questions on my campus and when explained you could see the changes in people’s faces. It made the evidence of AIDS in our world just a little closer and a little more real which is really all we wanted to do.It also motivated a bunch of students to check out a station in our theater’s lobby where you could call up Presidential candidates about their World AIDS issues and the reauthorization of PEPFAR for $50 billion dollars, an improved method of teaching by sticking to ABC as opposed to A by itself (Abstinence, Being Faithful and using a condom) and $8 billion of that $50 billion in going to Health aid workers in Africa. It was pretty successful and we did get a bunch of people to support the cause and sign the declaration. We also got a bunch of people to promise to check out this site, as well as e-mail addresses! So, definitely a testament to the fact that even in urban cities like Philadelphia, where problems like poverty and AIDS are rampant- people still need to know!