I don’t often talk about donating to organizations (maybe I do in your opinion), and I’m not suggesting that here. We currently live in a world that creates problems, and then creates organizations and campaigns to fix those problems. It seems a bit backwards to me.

About one year ago I decided to stop eating chocolate, at least chocolate I wasn’t sure was ‘fair trade’ (or if I found it in a dumpster). I went the majority of the year without eating chocolate period, which wasn’t too difficult. The reason I stopped eating chocolate is because I was confronted with the reality that the majority of our chocolate was harvested by children in forced labor in West Africa.

The solution to the problem of labor slavery to harvest cocoa is to choose to avoid those products. For now that means choosing smaller, more transparent companies, particularly those companies that carry the Fair Trade label. That has been the decision I’ve come to. Unlike coffee, which I don’t like and can easily avoid, I’m really a sucker for brownies and so when I choose to purchase chocolate I’ll be sure to choose the fair trade variety.

Your probably asking now where the $30 comes in. I’m not sure how many times you purchase brownies, or other chocolate through out the year, but we’ll just take an estimate. Let’s say that because chocolate isn’t all that good for your health, and because buying fair trade is more expensive, that you choose to purchase a chocolate bar about once every two weeks (am I being modest?). Choosing to buy the fair trade bar (at your local coop) will probably cost you around a dollar more per bar. It seems steep considering it’s probably double the cost of the other bar, but when you look at it in the overall scope, every other week, in a year your looking at about $26 to go from forced labor chocolate to fair trade chocolate. Seems like a pretty nice donation to me.
In the same way, you could eliminate a source of major unpredictable chemicals in your food buy choosing organic milk. Yes, each gallon is considerably more expensive then the store brand, but depending on how much milk you drink (maybe a gallon a week?), your looking at around $100 a year. Seems like a decent donation to chemical free bodies.

I think it’s important to be thinking about our consumer choices in this way, because they have a much bigger impact then we think. We tend to separate our purchasing from our giving, but I think we should start thinking about them together. Consider buying fair trade chocolate and coffee this year. Keep track of the cost difference and consider it as part of your annual giving (don’t know if you can count it on your taxes though). The world will be a better place for it.

I’ve been driving my wife to work lately and as such I turn on the radio while the kiddo naps in the back. I get bored of the music easily and so I’ve been checking out talk radio. One of the stations I’ve been listening to is a ‘conservative talk’ station. I can tell they are conservative because anytime they’ve mentioned a Democrats name or the topics of Global Warming or Immigration it’s been prefaced by negative adjectives. They call people who believe the stuff all kinds of names, which makes me wonder if listening is good for my self-esteem. Anyways, that’s not the point of this post, rather, I’m just wondering why they are so opposed to Global Warming.

Apparently, and I’m fine with stipulating they are right for a bit, there are plenty of scientist our there that know that Global Warming is not a man-made phenomena and it probably doesn’t exist at all. They say it’s a political ploy made up by Liberals and environmentalist. I guess I’m just trying to figure out why.

So, let’s just assume for a moment that Global Warming doesn’t really exist. All that exists is a couple thousand slide Powerpoint presentation by a former Vice-President. What do we do now?

I still think we should drive fuel efficient cars. I still think we should consider the impact our choice of food and consumer choices have on the environment. I still think 20% of the world’s population should not be consuming 80% of it’s resources. I still think the rainforest, the Alaskan landscape, and other feats of nature are beautiful the way they are and we should seek to preserve them. I still think if our tax dollars are going to build life-destroying weapons of war then some of the tax dollars should also go to preserving God’s green earth.

My motivation to be a good steward of this planet and to be environmentally friendly has never been a reaction to the horrors of global warming, it’s been a reaction to the biblical mandate to care for this planet. I don’t see any scientist opinion changing my lifestyle any time soon. All that being said, I wonder why people are so adamant about refuting global warming. Honestly, the only reason I could see for wanting to deny the existence of global warming is to feel less guilt about my consumeristic selfish lifestyle (If I’m wrong please enlighten me).

Not sure if you’ve heard about the shootings in Colorado that happened at a YWAM base and a church, resulting in five deaths including the attacker. I didn’t know anyone involved, but I did attend that very same YWAM base in the fall of 2000, so a number of people have been asking how I’m doing as a result.
I’m doing fine. Like I said, I didn’t know anyone involved so it seems as disconnected as any other of these types of shootings that I hear about. At the same time, the fact that it happened within the context of a program I have been a part of has given me a chance to ponder a little deeper about the incident. Two things about it concern me.

You can read about the incident on your own, but one thing I want to discuss is how it ended. The gunman shot two people at a large church and then when he walked into the church an armed security guard shot and killed him. I read a few articles discussing church security and it appears a number of large churches do in fact have armed security in the church. This is only my personal opinion, but I don’t think I could attend or be a part of a church that uses guns as a means of ‘security.’ I strongly believe in non-violence and I think there is a large precedent for non-violence in what we see of Jesus and the gospels as well as the early church. I don’t believe guns and churches are a good match.

Secondly, I was alarmed by the comment of the pastor of the church concerning the security guard. Given the context, I understand the pastor and others applauding her as a ‘hero’ and the press that she received, however, and this is probably just rhetoric, some of his words alarmed me. The pastor at New Life Church, Brady Boyd, said the guard “probably saved over 100 lives,” when she shot and killed the gunman. Here’s my concern: When a pastor talks about ‘saving lives’ I would think he would not depart from his religious beliefs. As Christians, we believe that our lives are more then just the physical one we sustain on this earth and we believe that being saved has a lot more to do with are spiritual life rather then simply the prolonging of this physical one. According to the Bible, it is only by Jesus that we are saved. Jesus saved humanity by violently dying a criminals death not by killing others.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those involved.

I know that last year when I wrote on this topic, some found it depressing. Here are two reasons I will be highlighting some words of Native People’s this week.

1. Thanksgiving is more or less the only time of year that any attention on a national level is given to the history of this country as it involves Native People. It is the one day that many are evening considering that there where people on this land when the pilgrim’s arrived, and it is one opportunity to prick a hole in the pretty packaged history we’ve created for ourselves.
2. As a Christian, I am compelled more and more that Jesus pointed to the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden and outcast as the true leaders of his kingdom, the ones who receive blessing, the ones to whom the kingdom belongs. In an effort to follow Christ, I want to give opportunity to silence my voice, and lift up others

The National Day of Mourning takes place on the same day we celebrate Thanksgiving. It is a protest by Native People’s to mourn the loss of their land and the injustices that have continued since that time. With no real solution on the horizon it’s been asked, “When will the protest end?”

According to a speech by Moonanum James, Co-Leader of United American Indians of New England at the 29th National Day of Mourning, November 26, 1998:

Some ask us: Will you ever stop protesting? Some day we will stop protesting: We will stop protesting when the merchants of Plymouth are no longer making millions of dollars off the blood of our slaughtered ancestors. We will stop protesting when we can act as sovereign nations on our own land without the interference of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and what Sitting Bull called the “favorite ration chiefs.” When corporations stop polluting our mother, the earth. When racism has been eradicated. When the oppression of Two-Spirited people is a thing of the past. We will stop protesting when homeless people have homes and no child goes to bed hungry. When police brutality no longer exists in communities of color. We will stop protesting when Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal and the Puerto Rican independentistas and all the political prisoners are free. Until then, the struggle will continue.

The Star Tribune had a very positive article in the paper:

“More than 3,000 trained prisoners are earning $1 an hour, and time shaved off their sentences, for helping fight California’s wildfires.”

The article was extremely positive, interviewing an inmate and how he’s benefited from the experience, as well as well as the department of corrections who point out that it’s “saving state taxpayers an estimated $80 million per year.”
What’s not discussed or addressed, is whether or not the very act of prison labor is ethical. I don’t know if I’ve written about this before, but John Perkins mentioned it a few times at CCDA and it renewed my passion to talk about it.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world with 1.6 million of our citizen’s in prison. It also so happens a disproportionate amount of those prisoners are minorities, you need only look at those exonerated to realize that prejudice and injustices in the system has placed many innocent people in prison as well.

Prison’s are becoming privatized and prisoners are being used to provide sweatshop labor to produce millions of dollars worth of goods for little to no benefit of their own. There is something wrong with that.
We’ve traded a system of blatant slavery for one that fits into our parameters of ‘justice’ and appears on the forefront as appropriate. It is not.

Sources:

• Prison Factories: Slave Labor for the New World Order?
• Prisoner Labor: A High-Growth Industry

Most of my what if? questions are concerning imagining the world differently, but not really thing we can take practical action on. There are already some organizations out there doing similar work, IJM, Not For Sale, and Perverted-Justice (from To Catch a Predator).

I was reading the book Freakonomics and it talks a lot about how the right incentives can help guide peoples actions. Shame is a powerful (negative) incentive, and I think can and should be used to help deter heinous crimes, like pedophilia. Ever since I first heard about the terrible sex trafficking that occurs worldwide I had a thought we should find ways to expose the businessmen fueling the business. A few years back I saw a Dateline special featuring IJM (International Justice Mission) and their work in the South Pacific bringing freedom to young girls forced into sex slavery and justice to the criminal brothel owners and others involved. In the feature, dateline used it’s investigative journalism to videotape a US businessman visiting brothels in Cambodia, and then they confronted him in the United States. (Here is the video below)

Dateline Special Report: Children for sale

Even before the To Catch a Predator shows started, I figured digital cameras and the internet could help expose and shame business men entering brothels, thereby draining the demand and thus keeping children in their homes, rather then being lured into sex slavery.

Here’s my idea. A photographer (paid or volunteer) takes high quality pictures of those entering known brothels. These pictures are then posted online. IDing the pictures would be difficult and time consuming, but wide spread advertising could help with that. If you effectively spread the word so that every concerned friend, wife or peer knew about the website, you would probably accomplish your goal. Say pictures were posted daily (maybe blog style), divided up by city or region. If you knew someone going on an overseas business trip, you could check the site for their photograph. I could explain more, but I think you get the basic idea.
The goal of the site wouldn’t be to have people arrested (IJM does great work on that front), rather it would be to use public shame to bring down the terrible industry. I think shame can be a powerful deterrent.

I’d love to see a group with resources like Not For Sale adopt this strategy. The fact that slavery, and particularly sex slavery, exist in our world today is disturbing and atrocious. It is something we all need to be involved in addressing and doing what we can to put an end to it.

“…it’s the ugliest, most preventable, man-made disaster on our global today.” -Gary Haugen

If you own a house, especially with a sub-prime mortgage, you’ve probably heard the recent news that Countrywide is going to refinance up to $16 billion of loans to help people avoid foreclosure. This is great news amidst the recent housing crisis because it means people will be able to stay in their homes and avoid foreclosure. Those who were taken advantage of by predatory lending, and those who simply made unwise decisions, during the housing boom will have a chance to fix things up and avoid possible horrible outcomes of those mistakes. And, yes, this should benefit the poor, as well as the majority of the middle class, who are facing current foreclosure.

However, predatory lending is nothing new. If you come from a low-income or minority race community, you’ve seen plenty of this before. Predatory lending plagues a great many urban communities. Banks are often few and far between, check cashing shops on every corner, and redlining have negatively impacted low-income communities for decades. Not only that, but forcing foreclosure is often a strategy used to gentrify urban areas and force home-owning poor families out of their own neighborhood. Unfortunately, the plight of the poor in our country has rarely caught the ear of our politicians, corporations or even churches.

This handout will benefit the poor somewhat, alongside the middle class it is aimed at helping out, but will these same sorts of handouts, government attention and concern continue to exist once this ‘housing crisis’ is over? Unless radical changes happen, the urban landscapes will still be full of predatory lenders and redlining practices.