Here at CounterPunch we get the querries from you scores of times a month, tell us where the good groups are. You want who's worth supporting. And so now, in our final issue of the year, just in time for you to make tax-deductible contributions that could truly work wonders, we give you some groups we know are doing fine things. As always, our search for these groups has told us that there's never a dearth of capable organizers fired with high ideals, never a national horizon that doesn't blaze forth victories great and small.
The Southern Center for Human Rights, an anti-death penalty group, performs heroic feats on a budget of about $650,000 per year. That money supports a staff of 16, including nine attorneys, none that is paid more than $25,000 per year. In 1998, the Center saved the lives of a number of people facing the death penalty, including that of Floyd Hill, who was sentenced to death in Cobb County, Georgia in 1981 for allegedly killing a police officer. Hill has always maintained his innocence and there were no direct witnesses to the crime. Lawyers for the Center finally won a new trial for Hill in March when the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the district attorney who prosecuted the case, Tom Charron, had flouted the trial judge's repeated warnings to not refer to Hill's refusal to talk to police before seeing an attorney. (The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that silence at the time of arrest cannot be used against a defendant during trial.). Another big victory came with a Center lawsuit that won compensation for prisoners abused by guards in Georgia. The suit involved several raids made on state prisons during which unresisting and restrained inmates were savagely beaten by guards ("Blood went up the wall," one guard, not involved in the beatings, testified. "Blood went all over the wall, all over the inmateI heard a sickening cracking sound.) Damages won by the Center -- $283,000 - are the largest ever paid by the Georgia Department of Corrections. In a case that has yet to be decided, the Center also filed suit last year against Alabama's Loxley Community Work Center over its practice of incarcerating up to 11 prisoners in an 8 x 10 "holding cell" for stretches of several weeks. The cell has no windows or ventilation system and inmates' uniforms, sheets and mattresses are not cleaned, even after covered with dirt and sweat. A prisoner kept in the cell for one week had to be rushed to the hospital with severe dehydration.
Southern Center for Human Rights,
83 Poplar Street NW,
Atlanta, Georgia,
30303, 404-688-1202
Up in Fairbanks, Alaska a small environmental group is fighting one of the biggest battles of the decade: the move to open the vast and untrammeled US National Petroleum Reserve to oil drilling. The Northern Alaska Environmental Center maintains a small staff and a hardy corps of volunteers, ranging from trappers and back-to-the-land types to Inuits, botanists and former oil pipeline workers. The challenge ahead of them is formidible. Arco, Exxon, Chevron and British Petroleum have steamrolled the Clinton administration into giving the green light for the oil giants to big exploration in the heart of the 24-million acre reserve. Through this process, the Northern Alaska Center has been nearly alone on the frontlines, attacking the Administration's cowardly capitulation to big oil. "The Clinton Administration is operating in a vacuum," Sylvia Ward tell us. "They have no energy policy, except to extract whatever's left in the ground. It makes all the high-minded talk about global warming ring hollow as a spent oil drum." Many of the national environmental groups have failed to put any energy into the fight to save the largest swath of undeveloped land in North America. Why? Because they are anticipating a trade-off. By giving the NPR-A to Arco, they feel they can secure protection for the smaller, but more high-profile Arctic Wildlife Reserve. But the Northern Alaska Center realizes that the oil companies want it all and the place to stop them is at the banks of the Colville River in the NPR-A. The next year will determine the fate of this irreplaceable landscape.
Northern Alaska Environmental Center
218 Driveway Street
Fairbanks, Alaska 99701-2806
Tel: (907) 452-5021
http://www.mosquitonet.com/~naec
Jobs with Justice works with labor, community and religious groups to organize campaigns for workers rights. Fred Azcarate at the group's office in Washington, DC tells us that 1998 was a good year, marked by local victories around the country. In Oregon, the County Council of Multnomah (which includes Portland) passed a living wage ordinance that requires companies that contract with the county to pay their workers at least $8.65 (if they offer benefits as well the companies can pay slightly less). In Washington state, JwJ helped mobilize support for an initiative that ensures that the minimum wage is indexed to inflation. Voters approved the initiative handily in November. JwJ also helped organize support for nationwide bargaining campaigns that resulted in major contract gains for hundreds of thousands of workers employed by US West, Bell Atlantic and Southwestern Bell. In Massachusetts, JwJ helped workers for the first time win union recognition from two big - and violently anti-union - nursing home companies, Sun Health Systems and Genesis.
Jobs With Justice,
501 3rd Street NW, Washington, DC 20001,
202-434-1106
It's been nearly two and a half years since the San Jose Mercury News published Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series, which exposed the CIA's complicity in Contra drug running and its role in the rise of the California crack cocaine trade. Webb has been run out of the journalism business and his story has been smeared by mainstream press, but the evidence against the CIA continues to mount. Three internal government reviews, including two by the agency's own Inspector General Fred Hitz, have backed up Webb's central thesis and raised even more troubling questions about the US government's abetting of drug trafficking and other criminal enterprises by its hand-picked troops during the war against Nicaragua. The story could have died, when Webb was forced out. But a coalition of groups has kept the pressure up, hounding the Agency and media. One of the leaders of this campaign is the Citizens' Truth Commission, sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies. The project is run by Martha Honey and Sanho Tree. "We are convening a panel of experts take testimony in Los Angeles and Baltimore on whose profiting and whose paying the price for the war on drugs," Martha Honey tells us. "Our intent is to map the drug and money laundering networks in these cities and the ties of government officials and police the police to the drug trade. There are two sides to the issue: the moving of drugs and the profiting from war on drugs." Hearings will be held in Los Angeles in March and in Baltimore later in the year. Honey said the Commission will also work with journalists to keep the story alive and to explore how the press failed this story in the past. "It's important to link up journalists in Latin America with US reporters," Honey says. "Here ere you might lose your job by reporting honestly on this story, but in many Latin American countries you might lose your life." Honey says the project needs voluteers
Citizens Truth Commission
c/o Institute for Policy Studies
733 15th Street NW Suite 1020
Wasington, DC 20005
202 234-9382 ext. 266
email: stree@igc.org
Essential Information, a group founded by Ralph Nader and that fights for corporate accountability, also notched up some impressive wins this year. Near the top of the list, says Rob Weissman, was Essential's successful effort (in coalition with a number of other groups) to block a move that would have given tobacco companies immunity from civil law suits. Weissman also points to a lobbying campaign by Essential that led the World Bank to review its support for siting medical waste incinerators in the Third World. Such incinerators account for one-half of all dioxin production in the North, and they are being phased out or heavily regulated. Hence, incinerator companies have begun dumping new facilities in the South, with the help, until now, of the World Bank and other international organizations. Thanks to Essential's lobbying campaign, which has been backed by Third World countries such as Haiti, Mozambique and South Africa, the Bank has agreed to rethink its policy. Weissman also pointed to two other victories that Essential can take some credit for: the federal government's surprising decision to pursue an anti-trust case against Microsoft and the Clinton administration's issuing of an executive order last September that commits the federal government to buying recycled paper. Because the government is the biggest single paper purchaser - the feds buy 19 billion sheets per year - the decision will have a major impact.
Essential Information,
PO Box 19405,
Washington, DC 20036,
202-387-8030
Though it can't take credit for the event, the fall of Indonesian dictator made 1998 an especially sweet year for the East Timor Action Network. The Network, which fights for self-determination for East Timor - which was invaded by Indonesia, with US backing, in 1975 -- can take more direct credit for some important victories in Washington. In October, the House and Senate passed a law that bans the use of US-supplied weapons in East Timor and forbids the Pentagon from offering International Military Education Training to the Indonesian armed forces. Lynn Fredriksson, who works out of ETAN's DC office, says the bill's passage "could be the most support any Congress has shown for rights of East Timorese" since the invasion. A few months earlier, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution urging the Clinton administration to "support an internationally supervised referendum on self-determination". Even the State Department has begun to timidly offer support for the Timorese. It now has an official position - though an unpublicized one - calling for the release of jailed resistance leader Xanana Gusmao and other political prisoners.
East Timor Action Network,
PO Box 1182,
White Plains, NY 10602,
202-544-6911.
Tim Shasta of the DC-based Center for Community Change, which helps local groups in low-income communities organize campaigns for housing, jobs and other critical issues, says 1998 has been "a year in which things started to reverse themselves. There's a lot of energetic work going on around the country, a lot of life out there." Saasta says an especially important win this year was buried in the Transportation bill, which set aside $750 million that is to be used to improve public transportation in poor neighborhoods. The bill also gives community groups an unprecedented role in helping develop plans for using all federal transportation money. The Center also helped a local group in Los Angeles, which succeeded in forcing contractors on a major freeway project set aside millions of dollars to train and hire low-income workers. The Center also helped win a number of victories in attempting to crack down on insurance redlining against poor neighborhoods. In one case, a jury in Richmond, Virginia ordered Nationwide Insurance Company to pay more than $100 million in damages to a local housing group which charged it with refusing to sell homeowner policies to black residents.
Center for Community Change,
1000 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20007
202-342-0567
For the past five years, Nike, one of the world's most profitable companies, has been relentlessly hounded by a fierce outfit called Press for Change, a group that fights for workers' rights around the world. Press for Change has exposed Nike's brutal labor practices in its Asian factories. It has brought attention to the shoe-makers use of child labor, forced overtime, hazardous working conditions and sub-living wage payscales. They have also revealed the cozy ties the company cultivated with the Suharto regime in Indonesia. Working closely with other first-rate groups such as UNITE and Global Exchange, Press for Change has brought Nike and its egomaniacal president Phil Knight nearly to its knees. Nike's bottom line has suffered its worst losses in the company's history and Knight himself has been forced to make one concession after another. Many of Nike's fixes have been hollow and the press has often picked up on this because Press for Change's director Jeff Ballinger has been able to quickly point out the weak spots, such as the recent Nike-brokered "no sweat" labelling scam. The pummelling of Nike is one of the great triumphs of the year and no group played a greater role in the battle than Press for Change.
Press for Change
E-502
75 Cambridge Parkway
Cambridge, MA 02142
(617) 496-0918
When other organizers sank down in their foxholes after Chiquita hit the Enquirer with a law suit and brought charges against its star reporter Mike Gallagher, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs held firm. They kept the story available to the public on its website and explained to any one who would listen that Gallegher's reporting had exposed for all to see the heinous behavior of a company that has caused untold misery across Latin America. For years the Council has also kept of the pressure on General Augusto Pinochet, demanding that the Chilean butcher be brought to justice for his bloody crimes. When organizations like Freedom House, and its director Adrian Karatnycky, took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal decrying the move to extradite the general, the Council effectively countered with a jolting reminder of the dictator's genocidal crimes. "The Clinton administration has abdicated a hemispheric policy, except for one subject, trade," Larry Birns, the Council's president, tells us. "They mistakenly believe that ideology is dead in Latin America and instead just focus on trade, a policy crafted by the Treasury Department. Meanwhile, issues of social justice are totally overlooked. But ideology is not dead. Look at the recent elections in Venezuela. Look at the gap between the rich and poor. Throughout Latin America we see the greatest concentration of wealth in history. Next year we're also going to stress the bankruptcy of the policy on Cuba. The Clinton administration shows an absence of courage and rationality. They adopted a policy of economic asphyxiation, which has been repudiated by nearly every country in the world."
Council on Hemispheric Affairs
1444 I Street, NW, Suite 211
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 216-9261
One of the most improbable victories of the year was engineered by the coalition of groups in Texas who fought off the nuclear waste dump slated for the Hispanic community of Sierra Blanca, in west Texas. The victory was improbable for three reasons: the nuclear industry usually gets whatever it wants; the opponents were poorly financed; and the advocates of the dump ranged from George Bush, Jr. to Anne Richards and Bernard Sanders. The fight was led by the Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund and they never once flinched from standing up to the likes of Sanders. Their message was simple: just because people are poor, brown-skinned and disenfranchised doesn't mean their communities can become the dumping groups for affluent region's toxic waste. The campaign against the waste dump skillfully united themese of economic and environmental justice. But they realize the battle is far from over. Now the waste merchants want to shift the dump site a few hundred miles to the northwest in the parched cattle country near the New Mexico border. The Sierra Blanca Legal Defense plans to continue the fight.
Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund
517 Navasota, Austin, Texas
(512)472-0855
http://www.compassionate.org/sbldf/
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