Americans Who Tell the Truth

 

Quotes for prompts, discussion, thoughts, artistic response:

 

One in six people around the world survive on less than $1 a day.
 

Muhammad Yunus , Nobel Peace Prize winner, founder of the Grameen Bank

Author of  Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

Exerpt from Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech , Muhammad Yunus:

"By giving us this prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has given important support to the proposition that peace is inextricably linked to poverty. Poverty is a threat to peace.

Worlds income distribution gives a very telling story. 94% of the world income goes to 40% of the world population, while 60% of people live only with 6% of the world income. Half of the world population lives on two dollars a day.

The millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size.

But then came September 11 and the Iraq war, and suddenly the world became derailed from the pursuit of this dream, with the attention of the world leaders shifting from the war on poverty to the war on terrorism. Til now, over $530 billion has been spent on the war in Iraq by the USA alone.

I believe terrorism cannot be won by the military action. Terrorism must be condemned in the strongest possible language. We must stand solidly against it and find all the means to end it. We must address the root cause of terrorism to end terrorism for all time to come. I believe that putting resources into improving the lives of the poor is a better strategy than spending it on guns.

Peace should be understood in a human way, in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace, we must find ways to provide opportunities for people to live decent lives. The creation of opportunities for the majority of the peoplethe pooris at the heart of the work that we have dedicated ourselves during the past 30 years.

I became involved in the poverty issue, not as a policymaker or as a researcher. I became involved because poverty was all around me, and I could not turn away from it. In 1974, I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom, in the backdrop of a terrible famine that was raging in Bangladesh. Suddenly, I felt the emptiness of all those theories in the face of the crushing hunger and poverty.

I wanted to do something immediate to help people around me, even if it was just one human being, to get through another day with a little more ease. That brought me face to face with poor peoples struggle to find the tiniest amounts of money to support their efforts to eke out a living.

I was shocked to discover a woman in the village, borrowing less than a dollar from the money lender, on the condition that he would have the exclusive right to buy all she produces at the price that he decides. This, to me, was a way of recruiting slave labor.

I decided to make a list of the victims of the money lending in the village next door to our campus. When my list was complete, I had names of 42 victims, who borrowed a total amount of $27. I was shocked. I offered this $27 from my own pocket to get these victims out of the clutches of the money lenders.

The excitement that was created among the people by this action got me further involved in it. If I could make so many people so happy with such a tiny amount of money, why shouldnt I do more of it? Thats what I have been trying to do ever since.

The first thing I did was try to persuade the bank located in the campus to lend money to the poor. But that didnt work. They didnt agree. The bank said that the poor are not creditworthy. After all my efforts for several months, when it failed, I offered to become a guarantor for the loans to the poor.

When I gave the loans, I was stunned by the result I got. The poor paid back their loans on time, every time. But still, I kept confronting difficulties in expanding the program through the existing banks. That was when I decided to create a separate bank for the poor. I finally succeeded in doing that in 1983. I named it Grameen Bank or Village Bank.

Today, Grameen Bank gives loans to nearly 7 million poor people97% of them are womenin 73,000 villages of Bangladesh. Grameen Bank gives collateral-free income-generating loans, housing loans, student loans and micro-enterprise loans to the poor families and offers them a host of attractive savings, pension funds and insurance products for its members.

Since it introduced them in 1984, housing loans have been used to construct 640,000 houses. The legal ownership of these houses belongs to the women themselves. We focused on women, because we found giving loans to women always brought more benefits to the family.

In a cumulative way, the bank has given out a loan totaling about $6 billion. Repayment rate, 99. Grameen Bank routinely makes profit. Financially, it is self-reliant and has not taken donor money since 1995. Deposits and own resources of Grameen Bank today amount to 143 of all outstanding loans. According to Grameen Banks internal survey, 58% of our borrowers have crossed the poverty line.

Grameen Bank was born as a tiny homegrown project run with the help of several of my students, all local girls and boys. Three of these students are still with me in Grameen Bank, after all these years, as its topmost executives. They are here today to receive this honor you gave us.

This idea, which began in Jobra, a small village in Bangladesh, has spread around the world. There are now Grameen-type programs in almost every country in the world."

 

 

Have students discuss the meaning of this speech and research  further what Muhammad Yunus puts forth by way of statistics, implications and the changes that could be made for the future.

 

Ask students to discuss the decision Muhammad Yunus made as a professor of economics in relation to the poor he saw all around him. 

 

Do your students see poverty? Do they live in poverty?  What are you doing about this issue in your classroom? What are the ethical dilemmas related to the Do No Harm Discipline that Muhammad Yunus addresses very well? How does he avoid the traps of charity ? 

 

"An armed conflict  between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict. This is like a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And it ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to its deadly effects.. The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fair if it does not touch the root of all evil- human greed. "

M.K. Gandhi

 

"Sooka, who now heads South Africas Foundation for Human Rights, says that she feels that although the hearings dealt with what she described as outward manifestations of apartheid such as torture, sever ill treatment and disappearance, it left the economic system served by those abuses completely untouched  an echo of the concerns about the blindness of human rights. If she had the process to do over again, Sooka said, I would do it completely differently . I would look at the SYSTMES of apartheid- I would look at the questions of land.. the mining industry.. I would devote only one hearing to torture because I think when you focus on torture and you dont look at what it was serving, thats when you focus on torture and you don t look at what it was serving, thats when you start to do a revision of the real history."

 

From The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

 

Daniel Bornstein

A related website:

howtochangetheworld.org

An introduction to the concept of social entrapaneurship which all students should be introduced to as an alternative to traditional work and business initiatives. A good resource in understanding unconventional ways to look at distribution of resources and wealth done one person , one business owner at a time. 

 

Adbusters-  magazine

 

Adbusters.org

Has an excellent kit for students related to media, consumerism and a website that contains excellent action steps related to consumerism, fair trade and other economic justice issues. Provides a very unique alternative look at what most students are fairly desensitized to as a result of over exposure to the media.

 

A great resource to understand the role industry, corporations and governments play in crisis situations such as Hurricane Katrina and natural disasters, Sept 11, 2001 in the USA and other political disasters. Incredible resource for understanding the deeper complexities of the human psyche and economic wealth and power. 

Should be required reading for all students in university or high school level.

 

Naomi Klein

Naomiklein.org

A website that provides information related to the labor practices of corporations as they relate to social justice issues and includes links for further study. Additionally, includes articles and work by Naomi Klein on innumerable subjects related to economic injustice.

Teachers might want to make use of the resource on the site of video as well for the classroom or individual study.

 

On this website, use The Shock Doctrine Short Film  can be used to introduce the concept of economic violence that Naomi Klein calls The Schock Doctrine. It is an excellent summary and can be used to provide discussion and further research.

 

Films by Michael Moore

 

Excellent portrayal of this very essential question for students that lies at the heart of economic violence on all levels.

 

 

When working with students in a study of economic violence, the issue of debt and developing countries should be looked at carefully. A good resource for this are the books written by Noreena Hertz. 

The following was written by Desmond Tutu about debt relief and Dr. Hertzs books.

 

"With grand announcements, recycled promises, and much hype about debt relief by the leaders of the world's rich creditor countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank since 1999, many of us can be forgiven for believing that the debt crisis of the world's poor countries is over. Far from it.The debt trap remains a major reason why poor countries remain poor and are unable to make progress towards reaching the millennium development goals of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty. In a shameful, persistent, and systemic global injustice, debt servicing continues to drain resources away from the poor to the rich of the world on a grand scale.Noreena Hertz's book I.O.U. is a new clarion call for the cancellation of the odious and unpayable debt of under-developed countries. It exposes the reasons why countries go into debt in the first place: a story all too often of geopolitical interests, corporate agendas, and multilateral machinations, with no regard given to how and why the loans came about, how they were spent, and by whom.Dr Hertz explains with remarkable clarity why none of us can afford to ignore the problem or pretend that it is resolved. She puts forward clear recommendations that can and must be taken to redress its legacy. As she makes clear, debt cancellation is not a voluntary act of mercy, charity, or forgiveness, but a demand of justice.I.O.U. should not go unnoticed. Its message must reach the highest corridors of power and the masses of the marginalized poor who daily carry the burden of the debt through joblessness, increasing user fees for basic services, hunger, malnutrition, and inadequate access to health care and education.When the truth is told about international debt, then we can begin to overcome the scandalous debt-slavery of the world's poor."

 

 

"I believe that as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil."

Robert F.Kennedy, 

 

"What may be wealth to an individual may not be wealth to a community. "  Henry George

 

"I think that our position as peace laureates is that, as I have explainedand this is particularly relevant to me as a person who connects peace, good governance, and the right management of resourcesis that our advocacy has always been that for us to be able to enjoy peace, it is very important for us to recognize the rights of people to manage their resources, the rights of people to be given an opportunity to say what they would like to do with their resources, the principle of equity to be practiced, especially by those who have the power to say no, but who are moved or who are guided by the principle of fairness and justice.And it is in that context that we were appealing to the US government to practice justice and fairness and to allow for inclusivity as they try to bring peace to that war-torn country and to recognize that until people feel that they are included, people feel that they are not being excluded, whether people feel that their resources are being used for the benefit of their people, that they are not being stripped of their resources, that that moving in that direction is a better way of seeking peace, because as long as people feel like theyre being exploited, that theyre being denied access to their resources, then, of course, they will react, and sometimes they react in a way that threatens peace and security, not only where they are, but indeed in the whole world. We in Africa have been very, very keen on the United States of America being sensitive to the issues of Africa. Especially, we have raised the issue of debt for many years. We have also raised the issue of the protection of our environment, and especially the protection of the Congo forest. Im particularly keen on this forest, because its not only important to Africa, but also important to the world with respect to climate change. And I know that the United States government is interested in this forest, as well as in the Amazon and other forests in Southeast Asia. And I would wish, and especially with respect to climate change, that America would provide the leadership that is needed and that she would not be the one falling behind, because her attitude towards climate change and towards what we can do to mitigate the impact, the negative impact, of climate change, especially in Africa, is very important."

 

Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Winner,  Author, Kenyan Politician 

We recommend these projects/activities in lieu of discussion. Students are often well versed on poverty issues but are not as familiar with the bigger picture of inequity and its relationship to other social justice concerns. This project offers them a very concrete way to research and create action steps. Further, it serves to give them accurate and honest information.

 

Developed at Golden Tree Middle School- 2001

By Scott Person 

Students research the following items in the world in terms of their availability, numbers, usage,etc. Additonally, students must also report on agencies and resources that are involved in problem-solving related to the inequities. The concept of social entrapaneurship can be introduced here through the biographies and other resources in this guide.

 

Clean water

Food

Land

Housing

Warmth/ Comfort

Safety 

Electricity

Health care

Employment- average rate of income/pay

Access to financial assistance/support

Access to education

 

For younger students:

First, ask students to examine these areas in their own neighborhood communities, city and state. As students are older, this research should be broadened to include the United States and the North American continent.

 

For older students:

Each country in the world is to be examined. Therefore it is best to divide students into groups or pairs depending on class size.Each pair/group is to be responsible for a continent. Allocate numbers of students based upon size, scope and number of countries on the continent. When results are complete, students should report their findings. Charts should be placed upon the wall so that a visual representation can be made. Students then combine findings in a binder, notebook, poster, power point or other presentation of the state of the world.

This exercise is a powerful way for students to being to understand the economic inequities that exist not only in terms of finances but also, resources and usage.

It will be interesting then for students to create mental overlays ( or physical ones if the teacher has time and materials) related to where war, violent conflict, hate violence also exist . We strongly recommend that students be provided with opportunities to create a presentation that can be made repeatedly in a public forum. Additionally, students can write op-ed letters to local news, create flyers and other ways to educate their communities about their findings. 

 

Project II:

Developed at Golden Tree Middle School-2001

Michele Hemenway

 

Begin the project by discussing and researching uses of money. 

Be sure to include:

 

The World Bank

Nobel Peace Prize winners work

Banks

Philanthropy

Origins of money

 

Start by having students interview business members in the community about their business practices and views on the uses of money.

Ask students to create their own business and make it a fair trade, fair wage,fair to the environment company.  Use a standard business plan template to create the company. These are easily accessed on Word Document computer programs.

Have students brainstorm a list of ethical business standards as their guide for creating the businesses. 

Have students research local businesses that claim to operate by fair trade standards. 

If there is time and resources, have students create, operate and maintain a business over a school year abiding by the business practice standards.

Create  a list of questions that students can ask themselves before buying a product or service that will be useful when making purchases.

 

Project III

 

                                A Golden Tree Middle School Project

                Developed by Eric Bookstrom and Michele Hemenway, 2002

 

The quote on poverty indicates that some people live in our world on as little as a dollar a day. This is something we find unimaginable. But to bring students close to it, let them create a budget for themselves over a three-twelve month period. They will have to exist on minimum wage during this time. Have students actually grocery shop, clothes shop and so forth on this budget. If you can go on a field trip, take students to your local thrift or goodwill store to buy their furniture,etc. Students can keep a journal of this experience, writing in it nightly. They can record their purchases as they go along. With family support, it is possible that a family could actually take on this project realistically. This has been done with very enlightening results for everyone involved.  It is helpful to add the following circumstances to the project to advance the scope of the economic justice issues:

 

Assign one or two students, depending on class size to add this to their  minimum wage portfolio:

 

1. Single parent

2. An individual with a prison record

3. An immigrant with little English

4. A couple raising a family on two minimum wage incomes

5. Homeless individual or family

 

 

 

 One of the greatest examples of economic injustice that exists is the enslavement of Africans under the name of slave trade. By its very name it defines itself as being in the business of trading human beings. And thus, a slave was treated as piece of property and listed as such in document after document.  An honest and accurate study of slavery is of greatest importance to an understanding of issues still haunting our country today. It is the biggest missing piece of all that has come before in the area of racism and relationships in the United States of America.

 

The understanding most students have of slavery and its origins in practice omits the economic basis of the practice and therefore, the most important aspect of the story.

If we do not present students with this comprehensive picture, we oversimplify the condition to the point where it is at best, romanticized or at worst, dismissed as irrelevant to current circumstances. Our own countrys beginnings are founded in redefining a man for purposes of the Declaration of Independence. The founders of our country were willing to overlook slavery in its proclamation of independence, leaving it for others in the future. Thomas Jefferson , the author of the declaration, wrote other documents in which he shared that the African slaves did not qualify as human. In order to maintain a system of free labor that was necessary economically for the states, racial inequity was established through science and this problem continues to permeate the lives of children today. 

 

   Stories of the children and grandchildren of slaves abound. We celebrate their resurrected lives , as if we had nothing left to do now.  After all, slavery was abolished, civil rights granted and equal opportunity, affirmative action and other instruments of racial equality now exist.  We share the stories of slaves who overcame and during the civil rights movement, people of color who  rose up.  But we do not acknowledge the lack of public legal hearings of reconciliation and reimbursement.  Nor do we note the subsequent economic injustices such as Reconstruction, the housing market, civil rights, all deliberate speed and most notably, the case of the Jena Six. With the election of Barack Obama, these issues have resurfaced in some of their most dangerous forms.

 

Currently, we can even see African Americans reunited and reconciling with those white families who owned their ancestors. We now have the technology for African Americans to trace their roots , sometimes as far back as where their family members were stolen or sold. But there is still little mention of the role of economics. There is virtually no mention of the wealth of our country built upon the backs of the slaves. The injustice is endless, too much to recall , to rehabilitate and so we stubbornly resist any attempts to make it right. 

 

   The question of "forty acres and a mule," the question of who continues to exploit and who benefits, must be fully studied for our young people to understand the depth of injustice and resentment that exists in our culture. While meetings of contrition and forgiveness are well intentioned and are a step in a better direction, the acknowledgement of the need for reparation is lacking. The cycle of relationship to those individuals in Africa willing to sell their own people to those willing to purchase a human being is one worthy of intense study. Both roles require diligence in our own economy: the traders, the sellers, the consumers. Who are they, what are they selling us and who profits?

 

It might be useful for students to write about or discuss, represent artisitically their beliefts and thoughts about slavery. And very important, do they believe we are still impacted by this and do they believe that slavery in other forms, still exists?

 

In studying slavery and its economic implications, the following resources will be useful:

 

 

 African American Lives, I & II- 

 

A PBS series that includes an extensive curriculum for use by teachers. Watching this series will bring the most important and insightful portrayal of the deeply painful, complex and unique circumstances slavery imparted. Personalizing each familys story will allow students to move past a general and sentimental view of  slavery and understand the disgraceful implications. Students can begin to understand how these stories play a role in what is happening to us now. Essential viewing in order to grasp the nature of the disgrace of slavery.

 

 

 

A film that documents the role of William Wilberforce and his lifes devotion to abolishing the slave trade in Great Britian.The films website includes an excellent in-depth curriculum. Essential viewing for helping students understand the business of slave trade and the grim conditions of the slave ships, practices and the ability of human beings to dehumanize one another. Students can be led to confront where and how these dehumanizing practices in business still exist today. Seen in conjunction with the film, Trade ( teachers should view first and use excerpts only of this film) students can understand the continued practice of  purchasing human beings. There is an accompanying website called :

 

 

 

A website that emerged as a response to the film Amazing Grace and the observance of the anniversary of the abolishment of the slave trade in Great Britian. Student led, the site engages young people in the continued efforts of William Wilberforce and the abolishment of slave trade. Excellent resource! 

 

 

Another good film to share the life of this extraordinary individual and someone whose biography should be told to all our children.

 

A PBS film that documents the life of Abdul Rahman, a Muslim prince sold into slavery from Africa. He was imprisoned in Mississippi for forty years and eventually was able to return to Africa. The film is based upon a book that can also be used. 

Great story to help students further their understanding of the complex nature of slavery and helps dispel the mythology that surrounds the nature of the Africans who were sold.

Highly recommended.

 

 

A Peoples History of the United States   Howard Zinn

 

Adapted by Rebecca Stefoff

 

Both offer honest accounts of slavery and the history of our country that followed as a result of the choice to participate in the slave trade and use Africans to build our country and make use of its resources. Essential reading and study if students are to be taught the economic implications of slavery and trade.

 

 

All stories of the Underground Railroad which are numerous.

 

By Karolyn Smardz Frost

 

The story of Thornton Blackburn , a slave residing in Kentucky and his beloved Lucie. The book is best read by the teacher/youth worker and the story shared with middle school students, unless they are avid and able readers. High school students can manage the text easily. This study would make a great report assignment or reenactment in the form of a play or dance/ music retelling.