Johanna Chao Rittenburg, manager of UUSC's Economic Justice Program, is one of the participants in the Fair Trade JustWorks camp in Guatemala.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

By dusk, fifteen JustWorks participants from all corners of the United States have landed in the heart of Guatemala City. We gather on wooden courtyard benches in the cool evening air at our guest house, Casa San Jose. Introductions give a sense of the range of perspectives, hopes, and questions each member brings to this nine-day exploration of economic justice and human rights in Guatemala.

Our group includes two recent university grads with passions for international relations and innovative business models, an East Coast mom/Verizon executive, an Ohio construction company owner, an elementary teacher from Colorado, and a community college teacher from Texas, an Illinois school social worker, a longtime Connecticut activist, and an engineer specializing in environmental clean-ups of abandoned mines. Choreographing this group are staff from the pioneering fair trade organization, Equal Exchange, and program staff from UUSC. We are a mixed group, spanning ages, class, gender, race, religion, geography, and ethnicity.

On this trip, our group will learn by doing -- from conversations with Guatemalan workers’ rights and land reform activists, to a two-day highland homestay with Mayan coffee farmers, through visits to a coffee-cupping lab and an enormous beneficio (coffee mill). Our lens will be human rights, fair trade, and the bean-to-cup coffee production of indigenous farming cooperatives.

Perhaps the very first experiential learning of the trip occurred months before -- somewhere between submitting the JustWorks application and getting on this morning’s flight to Guatemala. Stepping outside of one’s comfort zone to embrace the uncertainty of new encounters and new learning takes guts, and is itself an exercise of courage, commitment, and privilege.

For North Americans, it is a significant act of resistance to slow down against the urgency pressed upon us by our production-oriented culture. We’ve each rallied resources to prioritize this 10-day “time out” in order to deeply notice the reality beyond our neighborhoods, newspaper headlines, and TV screens. We open ourselves to feel the vulnerability, pain, intimacy, and contradiction of this world and the role we play in it. It’s an awesome feeling to be here.

Today, the news is good, very good. Community activists, human rights defenders, and the Bolivian people won their dispute with San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. Today, Bechtel dropped its USD $50 million suit against Bolivia for canceling the water privitization contract. Today, we can celebrate. We can remember those who have paid such a high price for today. We can look to tomorrow, with hope. Congratulations, Cochabamba! Congratulations, Bolivia! Thank you for today.

Pictured above: Bolivian water rights activist Oscar Olivera

On Monday, January 16, UUSC remembered and honored the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. In partnership with the UUA and other members of the national Let Justice Roll coalition, an event was held in Quincy, Mass., at the historic United First Parish Unitarian Church, which focused on a living wage for workers. This topic was especially appropriate for Martin Luther King Day, as King was supporting a strike by sanitation workers fighting for a living wage when he was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, Tenn.

The event began and ended with a stirring performance by the New England Conservatory Millennium Gospel Choir, who set the tone with their incredible voices, as the packed house clapped their hands and stomped their feet.

Headlining the powerful line-up was Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), who spent more than 20 minutes at the pulpit energetically making the case for a raise of the federal minimum wage, which has not been changed for nine years -- the longest such gap in raising the minimum wage since it was first established.

Sen. Kennedy was introduced by UUSC President Charlie Clements, who eloquently described the circumstances of many workers in the United States, who often work 3-4 jobs and still do not reach the total income needed to be living above the poverty line.

Later, UUSC Senior Associate Wayne Smith spoke about UUSC's living wage program, focusing the spotlight on the highly successful Santa Fe (N.M.) living wage campaign, the subject of both a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and "La Marcha," a new DVD produced with support from UUSC.

Other speakers included the host and emcee of the event, Rev. Sheldon Bennett; Quincy Mayor William J. Phelan; Rev. Hurmon Hamilton, pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church as well as president of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization; Rocio Saenz, president of SEIU Local 615; Margarita Restrepo, executive board member of SEIU Local 615; and Maude Hurd, president of the Massachusetts chapter of ACORN. The event was brought to a rousing and satisfying conclusion by Dr. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches.

If you want to get involved locally with the struggle to establish a just minimum wage in your community, click here to find a list of projects in your area.

The Bush administration has wasted no time in taking advantage of new legislation regarding detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo. Now the president is seeking to have the lawsuits brought by the detainees dismissed to challenge their detention and their conditions. But Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), one of the sponsors of the amendment to the legislation that limits detainees' legal rights, said very strongly in an NPR interview and on his website that the law was never intended to apply to pending detainee cases, only future ones.

The president also seemingly plans to disregard the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that was a hard-fought part of the legislation. Three key Republican senators take serious issue with Bush's assertion that he is within his rights to do so. With all this and the revelations of illegal wiretapping, the president and his administration continue to use the "war on terror" as an excuse for a war on this country's values.

Last week, I posted a blog entry here entitled "Problems in American Democracy." Prompted by reports of government agents visiting a UMass Dartmouth student who had requested a copy of Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book" through interlibrary loan, I described my own experience in high school researching "The Communist Manifesto" and a book about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Now we know that the UMass episode was a hoax, as some readers had suspected. I have deleted the blog entry to avoid furthering the hoax.

The threat confronting the United States in 2005 is very different from what we faced 30 years ago, when I graduated from Robinson High School in Tampa, Fla., and took the course -- required of all graduating seniors in that state -- known as "Problems in American Democracy." The text used was a Cold War relic, but the course was an example of how democracy is built. We learned to read widely and think for ourselves. Reading "The Communist Manifesto" and about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution has served me well, watching the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rapid post-Mao modernization of China.

Among the many things I learned that semester was that the founders of this nation were wise to build a system of checks and balances into the DNA of our society, no matter how uncomfortable it may occasionally be for our elected officials.

Wendell Philips said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Even though last week a college student fooled a newspaper reporter, and we (and others) should have been more careful in passing the report along, we are right to be vigilant when library records are subject to search. We are right to be vigilant when eavesdropping takes place on a massive scale without court oversight. And we are right to be vigilant when senior elected officials lobby for "exceptions" to federal law banning torture. UUSC's Civil Liberties Program is one important element in the defense of our values.

Congress has gone home and it will take a little time to figure out just how much damage has been done in these past few days. If you've been following the Congressional debate on torture, you'll want to read Jennifer Harbury's analysis of the meaning of all of the legislative actions of the past few days.

The bottom line is that U.S.-sponsored torture continues, even as you read these words. The garbled message coming from Congress has certainly not created a context in which torturers believe that inhumane treatment of detainees is likely to get them punished. Creating that context will take a lot more work by all of us who care.

UUSC has chosen its program area of civil liberties well. Unfortunately, there is much to do in the area of protecting civil liberties, here and abroad.

When does disrespect for civil liberties become an all out assault on the Constitution? The Bush administration is certainly walking that line. Despite its grudging acceptance of the McCain language to limit torture, the administration continues to insist on its right to torture. Now it turns out that the National Security Administration has been intercepting private communications without even a wave at the tattered protections that remained in place after the USA Patriot Act got through with them.

The president doesn't deny the reports and doesn't seek to cover up his lawlessness. He says the blatant violations of law were necessary and insists that they will continue. Liberal columnists are on fire, but no one else seems to care. Where is the outrage, my friends? Would you be more concerned if you knew they were listening to your phone calls? They may well be doing just that!

Writing in www.truthout.org , William Rivers Pitt provides more background on this disturbing series of events and speaks directly to the need for citizen action.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the entire affair is that The New York Times reported last Friday (when it broke this story) that its reporter had learned of this illegal surveillance a year ago, but that the paper had caved in to government insistence that it not print the article for reasons of national security. One wonders what else they know, but aren't yet ready to print.