caravia

Our fellow stumbler Ted is not only a good driver, he is a gifted writer and this is his story. Visit it and don't forget to click the " I like it" button.

Good news! Fair trade comes to fashion!

"In the heart of Paris, right in front of the Louvre, the 5th edition of the Ethical Fashion Show has brought together, more than 100 fashion (and ethical) designers and brands from different corners of the world. The presence of South American and African exhibitors was massive, together with many brands from the hosting country, France. The visitors could also enjoy creations from India, Japan, Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, Mexico, Australia, UK as well as from some other European countries such as Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands and Norway.

It was hope-giving to see so many exhibitors who are in one way or another busy with ethical issues in their creations, gathered together to share their views, ideas, and backgrounds and to enrich each other with their life-stories. The venue seems to succeed in making the concept of ethical clothing/fashion more popular and accessible to the mainstream consumer. It also helps to empower the designers and producers, who all get the chance to bring their products to "ethical" consumers and retailers from different parts of the world. "

Excellent initiative!

"SLUM-TV wants to documents the lives of the people in the
slum and to reevaluate these lives through the camera. A camera
always attracts attention. Our partners from the
slum film and document the life in Mathare.
The small movies are then shown in public places in
Mathare, like a newsreel. In Mathare, there exist a variety
of self-established cinemas. Mostly American
and African films and European football is shown there.

Analogous to weekly news-shows in the early age
of television our partners want to show their contributions
in these cinemas, and maybe to charge a small entree fee
in order to finance videotapes and other material.
Copies of the videos are sent to Vienna. We will also try to
distribute them under "Creative Common" licenses. That means
non profit orientated community TV's could use material for free,
but has to name authors. All other users would have to pay.
From the proceeds the manufacturers in the slums benefit again."

I really hope the US can go beyond bipartisan struggles and show a good leadership. We, as non Americans, are ultimate dependant of a good and healthy US.

From the page: "McCain: I will help Obama fix America

By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Tuesday, 18 November 2008
President-elect Barack Obama and his former rival John McCain pledged yesterday to launch "a new era of reform" after a dramatic meeting in Chicago appeared to dispel much of the election campaign's bitterness.

There was a mood of conciliation as the rivals pledged to put aside differences in order to rid Washington of its "bad habits" and solve the "urgent challenges of our time".

The joint statement, unprecedented in recent White House history, saw both politicians undertake "to work together in the days and months ahead on challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation's security."

The aim, they said, was to "restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and opportunity for every hardworking American family."

Senator McCain had already shown himself to be magnanimous in defeat. On the night he lost the election he declared: "I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face." "

Spotted by locals is a nice project adding personal content to guides made for tourists. Local people, real amateurs, sharing their best spots.

"Most passages and galleries have been created in the early 19th century. Galerie Vivienne has been constructed in 1823 by the architect Delannoy...

These places where the first kind of shopping center, the ancestor to the mall. There are still quite a few interesting shops of designers, antiques and old postcards. In the 19th century, this gallery rapidly became a very popular short-cuts to the crowded and very famous shopping street behind: rue des Petits Champs and rue Vivienne."

SPARC, grounded by Sheela Patel, try to change the conditionss of the slums improving people's own ways to take decisions and make networks.

"The slums have to be acknowledged for what they are. Communities which are contributing to the economy and deserve the legal recognition of their existence (many currently are `unofficial', which means residents have little security or land rights).

Next. That those same communities should have an equal say in how their community should develop and grow and this means really acting on what `partnership' really means. Sheela would agree that partnership in much development speak is lip service. Organisations say they `partner' with their communities but do not really understand or respond to the community needs, especially when the risks of doing so for their own organisation is high.

This really is the crux of Sparc. `There is a big gap between saying that you want to partner, and actually doing it', said Sheela. She finds that after 3 or 4 years most NGOs are afraid to take risks, whereas most poor peoples lives are full of risks. Too often, Sheela believes, the interests of the institution are put before the interests of the constituency that they serve. For SPARC it has taken nearly thirty years to build relationships with the slum communities, to build the trust which is required for the change to occur but that is how long it has taken to now do what they do.

And what to they do? Many things. Mainly SPARC acts in an advocacy role for the slum communities, representing their needs and rights to government. They have been pushing for land rights reform, pressing for tenancy agreements within the slum, so that dwellers can invest in housing and infrastructure, and so have `security nets' to fall back on. What you need to secure those nets though, Sheela explained to me, `is large numbers of people, working over a long period of time'. Which is where SPARC comes in, acting as a catalyst to bring a collective voice together; those large numbers Sheela talked about, and not being afraid if this takes time.

The idea behind SPARC was to share the risks with the slum dwellers, and always maintain their relevance to the needs of the communities their partner with. "The question was, can we put the skill sets of what poor people have when they survive in such difficult circumstances', explained Sheela, `and can we match them to the skills sets we have, so we can produce a complementary set of skills sets that can push this process beyond where it is, to transform this".

Sheela summarised. `So the process is how to form the partnership, and how to form strategies and mechanisms for people to stay organised over a long period of time, because you just don't get tenure in two years."

Nice about the Nobelprize Saul Bellows biography, when he was Solomon Belo.

"Solomon Belo moved from Lachine, Quebec, to the Humboldt Park neighborhood when he was 9. About a decade later, shortly after publishing a short story called "The Hell It Can't" about a savage, unexplained beating, he changed his first name to Saul and his last to Bellow. If the rest isn't quite history, by now it's certainly biography.

Late in his life, Bellow reflected on spending summer nights in Humboldt Park, "on the back porch, your neighbors on their back porches all down the line, the graceless cottonwoods reaching toward you and you listened to the accordions and player pianos and harmonicas below, across the way, down the street, playing mazurkas ... One of the children was sent to the corner to bring home a pitcherful of soda pop (the druggist called it a phosphate). Over every drugstore in Chicago there swung a large mortar and pestle outlined in electric bulbs and every summer the sandflies with green light transparent wings covered the windows."

Though you get the classic Bellovian sense of motion at the end of the passage, with the children running, sandflies beating their wings against the drugstore window, the tone is calm, quiet, almost pastoral. It lacks Augie March's antic good humor, Herzog's generative sense of woundedness, Charlie Citrine's obsessing over his friend Humboldt eating a pretzel while already covered with "the dust of the grave." But it retains (to my eye and ear, at least) an essential Chicagoness -- or at least it evokes the Chicago I knew through my grandparents: a city of immigrants and first-generation Americans living close together, with an ear cocked toward the old country (accordions, mazurkas) while running toward the new (phosphates, electric bulbs)"

Amazing!!!

"At 4.30 am on the 91st anniversary of the October Revolution, the Voina group burned a skull and bones onto the facade of the House of the Government of the Russian Federation. The Jolly Roger, lit up at 4.30 am, was the signal for the start of the parliament's siege, carried out by Voina activists.

Archive footage for the Voina group training session on November 7 '08 - the Anarchist siege of the White House in Moscow, Russia's parliament.

At 4.30 am on November 7 activists of the Voina group hijacked the seat of Russia's parliament, Moscow's White House.

A skull and crossbones appearing on the facade of the White House was the signal for the start of the parliament's siege by a battalion of Voina activists. Urban militants scaled the 7-meter high main gate to take control of the territory surrounding the White House. After holding ground and destroying pieces of video surveillance, Voina militants left the territory unharmed, with stunned troopers from the Federal Security Service appearing only minutes later.

91 years before, in 1917, a revolutionary mob in St. Petersburg put the residence of the Russian Emperor, the Winter palace, under siege, following a blank shot from the "Avrora" battleship - the historical start of the October Revolution.

The Jolly Roger is the symbol for piracy and Anarchism. Piracy is seen by the group as the definite economic technique for survival while battling capitalism. Anarchism is accepted as the political method for self-organization of the rebellious and independent collective.

In the 17-18th centuries pirates used to fly the Jolly Roger before their attacks on vessels and ports. Voina fired it's laser gun to signal across river Moscow for the siege of the White House to begin."