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ACORN International Report on the Global Remittance Market Report on Remittances
In June 2009 the board of ACORN International following a meeting in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and representing all of the federated countries of the organization called for a global effort to engage financial institutions and money transfer companies in order to win fair pricing for transfers of funds from migrant workers and immigrant families in North America to their families in their home countries in Latin America, India, Africa, and Asia. In actions in the summer of 2009 members in Tijuana, Buenos Aires, Delhi, Mumbai, Lima, and Toronto all took action on various banking institutions to present these demands.
To date the only positive response, though not completely satisfactory, was from Scotiabank in reaction to the efforts of ACORN Canada as part of this campaign. They agreed to lower the remittance charges and clarify other policies in line with ACORN International’s recommended “best practices.” Most of the other institutions ignored the demands and continued, and in some cases accelerated, their predatory practices. The federated board meeting in Lima, Peru in the spring of 2010 renewed their commitment to redouble the organizations efforts to bring the fight for remittance justice more aggressively in all of our countries.
To this end over the last six months of 2010 a team of researchers from Toronto, Baltimore, Vancouver, and Little Rock as well, as from all of the federated countries within ACORN International, has been assembled composed of activists, student interns, and retired academics and organizers. In a global release in early December ACORN International share the results of its “comparison shopping” both from sending countries in Canada and the United States as well as receiving countries where ACORN International is organizing. The results will speak loudly for themselves, but show a stark pattern of predatory pricing on both ends of the exchange that has been tragically ignored by regulators of financial practices on either the domestic side or internationally, leaving migrant and immigrant families little choice but to pay the piper even when it means seeing such vital resources skimmed of 20 to 30% off the top before being available to desperate families.
ACORN International is embarking on a full-scale campaign demanding that remittance based costs be reduced to reasonable levels reflecting the real investments in technology and security. Currently, many institutions are ripping off immigrant and migrant families simply because they can get away with it. We are demanding that a stop be put to such practices and reforms be implemented immediately. This a an estimated $300 Billion market, but too much of the money is being diverted from productive uses to pad the balance sheets of rich institutions rather than being allowed to build citizen wealth and income security with families and even national economies dependent on these resources. As more details of ACORN International’s Remittance Justice Campaign are made public, we will be demanding direct meetings with these institutions in order to demand change and reforms.
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The original version of this article is available from: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44840.html
Had President Barack Obama stopped to survey the crowd of Indian leftists protesting in the heart of New Delhi on Monday, he might have seen a familiar name on some placards: ACORN.
The group, a pioneering organizing force on the left and leading boogeyman on the right, remains alive in the American political imagination, with Republicans darkly warning last week of its role in various local elections. In reality, ACORN entered Chapter 7 liquidation last week, leaving behind a handful of big-city chapters under new names but no national political organization.
So what’s it doing in India, where it joined a protest against proposed liberalization of the retail industry, which could bring chains such as Wal-Mart to the country at the expense of its millions of small vendors?
As befits an organization torn apart in the end by internal chaos, ACORN International has grown out of a schism between ACORN founder Wade Rathke and a group of leaders who ousted him in 2008 amid criticism of his governance. Even before his ouster, Rathke had quietly shifted his focus to setting up groups along the ACORN model in nine countries, largely focused on organizing to demand government help in giant slums in the developing world.
“We run a much more self-sufficient organization — much closer to the ground and much more indigenous” than the U.S. Acorn, Rathke said Monday of the new group, which he said has between 50,000 and 60,000 members. “That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned since the demise of ACORN.”
Rathke created ACORN — short for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — in 1970 as a membership organization of poor people who paid modest dues to a professional staff to help press governments and corporations for tangible concessions. As the group grew, however, it became increasingly dependent on liberal donors and foundations and on government work — most of which vanished after the conservative videographer James O’Keefe produced videos of employees of ACORN’s housing unit appearing to offer him tax advice in setting up a prostitution business. The group was never charged, but the damage to its fundraising was devastating.
And Rathke said he’s determined not to build an organization that vulnerable again.
“You can imagine what it’s like to run a membership organization in India on 15 rupees a month,” he said.
He’s proudest, he said, of the work the group has done in San Juan de Lurigancho, a megaslum in Lima, Peru.
“It’s just amazing — there’s potable water there now, roads are being paved, there’s stairways being built, two parks are built and one school. We feel great about that,” he said. “But once again these are extremely poor places — stairs and roads going to shacks.”
In India, the group has set up shop in three cities and has been a member of a coalition called FDI Watch, which favors strict regulation on foreign direct investment.
ACORN “definitely has a future” in India, said Dhamendra Kumar, who heads up ACORN’s India office. “The rate of growth is really amazing.”
Obama, who as a lawyer represented ACORN in a 1993 voting rights case, had Republican operatives dressed as squirrels following him on the campaign trail in 2008. But now he’s firmly on the other side of the barricades from the radical group, trying to open Indian markets to American corporations.
“He’s in sales and promotion right now,” Rathke said dismissively of Obama’s focus on American jobs while in India. “I just wish the president had been a little more on message about what’s happening in India and a little less a corporate huckster. I really think the guy has a lot to give, and it would have been a message well-received if he’s going to speak to equity and injustice around the world.”
Rathke’s old internal critics weren’t thrilled to see ACORN resurface. Rathke had agreed to stop using the group’s name domestically when he left — he called it “Community Organizations International” for domestic fundraising purposes — but had irritated his old colleague by using the brand abroad. He’s now free to use it in the U.S. again as well.
“We had an agreement about him not using it here in the states, and the next thing we know the bastard goes and now he’s international,” said Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s final president. “He just stretches stuff.”
“I’m quite proud of the name and history of ACORN and ACORN International, so we have never considered changing the name in any country where we are working,” Rathke said.
And those who have followed Rathke’s career expect ACORN International to make its mark.
“He is the most important organizing strategist and tactician, since the father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky,” said John Atlas, author of a recent history of ACORN, Seeds of Change. “He has succeeded in building effective groups in India and Peru. I believe he will succeed in building others, and they will get stronger over time.”
The original version of this article is available from: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/1107/How-ACORN-could-intrude-on-President-Obama-s-India-visit
On his trip to India’s commercial capital, Mumbai (Bombay), President Obama addressed entrepreneurs, university students, and Asia’s richest man, who just built himself a 27-story house.
But he stayed far away from Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums, which was made famous worldwide by the hit 2008 movie “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Inside the slum lies an impolitic connection from Obama’s past that – like Shakespeare’s Falstaff – could have helped balance the president’s view into the lives of citizens here.
The ACORN Foundation India works to organize the slum’s trash collectors and sorters known as “ragpickers.” The group was set up separately by the founder of the ACORN community organization that Obama once worked with in America. Opponents assailed Obama’s ties to ACORN after some of its workers falsified voter registrations during the 2008 presidential contest.
In India, the model does not involve widespread voter registration of the poor – partly because groups like the ragpickers are disenfranchised in the world’s largest democracy. Many of them are migrants or homeless who lack the proof of residence papers needed to vote, says Vinod Shetty, the Mumbai head of the ACORN India Foundation.
“At every stage they are asked for proof of identity, proof of residence. So if you don’t have [that] you are treated as a criminal in the city. So then they have to bribe someone to get something all the time,” says Mr. Shetty. “They are in fact lining the pockets of all these authorities, who have a vested interest in keeping them either informal or without papers.”
ACORN India issues the ragpickers identification cards that help cut down harassment by police and neighborhood watch groups.
But since the group cannot be turned easily into a vote bank or organized against a single employer – most are self-employed – they have been ignored by politicians and labor unions.
ACORN India is working with the ragpickers to form a cooperative that helps the adults bargain collectively for better prices and social standing, while providing their kids educational scholarships and enrichment.
“In a city like [Mumbai] you need to be from a powerful section of the poor to grab land or even squat. If you are not protected by a political party, or by a community, or by any kind of gangsters or slumlord, you may not even get that space,” says Shetty.
Instead, some of the 150,000 to 200,000 ragpickers in Mumbai live on top of the garbage they sort on the fringes of Dharavi.
One such colony lives under a highway overpass around a trash heap hemmed in by two massive water pipes. The pipes have become sidewalks connecting hovels where ragpickers skillfully squeeze profit from the 10,000 tons of trash discarded daily in the metropolis.
Some are cutting large cardboard boxes into smaller panels that are cut and pressed together to form new, smaller boxes with their old logos cleverly flipped inside. Even the old staples are recycled.
Others are sorting for specific detritus like car headlamps or bicycle handlebar grips; such items take on value in bulk.
A man named Syed Sheikh sits under a canopy sorting through a sack of plastic junk he bought for 50 cents. He pulls an item out, taps it against a rock, then tosses it into one of the many bags and piles around him.
“I tap the rock to understand: Different plastic makes different sounds,” he says.
Plastic that’s sorted by color and by grade sells for $3.50 to $23 per sack. Even with his fast pace, the work nets less than 67 cents an hour for him. Still, after three hours of work a day he will earn more than 75 percent of Indians do, according to World Bank data from 2005.
While he lives in a very expensive city and Indian wages have grown in the past five years, his economic reality remains closer to the majority of Indians than the elite Obama met.
Shetty says roughly 40 percent of all Mumbai’s waste gets recycled, meaning ragpickers are part of the “green-collar” workforce that politicians and industrialists tout as a “win-win” between environmental and business concerns. ACORN India is resisting efforts to commercialize the sector unless the ragpickers are the ones chosen for the formalized jobs.
Standing in the foot-deep sea of worthless tiny plastic pieces outside Mr. Sheikh’s tent, one can see the tall buildings of Mumbai’s most expensive offices, including Indian Oil, Citibank, and Reliance Industries, the company owned by Asia’s richest man.
The distance, in many ways, is far greater than the gap between the Chicago streets of Obama’s early career and the halls of power in Washington.
“I think President Obama is a long way away from community organizing now,” says Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN. While he says Obama carries lessons from his community work, “he’s playing a different game.”
Indeed, Obama has used his trip to bring together the heads of multinational corporations to argue for free trade as a means of job creation and economic growth in both countries.
Mr. Rathke, who left the US ACORN group in 2008, focuses now on a separate organization he founded named ACORN International. The group has members in nine countries, including India, and focuses on the billion or so people who live in mega-slums.
Activists tied to ACORN International will protest outside Obama’s speech to Parliament Monday to pressure Indian lawmakers not to allow foreign companies like Wal-Mart into retail.
“We’re trying to organize a vast base in order to push on all political parties,” Rathke says. “The vision is that people should have the power and they should be able to push governments and corporations to do the right things.”
From the Times of India:
Activists seek setting up of SIT on Games
TNN, Oct 30, 2010, 04.44am IST
NEW DELHI: Civil society activists under the banner of ” India against corruption” accused the Prime Minister of “misleading” the nation by setting up the Shunglu Committee to probe corruption charges in the recently concluded Commonwealth Games. Activists, led by Magsaysay award winner Arvind Kejriwal and former IPS officer Kiran Bedi, demanded formation of a Special Investigation Team (SIT), and called the Shunglu committee a farce.
Claiming that the committee did not have powers to either summon or investigate corruption, Kejriwal said there was sufficient evidence to lodge an FIR.
“When agencies like the Central Vigilance Commission ( CVC) and the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) find it difficult to get their orders implemented, how would the Shunglu Committee get its orders implemented?” he asked.
The activists urged concerned citizens to join them in filing an FIR at the Parliament Street police station on November 12 against corruption in the Commonwealth Games. Other activists, who are supporting this campaign, include Prashant Bhushan, Swami Ramdev, Madhu Trehan and S C Agrawal.
The Shunglu Committee was appointed by the PM to look into the allegations of corruption in the Commonwealth Games, which was held between October 3 and 14. It has been asked to submit its report within three months.
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Copyright © 2010 Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All rights reserved.
Funds go up in smoke, MCD gets Rs 35 crore for fogging
From the Times of India –TNN, Oct 26, 2010, 12.53am IST
According to health minister Kiran Walia, the civic agency has told the government that after the intensive fogging in and around the Games Village before and during the Commonwealth Games, it has no resources left to do fogging for the rest of the year. There has been no fogging since the end of the Games. The situation has come to such a pass that in an emergency meeting on Monday, the state government had to sanction an additional Rs 35 crore for fogging purposes to the civic agency.
MCD originally had a budget of Rs 11 crore for fogging and later the Delhi government gave it an extra grant of Rs 22 crore for the purpose of intensifying the exercise around the Village and Games venues. This was in addition to the Rs 5 crore the MCD had from last year that was given to it for the Games. “I personally supervised fogging then so as to prevent any national embarrassment but now they have said that they have run out of kerosene, etc, and the money. That is a cause for great concern and I am trying to see if there can be some extra money sanctioned for this purpose,” health minister Kiran Walia said.
MCD had been doing fogging twice a day in the Games Village, she added. “We had covered a radius of 1-1.5km around the Village too so that there was no scope for breeding at all,” said the minister. Areas like Pandavnagar and Shakkarpur had seen the kind of presence of MCD fogging staff as it had never ever seen.
MCD sources say the “on-demand” fogging during the Games was a drain on resources but had been done because it was a “unique situation”. “But it is not possible to sustain that kind of tempo for that long a time without impacting our overall means. That is exactly what has happened now,” said a MCD official.
Finance minister A K Walia said, “I was told that the medicine that they are using now for fogging is three times more expensive than the earlier one. Moreover, the Games have been a drain, so we have sanctioned additional money and we have asked them to resume fogging as soon as possible.”
The article below is from Livemint.com and the original piece can be found at: http://www.livemint.com/2010/10/29181935/Recycling-and-respect.html
Few neighbourhoods in Mumbai have attracted global attention the way Dharavi has. But all the intense, often glamorized focus on the area can misrepresent it. It is justly described as a hub of enterprise, evidence that even the most disadvantaged of urban populations can thrive in spite of adversity.
But celebrating that can-do spirit and the common humanity that visitors and tourists love to identify with, can sometimes obscure Dharavi’s realities.
It can be one of the most hostile working environments in the city, and perhaps no population confronts its risks more directly than its waste collectors, commonly called ragpickers, the base of Dharavi’s growing recycling industry.
“I used to pick and sort plastic all day, too,” says Lakshmi Kamble, 30. “My life was about that. I wanted to be a doctor when I was a child, but we couldn’t afford it. And my whole life, as I grew up in Dharavi, got married, became a mother, got divorced, and moved back here with my daughter—I had no identity of my own.” She was sorting plastic the day she first heard of ACORN India’s Dharavi Project. “I thought to myself, what good would this do me? What was the point of being part of such a project?”
ACORN India, affiliated with ACORN International, is a registered charitable trust currently working in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, focused, in their own words, on four Rs.: “Reduce, Recycle, Reuse and Respect”. The Dharavi Project, which began operations in August 2008, is a participative resource for the communities which form part of the area’s recycling industry. At its heart is a collective that aims to give ragpickers the tools and training to improve their working conditions. Handling toxic materials and the rotten by-products of Mumbai’s industries poses significant health hazards to those who collect and sort them on punishing schedules, seven days a week. The project also aims to give the community the credit they deserve as essential workers in a city whose waste output keeps pace with its rate of growth. They are also faced with a near-total lack of respect and social security, bereft, as Lakshmi says, of any identity beyond that of the unclean and the hopeless.
According to ACORN India, 40% of this unacknowledged workforce consists of women and children: a population that can face exceptional risks and exceptional pressures from their families. Take Lakshmi’s daughter Sheetal, for instance: She used to be teased by others at the local municipal school for having a mother who picked up garbage. Lakshmi says she has heard the same about her own mother—like her, a native of Dharavi and a plastic collector.
“When I came to ACORN, I got my own bearings first,” she says. “I asked myself questions about the work I had been doing all my life. Is it good or bad? I told myself that as unclean or dirty as the job might be, I am doing a good thing. I am taking a load off the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation). Why should I feel ashamed of what I am doing? I explained this to my daughter: Tell those who tease her, so what if my mother does this? She doesn’t have to depend on anyone else to feed me. It put my daughter in the right frame of mind too.”
Today, Sheetal, 11, spends her time outside school in the variety of activities the Dharavi Project organizes for the children of its members. Some of those children—not Sheetal—are ragpickers themselves, compelled by hunger and family pressure to earn money. Through music, sport, dance and art, the Dharavi Project aims to give the community’s children some much-needed recreational space, and allow them to think about alternatives to their future. It has just ended a successful music workshop, and is running a football programme for the children right now.
Watching Sheetal run around on the grass with other girls, Lakshmi says: “The children don’t always come here knowing right from wrong. Some of them felt they only had to earn money, by good means or bad. Some of them committed crimes. But today I feel like these children are learning to create an identity for themselves. If they play games together, then maybe tomorrow they will have what it takes to form teams, to take part in competitions, to stand up to the world outside. They will learn that hard work will actually make a difference in their lives.”
Lakshmi’s mother Hanumanthi too attends the Dharavi Project’s programmes on the big days. “I’m too busy to go along to all their activities,” she says gruffly, but smiles as she recalls Sheetal’s participation in dramas, dance and singing. She is the head of the family as far as Lakshmi is concerned—out of their extended circle of kith and kin, she is the first of the three Kamble women who form the family that Lakshmi values. “My mother is my inspiration,” Lakshmi says. “The values I pass on to the others who come to ACORN India, especially the children, are the ones she gave me.”
Lakshmi is one of the Dharavi Project’s committee members today, organizing the community in rights-based work, training the collectors with whom she works side by side during the day, and ensuring that the other children in the project get the support and guidance they require from their own parents. “We have a chance to give these children the things we have never had,” she explains. It is not easy being a member: She typically divides her day between work, taking care of Sheetal, housekeeping, and ACORN India’s office, where she started to volunteer in March 2009 out of a sense of purpose, and which has become a passion and unpaid vocation.
“My mother was annoyed by what she considered a waste of time at first,” Lakshmi admits. “But now she has come around to the idea. She realizes that even if I earn less money because of the time I give to ACORN, people will know who she is one day: because of her daughter and the work she does.
