Help Us Help Ourselves

Thanks to Feministe for the reminder:

Feministe will be hosting the next Help Us Help Ourselves round-up on March 1st. The project is explained here. Submit your links on this site, either by posting a comment or a track-back to this post. Past examples are here. I will be posting my submission shortly.

Help Us Help Ourselves is a collaborative wiki by women that pools essential practical knowledge on how to negotiate and survive the pitfalls of the poverty and exclusion that so many of us and our children find ourselves in at some time in our lives. Things like:

  • how to get financial aid (think traditional and non-traditional students here)
    how to scrape up money quickly when you’re in a bind
    how to get your money’s worth when your $800 car breaks down
    hell, how to fix X, Y, and Z on your car
    what to expect when you find yourself in a custody battle
    how to find a lawyer, and how to find a good lawyer
    what to bring and what to expect when you sign up for HUD housing or any other sort of public assistance
    how to find healthcare when you don’t have insurance
    how to get a small business off of the ground
    tested, effective home remedies
    cheap (and I mean cheap) recipes that still taste good
    tips for thrift store shopping
    things you can do with your kids that don’t cost anything
    how to get a loan
    how to get a wheelchair for free
    how to budget your money
    how to leave an abusive relationship
    how to entertain some friends without breaking the bank
    how to save on your utility bills
    how to start a babysitting co-op
  • It’s mostly US based and thus gets a bit precious at times but that’s the nature of wikis anyway; however much of the info and advice is truly useful and transcends national boundaries and the more we contribute the more comprehensive and inclusive it’ll become.

    Let’s Talk About Drugs For A Bit.

    All this past week there has been a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the media and leftish politics over a number of possibly drug-related shootings of young black men in South London and other working class areas around the country.

    There’s been reams of analysis trying to work out the reasons why those dreadful kids act the way they do, as though these young people were some isolated tribe, completely disconnected from some mythical, largely white, largely comfortable middle England – an innercity, urban abberation, the scary Other, a phenomenon to be examined in the mode of a colonial administrator reporting the discovery of a band of previously unknown New Guinean headhunters.

    The Daily Mail:

    The fact is that no one in the police wants to talk about gang warfare in South London, because the last thing senior officers want is to give credibility to this breed of savage young men who are capable of horrific violence unfettered by the most basic concepts of morality.

    Not once have I seen anyone in the mainstream media or politics make any connection between these murders and theirs and their friends’ own recreational drug use. No, it’s just another youthful indiscretion, if indeed if it ever stopped.

    As the Telegraph’s Sam Leith pointed out, “drugs have lost their toxicity as a political issue” because the generation for whom their use is normal now fills the corridors of power. A simple test is to ask what you’d like to know about your boss. Told that prostitutes visited his home, as the News of the World alleged against the Duke of Westminster, you would be all ears. Would you be interested to learn he had taken a couple of spliffs at school? Not very, I should think.

    Drug use is the big tacit unspoken in British politics and the Labour Party and its hangers-on are the biggest hypocrites of all on the subject. So Cuddly Cameron smoked a spliff at Eton aged 15? Well, woop-de-doo-bloody-doo.

    Of more concern to me is how the spliff got to him, and who was hurt or banged up as collateral damage for his teenage half hour of posh herbal euphoria.

    The same goes for New Labour: you should’ve seen some of the Labour party notables I’ve seen toking up in the eighties and nineties, thinking they were in safe company, or the local councillors loved up on ecstasy and lemon Hooch on a girls’ night out. That’s not to mention drink, cocaine and legally prescribed medication; I strongly suspect that at least half the government, national and local, is chemically affected in some way or another at any given time.

    And what about those nice, middle-class journos and civil servants and bank workers with their weekend hits of charlie or whizz, or the poppers that spice up their nice middle-class sex lives? My own son has been approached at clubs (because he is black, duh) by a probation officer (and now former friend of mine) and several criminal lawyers of my acquaintance looking to buy dope. That tells you what you need to know about the integrity of the justice system.

    Do these people ever give a thought as to where their little indulgences come from as they buy their teenth or a tab from their friendly local hipster round the corner? I doubt that very much. In fact the very next day they’ll be in committee or on telly or in the House or in the columns of the Grauniad or The Times, pontificating about the dreadful moral laxity of the young.

    Being such hypocrites on the subject of their own drug use it ill behoves them to be so draconian on youth, drugs and crime policy.

    In partaking of American War On Drugs and Zero Tolerance rhetoric and practice the Blair government, with typically blustering incompetence, has driven the youth prison population up, criminalised a generation, and pushed drug criminality and violence down the age scale, as what were tweenie runners trying to supplement their (often addicted themselves)parents’ measly unemployment benefit with the crumbs from the only local growth industry now find the field clear for the expression of their wildest, pubescent, PS2 and MTV-fuelled fantasies of gangsterdom and Respect.

    All the government current policy has done is to temporarily take out a layer of competition in dealers : it’s done nothing about the growing demand for recreational drugs. Those hooked on crack or heroin (or now, crystal meth) are hardly going to say “Oh damn, you took the big boys out of circulation, I’d better give up drugs then”. Where the demand is comes the supply.

    The teenagers shooting each other in South London for market share are just, as they’ve been taught by ten years of neoliberal economics and music videos, practicing capitalism in its purest form. But they are being framed by the media and government as savage, feral, a race apart.

    The profit from trade in drugs, like that in arms or torture equipment is a major driver of the UK’s intangible economy. Wherever the money comes from and no matter how tainted, one whizz around the City of London carousel or a churn in the property market and it’s squeaky clean again and ready to be invested elsewhere. But at the bottom, no matter how squeaky clean the money is, no matter how smart the suits or politically connected the players at the top are, are violence and greed and poverty and despair and mothers mourning dead children.

    With the obsolescence and collapse of its manufacturing base Britain is increasingly reliant on crucial invisible earnings, the skim off the top of that immense money market in the City of London. Gordon Brown’s economic plans are dependent on it; ever larger swathes of the country’s population make their livings servicing the financial machinery that keeps those earnings flowing, and those who are not so fortunate as to have their livelihoods dependent on the whim of an overpaid, overbonused city whizzkid are, of course, just lazy ingrates who should show a little entrepreneurial spirit. So they do, emulating their ‘betters’ in the most immediate and most lucrative way possible.

    You’d think a government that admires the naked aggression of invading Iraq to cut out the middleman supplying their own addiction would admire the naked opportunism and entrepreneurship that the teenagers of South London demonstrate, wouldn’t you? New Labour has been in power for ten years now and they’re just doing it the New Labour way, See a market – take it, with guns if necessary.

    I doubt there’s a family in the country that hasn’t been affected in some way by drugs and the toxic criminality and poverty that accompanies it. Young people from a working-class background, especially young black people, who manage to escape that life seem to be in a dwindling minority. It’s like watching a whole generation slide down the drain and no-one giving a damn.

    Figures released by the charity today, based on statistics compiled by the Council of Europe, show that England and Wales has the highest number of young adults in prison in western Europe.

    They’re just chavs, after all. Who cares? The reductionist conservative view would be that it is Darwinism in action. But every drug casualty, every life nipped in the bud, has a parents, siblings, friends, – all are affected and the ripples spread far and wide.

    Having had close experience with the horrible effects of addiction and drug violence in my own close family I’m no naive idealist, but I seriously believe that the only possible way to stop this poisonous stew of hypocrisy, class and race prejudice cascading even further down the generations is to decriminalise and regulate the supply of drugs entirely. Human history has shown that if there’s a mind-altering substance available to them mammals will try it. Even cats and elephants enjoy getting high so why not just acknowledge that?

    The Blair government’s is a hypocritical, evangelical Christian-driven drugs policy that emphasises punishing individual ‘sin’ whilst at the same time practicing that very ‘sin’ in private and encouraging profiteering from it.

    It and the British media fail to acknowledge the central role that they themselves play in the drugs trade. Every time you smoke a spliff in Britain, if it’s not home-griown then you have contributed to the degradation of a generation too. Hyperbolic yes, but until we all acknowledge that its our own personal roles in the international movement of drugs and capital that’s fueling these teenage bedroom executions we can’t have any hope of a sensible treatment-based drugs and crime policy that could pull this generation back from the brink. It’s way past time for a bit of honesty from everyone involved.

    Hey, Rachel Moran! Ever Heard of Rehab?

    Spoilt Brat

    Tampa Bay’s very own spoiltbratblogger Rachel Moran once again amply demonstrates her qualifications for a spell with the nice people at the local ‘residential spa’.

    As Lindsay at Majikthise very helpfully points out Moran is writing about the homeless again and, as the lady herself once saw fit to grace us with her exalted presence and we continue to take a proprietary interest, I popped over to take a look.

    I do wish I hadn’t.

    hey, rick baker! ever heard of a SHELTER?!

    Hooooray, guess what I did tonight? Kicked it with a homeless dude, of course, ’cause, you know, you made such a point of it.

    I walked out of the Garden, where Sam The Pickles was playing the deep drum-n-bass, makin’, like, two pretty girls shake their ass for fun, before I hit the Brandy’s Liquor Lounge for the real Bon Jovi throwdown, courtesy of The Movie.

    What is it with this woman? She seems to think she’s lliving in some kind of picaresque novel with herself as the heroine. She’s sleazing round bars in a provincial backwater, thinks getting drunk and/or high, tooling around in her Mercedes (‘Benz’. Oh dear.) on her Daddy’s money and talking drunken bollocks with her fellow trainee middle-aged lushes isn’t just another dull and tawdry story of a life lived in quiet desperation. Nope, she’s got to justify it to herself as some kind of transgressive, edgy, art experience, just because she’s blogging about it.

    That could work in theory: ‘Mary Sue as Patrick Bateman’ hasn’t been tried in blogging yet so far as I know, so at least she’d have novelty value. But even taking it purely as a writing exercise it doesn’t work, not with Moran’s writing it. She’s just so damned incoherent.

    I had trouble finding excerpts to feature, because for the life of me I cannot see any point where the whole rambling story hangs together. So one chunk’s as good as any other:

    The Snoop Dogg look-alike was out of earshot or had given up by this time. I don’t know. I don’t care.

    “What’s your name?” said the guy in the other Benz, in front of the cop.

    “Mercedes,” I said and drove away, safely, slowly, thinking about you, and a cop kickin’ it by my car for no reason, and a homeless man that is perfectly sufficient asking you to hand him things.

    I got a lot of flack when someone handed me things, so I stopped doing it.

    My, oh my, what a difference a year makes.

    Your challenge – buy something off a homeless person at an exorbitant rate. Don’t let the transaction take longer than it needs to.

    Now pretend you go out and see police at every corner. I know you weren’t there, because the street was empty, except for the Snoop Dogg look-alike who sold me a stoge at a dollar (a 400% markup). Pretend also that you could handle the same transaction as smoothly.

    And now tell me I wanna beat people up.

    Uh?

    I’ve really tried, but I can’t for the life of me find where that particular moral can be drawn from this story. All I can conclude is that Rachel Moran thinks the fact that she didn’t beat a homeless guy up on this particular occasion proves that she doesn’t want to beat people up. This from a former law student? It’s a good job she never graduated, she’d’ve been a liability to the profession.

    The one thing that does come across from the post is that Rachel Moran thinks this is an adequate riposte to her critics and they should shut up and butt out.

    Butt out? Oh no. She obviously wants attention, so she shouldn’t complain when she gets it.

    “The results of philanthropy are always beyond calculation.”

    If you’re looking for an in-depth informative read this morning you could do little better than not to bother with the Sundays and read yesterday’s LA Times investigative article on Bill Gates’ essentially sham philanthropy.

    It lays out in devastatingly thorough terms the way the Gates’ Foundation charitable giving is funded by billions invested in the very drug companies and energy industries whose effects in Africa his much-publicised charity spends so much on visibly treating.

    The reporters give chapter and verse on Gates Foundation investments in companies like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, happily polluting away virtually unrestricted in Nigeria, and drug manufacturer Abbott, whose lobbying of industry-friendly intellectual property rights law has priced many AIDS drugs out of the reach of the very sufferers the Foundation aspires to help.

    Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation

    By Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writers

    January 7, 2007

    Ebocha, Nigeria ? JUSTICE Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb..

    An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it “the cough.” People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    Justice squirmed in his mother’s arms. His face was beaded with sweat caused either by illness or by heat from the flames that illuminate Ebocha day and night. Ebocha means “city of lights.”

    The makeshift clinic at a church where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.

    In Ebocha, where Justice lives, Dr. Elekwachi Okey, a local physician, says hundreds of flares at oil plants in the Niger Delta have caused an epidemic of bronchitis in adults, and asthma and blurred vision in children. No definitive studies have documented the health effects, but many of the 250 toxic chemicals in the fumes and soot have long been linked to respiratory disease and cancer.

    “We’re all smokers here,” Okey said, “but not with cigarettes.”

    The oil plants in the region surrounding Ebocha find it cheaper to burn nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas each day and contribute to global warming than to sell it. They deny the flaring causes sickness. Under pressure from activists, however, Nigeria’s high court set a deadline to end flaring by May 2007. The gases would be injected back underground, or trucked and piped out for sale. But authorities expect the flares to burn for years beyond the deadline.

    The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France ? the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

    Gates’ charitable vehicles own so much stock in these companies that by socially responsible proxy voting in shareholders meetings the Foundation could have a significant effect on companies’ policies – if they chose to – which would tackle some of the health issues they champion at source. But they don’t choose to, because that would not be good for the markets or for Microsoft.

    It’s fashionable these days, (and I’m as guilty as the next blogger) to decry the major papers as festering backwaters of old media, but every now and then there are still twitches of life and good reporting gets a prominent position.

    That despite its own troubles balancing the conflicting demands of capital and news reporting, the LA Times is willing to take on Gates and Microsoft, the oil industry giants and the pharmaceuticals to show the public exactly what their respected household names are doing to the world has to be a good thing.

    Read more: Media, Politics, Development, Charities, Investment Social Responsibility, Bill Gates, Microsoft

    Taking Control Of Money

    The developed nations seem to be trudging ahead with chip and pin and contactless credit and debit card technology just as Africa is developing a new paradigm of money transfer that transcends both of these creaky and insecure technologies.

    I heard a version of this short documentary about it on the World Sevice a week or so ago, but here’s the full report, Kenya’s Mobile Revolution, from BBC2’s Newsnight.

    Completely bypassing physical banking or telephone structures and using a combination of mobile phone networks and scratchcards, people in Kenya (and abroad working elsewhere) are able to trade more securely, to transfer money worldwide and take control of their own finances and futures. This is liberating many from the tyranny of financiers and predatory middlemen.

    Africa in many ways is skipping the industrial revolution entirely and zooming right past the rest of us; we’re still in thrall to predatory lenders and outrageous bank fees, and hoping desperately that whenever we swipe our cards they’re not being cloned by some shady gang of identity thieves.

    Speaking of which, here’s one of those ‘secure’ chip and pin terminals hacked to play Tetris:

    Even given that the supposedly tamper-proof terminal had to be physically modified to do that, this video does not inspire confidence. That it can be so easily subverted should be a worry to all card-users.

    I’m not starry eyed about the Kenyan developments either though. No doubt their system will be hacked in some way eventually too, human ingenuity and the lust for money being what it is.

    Read more: Money, Economy, Banking, Development, Technology, Security, Hacks