How revolutions happen: Patterns from Iran to Egyp

Revolutions can be short and bloody, or slow and peaceful. Each is different, though there are recurring patterns – including some that were on show in Egypt.

Trotsky once remarked that if poverty was the cause of revolutions, there would be revolutions all the time because most people in the world were poor. What is needed to turn a million people’s grumbling discontent into a crowd on the streets is a spark to electrify them.

Violent death has been the most common catalyst for radicalising discontent in the revolutions of the last 30 years. Sometimes the spark is grisly, like the mass incineration of hundreds in an Iranian cinema in 1978 blamed on the Shah’s secret police.

Sometimes the desperate act of a single suicidally inflammatory protester like vegetable salesman Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia, in December 2010, catches the imagination of a country.

Even rumours of brutality, such as the claims the Communist secret police had beaten two students to death in Prague in November, 1989, can fire up a public already deeply disillusioned with the system. Reports that Milosevic had had his predecessor, Ivan Stambolic, "disappeared" in the weeks before the Yugoslav presidential elections in 2000 helped to crystallise Serbian rejection of his regime.

Chinese template

Death – though in this case non-violent – also played a role in China in April 1989, when students in Beijing hijacked the officially-sponsored mourning for the former Communist leader, Hu Yaobang, to occupy Tiananmen Square and protest against the Party’s corruption and dictatorship.

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Revolutions: Iran to Egypt
Iran: Jan 1978 – Apr 1979 Tiananmen Square: Apr – Jun 1989 East Germany: Sept – Nov 1989 Russia: 19-21 Aug 1991 Indonesia: 12-21 May 1998 Serbia: Sep – Oct 2000 Georgia: 2-23 Nov 2003 Ukraine: Nov – Dec 2004 Lebanon: Feb – Apr 2005 Iran: Jun – Aug 2009 Tunisia: 17 Dec 2010 – 14 Jan 2011 Egypt: 25 Jan – 11 Feb 2011 But although the Chinese crisis set the template for how to stage protests and occupy symbolic city-centre squares, it also was the most obvious failure of "People Power".

Unlike other elderly dictators, Deng Xiaoping showed energy and skill in striking back at the protesters. His regime had made a billion Chinese peasants better off. They were the soldiers sent to shoot down the crowds.

Protests against Suharto’s "re-election" in Indonesia in March 1998, culminated in the shooting of four students in May, which set off a round of bigger demonstrations and more violence until more than 1,000 were dead.

Thirty years earlier Suharto could kill hundreds of thousands with impunity. But corruption and the Asian economic crisis had imploded support for his regime. After 32 years in power, his family and their cronies were too rich, while too many former backers were getting poorer – a poverty they shared with ordinary people.

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“
Start Quote
Revolutions are 24-hour-a day events – they require stamina and quick thinking from both protesters and dictators”
End Quote What collapses a regime is when insiders turn against it. So long as police, army and senior officials think they have more to lose by revolution than by defending a regime, then even mass protests can be defied and crushed. Remember Tiananmen Square.

But if insiders and the men with guns begin to question the wisdom of backing a regime – or can be bought off – then it implodes quickly.

Tunisia’s Ben Ali decided to flee when his generals told him they would not shoot into the crowds. In Romania, in December, 1989, Ceausescu lived to see the general he relied on to crush the protesters become his chief judge at his trial on Christmas Day.

External pressure plays a role in completing regime-change. In 1989, the refusal of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to use the Red Army to back East European Communists facing protests in the streets made the local generals realise that force was not an option.

The United States has repeatedly pressed its authoritarian allies to compromise and then, once they have started on that slippery slope, to resign.

Sclerosis

Longevity of a regime and especially the old age of a ruler can result in a fatal incapacity to react to events quickly.

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“
Start Quote
Graceful exits are rare in revolutions”
End Quote Revolutions are 24-hour-a day events – they require stamina and quick thinking from both protesters and dictators. An elderly inflexible but ailing leader contributes to the crisis.

From the cancer-stricken Shah of Iran via the ailing Honecker in East Germany to Indonesia’s Suharto, decades in power had encouraged a political sclerosis which made nimble political manoeuvres impossible. As Egypt reminds, revolutions are made by the young.

Graceful exits are rare in revolutions, but the offer of secure retirement can speed up and smooth the change.

In 2003, Georgia’s Shevardnadze was denounced by some as a "Ceausescu" but he was let alone in his villa after he resigned. Suharto’s generals had ensured he retired to die in peace a decade later – but his son "Tommy" was imprisoned.

Often there is a hunger among people to punish the fallen rulers. Their successors, too, find retribution against the old leader can be a useful distraction from the economic and social problems, which don’t disappear with the change of regime.

Oxford historian Mark Almond is the author of Uprising – Political Upheavals that have Shaped the World.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12431231

Chinese human rights lawyer confined to village

A blind, self-taught lawyer and activist who documented forced abortions and other abuses was released from a Chinese prison today and promptly locked down in his rural village with no access to communication, a relative said.

Chen Guangcheng, 39, is a charismatic, inspirational figure for civil liberties lawyers who have fought to enforce rights that are enshrined in China’s constitution but often breached by the government and police. Chen was imprisoned in 2006, marking the start of a government crackdown on activist attorneys.

Chen was escorted to Dongshigu village this morning as family members were preparing to leave to meet him at the Linyi city prison in Shandong province, a relative, Yin Dongjiang, said. The family had been under heavy surveillance in recent days and authorities cut off the mobile and landline phone services for several relatives, he said.

"There’s a lot of people in the village right now and the family aren’t allowed to leave their home," said Yin, whose sister is married to Chen’s older brother.

Chen’s brother used Yin’s phone, which still worked, to send a message to Chen’s lawyer Teng Biao saying Chen was at home and that telephones had been cut. Yin said he had not seen Chen and did not know what his physical condition was after the four-year prison term.

Five men in plain clothes blocked the road into Chen’s village with a van and six more came running after journalists, who tried to enter the community, which is surrounded by cornfields. After a brief scuffle with the journalists, the men jumped into their van and chased the journalists’ car at high speed as they left the area.

Last week, authorities installed six surveillance cameras in the village to help them keep an eye on Chen, Yin said.

During Chen’s four years and three months in prison, he has only rarely been allowed to see his wife, despite rules that provide for monthly visits. He has suffered chronic diarrhoea and his wife said he had been beaten by fellow inmates.

Blinded by a fever in infancy, Chen attended the Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine to study acupressure, one of the few occupations available to blind people in China. But he developed an interest in law and eventually began fighting for disabled farmers in his home village, forcing the government to follow the law and waive their tax payments.

He expanded his activism after hearing complaints from people living in nearby villages that family planning officials were forcing women to have late-term abortions and sterilisations to enforce the government’s family planning policy.

Although such practices are illegal, local officials sometimes resort to drastic measures to meet birth limits set by the government – and Beijing usually ignores the abuse. Chen’s careful documentation enraged Linyi officials, who began a harassment campaign.

He was accused of instigating an attack on government offices and organising a group of people to disrupt traffic, charges his supporters say were fabricated. Police detained three of his lawyers the night before his trial and barred another from examining evidence, while a fifth was beaten by unidentified men.

A human rights lawyer, Jiang Tianyong, said Chen helped raise awareness among ordinary people of their civil rights. Chen’s prosecution heralded a period of rough tactics used by authorities to curb the determined group of activist lawyers who were taking on sensitive cases, Jiang and other rights experts said.

Jiang said the government has since adopted less heavy-handed ways to rein in the lawyers. "Methods to harass us have become more sophisticated nowadays. Authorities have made it very difficult for legal professionals to properly defend cases," said Jiang, who was among 53 lawyers – many known for politically sensitive human rights work – who lost their legal licences in July 2009.

"Now they would not dare to make any of us disappear, or kidnap us, but they will revoke our licences or conduct trials with many irregularities," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/09/chinese-human-rights-lawyer-confined

8-year sentence for American in China

Beijing, China (CNN) — The U.S. Embassy here says it is "dismayed" by a Chinese court decision sentencing a U.S. citizen to eight years in prison for violating state secrets law.

In a written statement Monday, U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman called for the release of Dr. Xue Feng, a naturalized U.S. citizen, who in addition to the prison sentence was fined about $29,500 for allegedly providing intelligence abroad.

"I was at the courthouse this morning when Dr. Xue Feng was sentenced to eight years and fined 200,000 RMB. I am disappointed, " Huntsman said in a written statement.

"I believe the time has come for Dr. Xue, who has already been detained for two and a half years, to be released," he said.

Huntsman — who has visited Xue in prison — urged Chinese authorities to release the accused U.S. citizen "in the spirit of justice" and to " allow him to be returned home and be reunited with his family."

The University of Chicago’s Dr. David B. Rowley, Xue’s former professor who has rallied for his release, said he was "shocked" by the sentencing and claims that Xue is languishing in prison on vague charges.

"I find this whole thing just unbelievable in no small part because the rationale is just so thoroughly flawed," Rowley said.

Xue "has always been a straight shooter," Rowley said. "He was not … a wheeler-dealer type." He is "an honest, hard worker and this came as a real surprise to him as well."

Xue was working in China as a leading geologist for the Colorado-based IHS Consulting firm, a global provider of energy-related information, Rowley said, and the information Xue was privy to did not include state secrets.

While Rowley said he was not privy to the specific database mentioned in Xue’s indictment, the University of Chicago professor said the pieces of information commonly contained in such databases are not state secrets.

"These types of databases usually contain information related to the petroleum potential of a given area, and that might include what wells already have been drilled and information on the geology and geophysical or underlying structure of these areas. That’s pretty much it," he said.

Xue’s job as a leading consultant for IHS involved acquiring and reselling this type of data, Rowley said.

He said that as a petroconsultant, Xue thought he was viewed favorably by the Chinese because he was able to sell to Chinese officials similar data from countries in which the Chinese had drilling interests.

Rowley said Xue had resigned from IHS at the time of his arrest and believed that the warnings issued by Chinese officials concerning the database were not issued against him, but against his employers, he said.

"IHS is extremely disappointed at the news and is very sympathetic to the situation. We are continuing to work with our advisors on the issue," said IHS spokesman Ed Mattix.

CNN producers in Beijing have reached out to Chinese officials for reaction but there has been no official response.

Rowley said U.S. Embassy officials reported Xue was depressed and had been tortured with cigarette burns.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/07/05/china.us.citizen.sentenced/index.html?hpt=T1&fbid=j7C9-bxeHvL

China’s revolution in investigative journalism

Wang Keqin and China’s revolution in investigative journalism

To the usual journalistic armoury (famously, ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability), Wang Keqin has added an extra element: the small, red-smudged, battered metal tin that he carries to each interview.

Inside is a sponge soaked in scarlet ink. Like a detective, the 45-year-old reporter compiles witness statements. Then he secures fingerprints at the bottom to confirm agreement.

It is a mark of the thoroughness that has made him China’s best-known investigative journalist, breaking a string of stories that have earned him renown, but also death threats from criminals and wrath from officials.

"The other side is usually much stronger. You have to make the evidence iron-cast," he said, tapping the tin.

That is not always enough. Last week his boss was removed as the editor of China Economic Times following Wang’s report linking mishandled vaccines to the deaths and serious illnesses of children in Shaanxi province. Bao Yuehang has been shunted to a minor sister company. Shaanxi officials have claimed the report was wrong; Wang has reportedly said they did not investigate properly, although he declined to comment when contacted by the Guardian.

It is the latest case to highlight the zeal of China’s watchdog journalists – and the challenges facing them.

Wang’s CV echoes the development China’s mainstream media: from life as a propagandist to a role as a watchdog – albeit one on a sturdy chain. He started his career as an official in western Gansu province in the mid-80s – "a very easy shortcut to wealth and status", he observed, in an interview conducted before the vaccines controversy.

He recalled the propaganda stories he used to churn out – "like accountants working under the leadership of the Communist party with a red heart" – and how he cobbled together articles for local media for a bit of extra cash. But as residents sought him out with their problems, he found his conscience stirring. "They enthusiastically welcomed me into their homes, told me their stories and looked at me with high expectations. As a 20-year-old it was the first time I was paid so much attention and I felt a great responsibility. I had to tell their story."

By 2001 he was "China’s most expensive reporter": not a reference to his salary or lifestyle – he still works from a small, dingy room in his paper’s nondescript offices in outer Beijing – but to the mammoth price put on his head for exposing illegal dealings in local financial markets. Soon afterwards another report enraged local officials and cost him his job.

"I had problems with black society [gangs], and problems with red society [officials]," Wang said. "I heard there was a special investigation team, [with the target of] sending me to prison."

Shunned by friends and former colleagues, he was saved by an extraordinary intervention. An internal report on his travails, written by an acquaintance at state news agency Xinhua, reached Zhu Rongji, then China’s premier, who stepped in to protect the journalist.

That was in what many Chinese journalists see as a golden age, when an increasingly gutsy press began to root out scandals and abuses. But in 2004, the authorities responded with tough restrictions on media organisations reporting from areas where they are not based. Though the restrictions are widely ignored, journalists say they have allowed officials to impede investigations and stamp down on the burgeoning of watchdog reporting.

Add Beijing’s drive to promote a "harmonious" image of China, and the increasing closeness of economic and political influence, and many are pessimistic. "Today, investigative reporting has become a ‘rare metal’; not only power but capital is oppressing it," said Qian Gang, formerly managing editor of the progressive newspaper Southern Weekend and now at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project. Some argue that in recent years even state media have offered swifter, fuller coverage of breaking news and touched on more sensitive topics. But to David Bandurski, also of the project, that merely reflects the government’s strategy of actively guiding public thinking. "Control is moving behind the scenes," he said. "In fact, there is less journalists can do than two or three years ago … On the face of it you can do these things, but practically you cannot."

When the scandal of tainted baby milk broke in 2008, one frustrated editor blogged that his paper had known of the danger but been unable to expose it.

While Beijing sometimes encourages watchdog reporting, it still approved the cross-region rule, said Bandurski: "You can talk all you want about how local officials are the problem and central government wants to fight local corruption and be the good guy. Well, then send a very strong message."

Yet within these constraints, determined journalists fight for – and find – the space to work. "What decides whether you can do something is not what the law or policy says, but a whole set of other circumstances – who are you connected to; what someone says at a certain time that gives you cover to go after a certain story," said Bandurski.

Younger reporters have grown up with role models such as Wang. And in a commercialised media sphere, competitive pressures create a real incentive to break edgy stories.

Li Datong, ousted as editor of Freezing Point magazine in 2006, said the media are able to do more, "not because the government loosened its control, but because the society as a whole is becoming more mature." When earthquakes rocked Sichuan two years ago, and Qinghai last month, many editors ignored orders not to send reporters.

The internet has also amplified the voice of the mainstream media. Many journalists use personal blogs to publish material censored from their reports.

But journalists know that misjudging the opaque and shifting boundaries can damage or end careers, or their publications. And there are new challenges. Zhou Ze, a journalist-turned-lawyer who is tallying physical attacks and other pressure on the media, said a major concern was officials’ changing tactics to tackle critics.

"In recent years bribery and blackmail accusations have increased," he said. "When you say it’s defamation, people [ask] what was written in the story and whether it was true. If you say it’s bribery or blackmail, it paints the journalist in a very negative light – people assume they have lost their ethics and they won’t get public support."

Readers have good cause for suspicion. Corruption is rife; salaries are low and payment to attend press conferences the norm. Bungs to ensure favourable coverage or bury negative stories are common and have produced "fake journalists", who threaten to report industrial accidents unless paid off.

Wang condemns the blackmailers but fears the bigger problem is "fake news": propaganda, political or commercial, in the guise of journalism.

In a country where citizens have few ways of holding those with power to account, tough and reliable reporting is all the more essential. Wang has covered topics from land seizures to dangerous mines and the spread of HIV through blood transfusions. Zhou fears fewer reporters will dare to tackle such issues, and that the public will pay the price. "If reporters’ rights cannot be protected, the rights of ordinary citizens cannot be," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/23/wang-keqin-china-investigative-journalism

Chinese lawyer goes missing after being detained

Chinese lawyer goes missing after being detained

Gao Zhisheng had testified that he was tortured and threatened with death during a previous detention. Photograph: Verna Yu/AFP

Fears are growing for the Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng after his brother said police admitted he "went missing" in September, seven months after being taken into detention.

The firebrand critic of the Communist party has been repeatedly detained by public security agents and has testified that he was tortured and threatened with death. Gao disappeared from his hometown in Shaanxi province on 4 February last year. His family told reporters and human rights groups at the time that he was whisked away by local police and security agents from Beijing.

Since then, his whereabouts have been a mystery, but this week his brother told Associated Press that he had received new and disturbing information from one of the policemen who took Gao away.

Gao Zhyi said the policeman told him that Gao Zhisheng "lost his way and went missing" on 25 September.

The authorities refuse to comment on the case. The ministry of justice asked for faxed questions but did not reply to them. Similar requests for information from Beijing’s Public Security Bureau have been met with silence.

Human rights groups said they were alarmed and called on foreign governments and journalists to press for an explanation of how Gao went missing during his captivity.

Roseann Rife of Amnesty International said everybody should be asking the Chinese authorities where Gao Zhisheng was. "We have been very concerned since last February because there are reports in his own hand about how he was treated in custody last time, when it seemed he was near death."

Mo Shaoping, a lawyer who was prevented from representing Gao during an earlier trial, said the situation was abnormal.

"If he ran away from a detention centre or died there, the legal responsibility of the authorities is unavoidable. If police told Gao’s relative that he is missing, they have an obligation to find him."

China’s security apparatus often detains rights activists and lawyers without explanation or public comment, but the duration of Gao’s disappearance and his testimonies about past treatment have raised concerns.

After a detention in 2007 he wrote an open letter – made public last year – that claimed guards used electric batons on his genitals, burned his eyes with cigarettes and shouted "kill the bastard". He said they threatened to kill him if he told anyone about his treatment.

Despite constant surveillance and death threats, Gao was arguably fiercer and more confrontational in his criticism of the Communist party than any other activist.

In a previous interview with the Guardian, the former soldier and coal miner said he felt protected because there would be an international outcry if anything happened to him.

"They threaten to arrest me and I say, ‘Go ahead’. I am a warrior who does not care whether I live or die. Such a sacrifice will be nothing to me if it speeds the death of this dictatorship," he said.

That was two years before the Olympics, when several other prominent activists said they felt protected by international exposure. Since then at least two of them have been imprisoned. Hu Jia was sentenced to three and half years in 2008 and Liu Xiaobo was given 11 years by a court last month.

Chinese censors block information about such cases. Local media are forbidden to report on Gao Zhisheng and a Wikipedia entry about him is blocked.

The crackdown on critical voices continues. This week police detained Zhao Shiying, who signed up to the Charter 08 call for political reform.

Two human rights lawyers revealed that their email accounts had been targeted soon after Google announced that it was reconsidering its presence in China because its database was hacked for information about activists.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/15/chinese-lawyer-gao-zhisheng-missing

Timeline: Chinese internet censorship 1yr

Timeline: Chinese internet censorship over the last year

Tania Branigan
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 January 2010 01.17 GMT
Article history
January: China launches a crackdown on vulgar websites that have failed to censor inappropriate content including Google. As the drive intensifies, observers warn it is affecting politically sensitive content too. Later that month, Chinese the media censors US president Barack Obama’s inauguration speech: state TV cuts away from live feed after a reference to communism and leading websites remove word from translated text.

March: China blocks YouTube after denouncing as "a lie" footage that appears to show security forces beating Tibetans in Lhasa last year.

June: China blocks Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Later that month it blocks Google’s services, with search functions and Gmail inaccessible for more than an hour.

The biggest news of all is the outcry as the government orders PC makers to install its censorship software, Green Dam.

But following complaints from internet users, businesses and foreign governments, the authorities back down, saying they will not be compulsory

July: Internet access is cut across north-west China, home to more than 19 million people, after deadly ethnic riots in its capital, Urumqi

Some sites are later restored, but as of January 2010 access remains restricted. Facebook reports access problems and will remain inaccessible from China as of January 2010.

Later that month the government says it plans to implement a five-year program advocating clean online games, starting in 2010.

It also bans websites that feature or publicise online games that "glamorise mafia gangs"

August: The government drops its plan to install the Green Dam software on every new computer sold in China, despite official comments the previous month that it would go ahead after all

September: News websites in China are requiring new users to register their true identities before allowing them to post comments, it emerges.

November: Obama criticises internet controls during his visit to China, describing himself as "a big supporter of non-censorship".

December: The government says its campaign against pornography on the web and through mobile WAP sites will continue until May 2010, state news agency Xinhua reported. It later emerges China has issued new internet regulations, including what some interpret as an attempt to create a "white list" of approved websites that could potentially place much of the internet off limits to Chinese readers and ordering domain management institutions and internet service providers to tighten control over domain name registration.

At the end of the month, police say the crackdown on internet porn has brought 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal case investigations in 2009.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/14/china-internet

Boycott the Sponsors of Fox News

or at least tell them you’re going to!

Here are some great resources that list the sponsors and their addresses.

http://www.yourblackworld.com/news/stories2/fox_news_corporate_sponsors.htm

http://www.debone.com/boycottFoxNewsSponsors.html

Fuck Faux News!

Bahahaha: http://pssht.com/fauxnews/satire.html Dutch_Doomsday_Fox_News_2.jpg (90.09 K)

Direct action against foreclosing banks!

Yes We Can use grassroots organizing to effect people’s lives.

Resistance to Housing Foreclosures Spreads Across the Land

By Ben Ehrenreich, The Nation. Posted January 23, 2009.

Community-based movements to halt the flood of foreclosures have been building across the country. And they’re not the usual suspects.

"This is a crowd that won’t scatter," James Steele wrote in the pages of The Nation some seventy-five years ago. Early one morning in July 1933, the police had evicted John Sparanga and his family from a home on Cleveland’s east side. Sparanga had lost his job and fallen behind on mortgage payments. The bank had foreclosed. A grassroots "home defense" organization, which had managed to forestall the eviction on three occasions, put out the call, and 10,000 people — mainly working-class immigrants from Southern and Central Europe — soon gathered, withstanding wave after wave of police tear gas, clubbings and bullets, "vowing not to leave until John Sparanga [was] back in his home."

"The small home-owners of the United States are organizing," Steele concluded, "tardily perhaps, but none the less surely." It wasn’t just homeowners — three months earlier the governor of Iowa had called out the National Guard after farmers stormed a courthouse and threatened to hang the judge if he didn’t stop issuing foreclosures. They left him in a ditch, bruised but alive. By the end of the 1930s, farmers’ and home-owners’ struggles had pushed the legislatures of no fewer than twenty-seven states to pass moratoriums on foreclosures.

The crowds appear to be gathering again — far more quietly this time but hardly tentatively. Community-based movements to halt the flood of foreclosures have been building across the country. They turned out in Cleveland once again in October, when a coalition of grassroots housing groups rallied outside the Cuyahoga County courthouse, calling for a foreclosure freeze and constructing a mock graveyard of Styrofoam headstones bearing the names of local communities decimated by the housing crisis. (They did not, unfortunately, stop the more than 1,000 foreclosure filings in the county the following month.) In Boston the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America began protesting in front of Countrywide Financial offices in October 2007. Within weeks, Countrywide had agreed to work with the group to renegotiate loans. In Philadelphia ACORN and other community organizations helped to pressure the city council to order the county sheriff to halt foreclosure auctions this past March. Philadelphia has since implemented a program mandating "conciliation conferences" between defaulting homeowners and lenders. ACORN organizers say the program has a 78 percent success rate at keeping people in their homes. One activist group in Miami has taken a more direct approach to the crisis, housing homeless families in abandoned bank-owned homes without waiting for government permission.

It’s unlikely, though, that any of these activists will be able to relax soon. Other than calling for a ninety-day freeze on foreclosures — which, given that loan negotiations can take many months to work out, would almost certainly be inadequate — President Obama has been consistently vague about his plans to address the foreclosure crisis. He has indicated his support for a $24 billion program proposed in November by FDIC chair Sheila Bair, which would offer banks incentives to renegotiate loans, aiming to reduce mortgage payments to 31 percent of homeowners’ monthly income. Obama’s economic team has since worked with House Financial Services Committee chair Barney Frank on a bill that would require that between $40 billion and $100 billion of what’s left in the bailout package be spent on an unspecified foreclosure mitigation program. It would be left to Obama’s Treasury Department to design that program. But Frank’s and Bair’s proposed plans are voluntary. Banks that choose not to accept federal assistance won’t have to renegotiate a single loan.

Community organizers, however, aren’t sitting around waiting for banks to come to the table. Nowhere have they had more cause to keep busy than in California, home to a quarter of the 3.2 million foreclosures filed in the country last year. The collapse of the state’s hyperinflated real estate market has left as many as 27 percent of mortgage holders owing more on their homes than the properties are worth; California’s foreclosure rate is more than twice the national average. From San Diego to Stockton, in churches, union halls and community centers, angry homeowners have been organizing to freeze foreclosures and impose a systematic modification of home loans.

The crisis has produced some unlikely activists. Faith Bautista didn’t start out as a rabble-rouser. A small, energetic and stubbornly cheerful woman, she has run a tiny nonprofit called the Mabuhay Alliance since 2004. Until recently, it functioned as an all-purpose minority small-business association. With a staff of six working out of a mini-mall office behind an auto parts store in an industrial section of San Diego, the Mabuhay Alliance served a largely Filipino community (mabuhay translates roughly from Tagalog as viva!) offering, among other services, free income-tax preparation, microloans and counseling for first-time homeowners.

It was through the latter program that Bautista heard the first rumblings of the mortgage meltdown, which would ultimately bring down Wall Street’s most powerful financial firms. Southern California’s development boom hadn’t yet begun to ebb in late 2006, but, Bautista says, "people were already calling us and asking what was going to happen. They were clearly going to default."

The community Mabuhay serves — about 40 percent Filipino, the remainder Latino, African-American and other Asians — was hit particularly hard. Throughout the housing boom, immigrant and minority borrowers were disproportionately issued high-priced subprime loans, even when they qualified for less expensive, fixed-rate mortgages. One study by the California Reinvestment Coalition found that African-American and Latino borrowers were nearly four times as likely as whites to receive high-cost mortgages. Bautista had an adjustable-rate mortgage on the home she bought in 2004. Her monthly payments soon leapt to $6,000. It took her nine months, she says, and a personal meeting with the CEO of the bank that held her mortgage, to renegotiate the loan. It quickly became obvious to her that fighting the banks on an individual basis would be inadequate to the scale of the crisis — only an organized battle for systematic changes would help keep people in their homes.

In the early months of 2007, as the first of the subprime lenders began to declare bankruptcy, Bautista started contacting major lenders, asking them to stop foreclosures and take part in a "massive loan-modification program" — dropping interest rates, writing down principals and donating executive bonuses to a fund for borrowers at risk of default. If lenders shared responsibility for the crisis, she calculated, homeowners shouldn’t bear the full brunt of the suffering. Not surprisingly, she laughs, "they didn’t want to talk to us."

That summer, with the help of the Greenlining Institute, a Berkeley-based research and advocacy group that works on racial equality issues, she was able to arrange a meeting with Countrywide co-founder and CEO Angelo Mozilo. At the time, almost one-fourth of Countrywide’s subprime loans were delinquent. The meeting, Bautista says, was fruitless: "Eyes are closed, ears are closed." Over the next few months, she met three more times with Countrywide management, getting nowhere. "They didn’t want to admit they were doing anything wrong."

Elected officials appeared equally blind to the extent of the problem. Countrywide’s stock had plummeted, but the influence of the nation’s largest mortgage lender still ran deep. Mozilo’s so-called Friends of Angelo program had cut favorable deals on loans to his highly placed acquaintances, including Christopher Dodd and Kent Conrad, chairs of the Senate banking and budget committees, respectively. And Countrywide, along with other top mortgage lenders and industry associations, spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and gave millions more in campaign contributions. By mid-October 2007, the government’s only response to the foreclosure crisis had been the creation of the Hope Now alliance, a voluntary mortgage-industry coalition that established a telephone hot line to aid homeowners in altering the terms of their mortgages. But, critics say, the program has done little more than design repayment plans that in many cases actually increased borrowers’ monthly payments. "I call it Hope Not," quips Bautista.

At the state level, things weren’t much better. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger brokered a nonbinding agreement in which Countrywide and other lenders volunteered to extend the introductory low interest rates on some adjustable-rate mortgages. It only deferred disaster and did nothing for those who were already in default. Meanwhile, new foreclosure records were being broken every month.

The day before Thanksgiving, the Mabuhay Alliance, joined by the Mexican-American Political Alliance, staged a protest in front of Countrywide’s San Diego office. They attempted to hand-deliver a turkey to Mozilo, who, not counting stock options, would be paid $22 million in 2007, down from $42 million in 2006. Once again, the doors were locked. Only about fifty people showed up that day, but the protest got enough press to have a powerful symbolic effect. "No one was willing to take on Mozilo in California," says Greenlining’s Robert Gnaizda. "He held enormous power. And [Bautista] took him on. She forced the financial industry to pay attention."

The next week, Bautista and Gnaizda went to Washington and met with Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and FDIC chair Sheila Bair, asking for a freeze on foreclosures and wholesale relief for mortgage holders. Bair was receptive, Bautista says. Bernanke was not. Eight months later, when the FDIC took over IndyMac, Bair immediately suspended foreclosures. "Now they’re willing to do it," Bautista shrugs. If they’d acted earlier, she says, "all those people who were foreclosed wouldn’t have been foreclosed."

In December, a few weeks after the Countrywide protest, she and Gnaizda wangled a meeting with California Attorney General Jerry Brown, asking him to sue Countrywide for defrauding borrowers. He wasn’t interested, Bautista says. The following June, a few days before Bank of America bought out the crippled lender, Brown finally filed suit against Mozilo and Countrywide. Gnaizda explains the delay: "Countrywide was not weak in December."

In the meantime, all the major loan providers in the country have agreed to work with Mabuhay to modify individual loans. This means, Bautista says, that Mabuhay can help about twenty people a week. She is far from satisfied. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars given to the financial industry, no federal or state government has provided any substantive relief to the people hit the hardest by the mortgage crisis — the ones who are losing their homes. "You gotta start from the bottom and go up," Bautista says. "If you start at the top, then at the bottom you get crumbs. You get nothing."

In December Mabuhay sponsored a "foreclosure clinic" at a community college in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Vallejo, which despite its small size — its population is about 112,000 — boasted the tenth-highest foreclosure rate in the country at the time. About 150 anxious homeowners showed up, clutching thick folders of financial documents, waiting to speak with mortgage counselors. Their stories were painfully similar: one couple was struggling to pay an interest rate of 16 percent; another was unable to make $4,300 monthly payments and owed $630,000 on a home worth $370,000; another, in their mid-60s, had resigned themselves to losing the home in which they’d lived for twenty-three years and spending their retirement in a motor home.

Standing beside Bautista at the front of the auditorium, Gnaizda did his best to channel the crowd’s frustration into action. "Ten million families are facing foreclosure right now," he said. "Change is not going to come about because President Obama wants it to. He is not going to act unless you hold his feet to the fire."

Gnaizda was not alone in that conclusion: other grassroots efforts to stop foreclosures have been sprouting up all over California. In metropolitan Los Angeles and Oakland, groups like ACORN had already established an effective infrastructure to organize low-income homeowners. A list of community demands that came out of a December 2007 ACORN-sponsored meeting at an Oakland senior center became the basis for a July state law requiring banks to warn homeowners thirty days before filing a notice of default. The law is credited with dramatically lowering foreclosure rates in California for two months after it took effect. (Predictably, foreclosure rates resumed their northward climb after that.)

More recently, ACORN has been pushing the adoption of the program the group helped pioneer in Philadelphia, a mandatory mediation process that forces lenders to negotiate with homeowners before filing a judgment of default. "If they can’t figure this out in Sacramento," says ACORN’s Austin King, "they’re not trying."

Much of the local organizing on the issue, though, has not come from the usual activist suspects. Circumstances have forced groups that usually practice more staid forms of engagement into the fray, particularly in the former industrial towns just beyond the urban fringe, which have been among those hit hardest by the economic collapse. The antiforeclosure movement in Antioch, about thirty-five miles east of Vallejo, began with ten people forming an organizing committee at a local Catholic church. "We just heard dozens and dozens of stories of people struggling to keep their homes, of people losing their homes. They couldn’t get any of the banks to respond or even speak to them," says Adam Kruggel, executive director of Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organization (CCISCO). Two hundred and fifty people showed up at the group’s first meeting on the issue. "We sort of deputized ourselves," Kruggel says. "The government wasn’t regulating the banks, so we were going to embarrass them in public."

The strategy worked. CCISCO protested in front of several Antioch bank branches in May. Lenders soon began returning the group’s phone calls and agreeing to renegotiate their members’ loans. But the Bush administration’s bailout plan generated enough anger that, Kruggel says, "we realized we needed to work on a local and national level. For less than what [the Treasury] gave Wells Fargo, they could create a loan-modification program that could save a million and a half families their homes." CCISCO began coordinating with similar efforts one county over in Stockton and halfway across the country in Kansas City, and the group sent a lobbying delegation to Washington. It’s asking for a six-month freeze on foreclosures and a cap on mortgage payments at 34 percent of family income. "Any bank that got any bailout money needs to do systematic loan modifications," Kruggel says. "We’re not going to wait for the Obama administration."

Craig Robbins, who directs ACORN’s foreclosure campaign, echoes Kruggel’s sentiment: "We’re excited about some of the things Obama has been saying, but there’s got to be tremendous pressure for a real, comprehensive federal solution." Taking cues from Depression-era antiforeclosure movements, ACORN activists began disrupting foreclosure sales at courthouses across the country in Januaary. "We’re looking to throw a wrench in the foreclosure machinery," says Robbins, adding that ACORN is planning to organize "rapid defense teams" ready to turn out crowds on short notice to prevent evictions. Until that happens, it might help to remember that the crowd of thousands that came to the Sparanga family’s defense in Cleveland didn’t gather until four years into the Depression. This one has just begun.

Moving Letters to Obama from Young Navahos

wow. kids see things so clearly.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99088962

Tell WEF to eradicate poverty through Microfinance

Ask the World’s Economic Leaders to Make Microfinance a Focus

In January, the world’s economic leaders will gather at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2009 to discuss the current financial crisis. This meeting is a powerful opportunity to advocate for those hardest hit by the crisis — the 3+ billion people around the world currently living on less than $2 a day.

Microfinance provides the world’s poor with the tools and resources they need to permanently lift themselves and their families out of poverty. But there is an urgent need to expand these services as microfinance is currently reaching only 10-20% of the estimated 500 million poor entrepreneurs who would benefit from it.

Please join us in contacting the Forum’s Co-Chairs by January 21st, to urge them to promote and prioritize microfinance at the upcoming conference and help eradicate poverty.

Please fill out the fields below to sign the petition to the WEF Co-Chairs today.

http://www.lendtoendpoverty.org/

There are a lot of really cool programs where you can lend $25 to someone who is attempting to set up their own business and then they pay you back within a few years! Helping and making a little money too! Google Microfinance. It’s especially great for women.