Rosenberg Fund for Children

No More Guantánamos

I’ve always felt it was very important for the RFC to maintain its focus. The core of our mission is summed up in just a few words: providing for the educational and emotional needs of the children of targeted progressive activists in the United States. For the most part the RFC does not get involved with or endorse the myriad of progressive campaigns and events taking place nationwide at any given time, except when something has a direct impact on our beneficiaries.

One exception, although I don’t really consider it one, is that the RFC has taken stands in support of human rights in response to our government’s post-9/11 repression. I’m not sure this is really an exception because this repression poses a threat to all progressive activists and their families. Thus, the RFC was proud to present a free dramatic reading of Guantánamo; Honor Bound to Defend Freedom to 600 members of our local community to celebrate our 15th anniversary in 2005.

I am writing this post for the same reason.

Nancy Talanian, a local activist and friend of mine, has recently started a project entitled “No More Guantánamos.” ( http://www.nogitmos.org). I have lifted the following, with minor editorial adjustments, from their website: “No More Guantánamos is a coalition of concerned citizens, communities, organizations, and pro-bono attorneys representing detainees who are working together to ensure justice and human rights for the prisoners. [It is an effort to]: Transform prisoners’ images in the U.S. from faceless, nameless 'terrorists' to human beings who deserve fair treatment and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty; use prisoners’ stories to overcome unfounded fears of prisoners in your community; enable prisoners cleared for release but who can’t return home to settle in the U.S. or help them get where they want to go; hold the government accountable for violations of human rights laws and for implementing laws and policies to prevent future violations.”

Although I have almost no spare time, I can’t resist providing what little help I can to this grassroots effort to ameliorate a terrible wrong. The first thing that struck me about this campaign was how achievable at least some of its goals were. There are only about 200 men left at Guantánamo. It is hard for me to believe that there aren’t dozens of progressive communities in our country who would gladly welcome those who are cleared for release but unable to return to their home countries, even as many others recoil in horror at the thought of letting these “monsters” into their midst. Collectively these communities could easily take in all those cleared for release. While this is only an initial step, what an incredible teaching moment and opportunity to effectuate our support for human rights.
I hope some who read this will be inspired to visit the No More Guantánamos website and perhaps start a committee in their community.

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Repression in Rochester

My daughter, Jenn (the RFC’s Grantmaking Coordinator), and I spent last weekend in Rochester and Buffalo attending RFC receptions as part of our 20/20/20 program. We call it 20/20/20 because we will celebrate the RFC’s 20th anniversary by holding at least 20 events around the country during the 20-months that started in September. We managed to beat the snows and catch the tail end of one of the best fall color seasons we’ve had in the last decade.

At each reception I told my personal story, described how it gave birth to the RFC and reported that the ongoing repression and the Bush economic depression have increased the demand for our support. The folks at the Rochester event described their own recent brush with authoritarianism: several had been arrested and/or harassed by police earlier in the month.

On October 7th, 2009, the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the current Afghan war, the Rochester chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) staged a peaceful protest calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The noisy but peaceful action of less than 100 people started with speeches in a park and was followed by a march to the center of town. As they crossed a bridge the activists were confronted by a phalanx of police who arrived in no less than 40 police cars!

The police attacked the protesters without warning, singling out a young black man in the center of the crowd for no apparent reason other than the color of his skin. A dozen protesters were arrested and two required hospitalization. The incident was filmed by an independent media (IMC) film crew and is available at http://blip.tv/file/2695340. The video shows police throwing non-resisting students to the ground and arresting them without provocation. As often happens in these situations, the two students who were most severely injured are facing the most serious charges of resisting arrest and attacking a police officer.

This was one of several stories I heard about the brutality and racism of the Rochester police while I was in town. On the 300 mile drive home to Western Massachusetts I couldn’t help wondering if the police took their cue from the barely suppressed violence and hate spewed by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Fox News. Unlike the TV blowhards, the police have guns, badges, the power to arrest and the authority of the state behind them.

How many of these cops and others across the nation, have been pumped full of post-9/11 hysteria for almost a decade and are primed to explode? How many of you have your own stories of similar events unfolding in you areas? I invite you to bring these outrages to light by posting comments here.

I fear that given this climate, the RFC will face a seemingly endless stream of new applications for many years to come.

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Can we Revive the Gathering Program?

I suppose the RFC is doing as well as, if not better, than one would expect in the midst of the Great Recession (funny the way there is such a resistance to using the “d” word!). Our tremendously loyal and committed supporters have come through repeatedly with thousands upon thousands of modest donations, mostly ranging between $25 and $100. But I’m primarily attuned to our beneficiaries’ needs, and so end up seeing the glass as a quarter empty instead of three-quarters full.

Our donors contributed approximately $550,000 in 2009. This enabled us to make and administer grants totaling about $350,000. I expect we’ll match these totals in 2010. I’m extremely thankful to our contributors who’ve dug so deep, and equally pleased that the RFC’s staff of just three could justify this support by doing all our granting work, and increasing our communication to our supporters, while simultaneously adding a new layer of online outreach.

But we need an additional $30,000 to pay the costs of our next Gathering which we’ve already had to postpone from 2009 to 2011, and right now I don’t see where that money will come from. Most people give us $25, $50 or $100 each year. $30,000 more means an additional 300 gifts of $100, or 600 of $50, or 1200 of $25, on top of what people are already giving. It seems unrealistic to expect that will happen. And unlike our local hospital or college, the RFC doesn’t have any people on our list whom I can call to ask for $30,000.

And that’s not the end of it. We’ve not only cut back on our granting, but we’ve decreased our staffing as well. Before my daughter, Jenn joined the RFC we had a part-time Grantmaking Assistant along with our Grantmaking Coordinator. Jenn has been managing both jobs since coming on board over 2 years ago. So not only are we unable to fund the next Gathering, we also have insufficient human resources to organize it. And if we were to add that staff position, between salary and benefits that would be another $30,000.

So rather than reveling in the $550,000 we can raise, I find myself focused on the $60,000 we can’t. This situation is particularly frustrating, because this amount is not a pie-in-the-sky figure. I know exactly what we’d do with the money and can almost taste the concrete benefits these funds would create for the children we aid.

Don’t get me wrong. No one here is even considering giving up on the Gathering program. Repression is about disempowerment. Repressive forces seek to isolate their targets because it’s a quick way to demoralize them. Bringing those who have been targeted together to share experiences and develop mutual support networks is a wonderful way to re-empower our beneficiary families while providing essential nurturing for their children. The uniformly enthusiastic feedback we’ve received from Gathering participants confirms how important they are. So we’re pulling out all the stops in this 20th anniversary year to raise the funds we need to bring our project back to full speed.

I’m not certain that we can do it, but if by the end of this year you see an announcement in our newsletter or on our website that we are going forward with the 2011 Gathering you’ll know that, somehow, we pulled it off.

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Storm Coming?

Is it that lately activists are more under siege? Maybe I think so because I hear so many horror stories at the RFC. Yesterday I read about the Muslim students at UC Irvine in California being charged with criminal offenses because they heckled a speech on their campus given by the Israeli Ambassador. The Jewish Voice for Peace has gathered petitions with thousands of signatures demanding that the charges be dropped. In the meantime, peace and justice activists in Minneapolis and Chicago have been subpoenaed to testify before Grand Juries who are investigating whether these activists should be charged with providing material support for terrorists. In Puerto Rico, college students have gone on strike to protest massive tuition increases. As I write this the police have stormed the University of Puerto Rico campus, beating and arresting the non-violent protesters.

Elsewhere prosecutions continue under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). AETA is a sweeping federal law that brands as terrorism protests that hurt the finances of corporations that conduct animal research or deal in animal products. Rumors continue to swirl about the government using the Espionage Act to indict those associated with Wikileaks. Prosecutions and deportations of undocumented workers skyrocketed in 2010. I feel like I’m compiling a laundry list from hell.

Unfortunately, I’m not just imagining an increasingly repressive climate. I believe, instead, that economic and environmental forces are fostering autocracy and the creation of scapegoats. The big corporations now have almost unfettered domination in our country. They will do everything they can to maximize their money and power at everyone else’s expense. Even the most sophisticated disinformation complex ever created (today’s mainstream media) can’t hide the growing disparity between rich and poor in our society. The system can’t advertise away the fact that approximately one in six adults are either unemployed or underemployed, and that a recovery that is limited to corporate profits will not alleviate this situation.

This is a recipe for increasing social unrest and the rulers are well aware of it. It is, therefore, only natural for them to seek to increase their control over the flow of information and stifle any dissent as firmly as possible before it gets out of hand. First, they expand what is classified as secret and then prosecute those who wish to disseminate it. They stack the courts with authoritarian judges who sentence activists to draconian prison terms under laws that make almost any organizing activity for basic change illegal. And they create a new set of bogeymen, “illegal” aliens and “terrorists” who are on the verge of destroying our way of life to justify the repression and divide those they exploit.

These are not predictions of what is to come, but rather a description of what is happening now. But I don’t think any of these repressive tactics will succeed. Presently, we may be wishing for more resistance in the United States, but I sense it growing all over the world, and think it is only a matter of time before the acid begins to bubble in the belly of the beast. This is, perhaps, an overly simplistic analysis, but getting screwed if you do nothing can be a powerful goad to action.

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The Day After: More of the Same at the RFC

The endless electoral campaign is finally over and Obama won. As far as I can tell, while the Senate is slightly more liberal, the overall political configuration is similar to what existed before the election. How does that impact the Rosenberg Fund for Children?

The RFC’s principal purpose has not changed since its founding more than 20 years ago. We provide for the educational and emotional needs of the children of targeted activists in the United States. Since the parents of our beneficiaries have engaged in a large array of progressive activism, and their targeting can range from loss of a job to physical harassment, arrest or even assassination, the relationship between social unrest and the number of new applications we receive is complex.

One indicator that, while not precise, can hint at whether we’ll see an influx of new applications during a coming year is the number of those arrested at protests during the previous year. While it may surprise some of our supporters that we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of new applications since Obama was first elected in 2008, it has not surprised us. That’s because number of people arrested at demonstrations has increased dramatically since the 2008 election. While I do not have exact figures for 2012 yet, as far as I can tell several thousand protestors have been arrested so far this year. Thus, it is not startling that we’re reviewing more than 80 applications for our aid this fall.

Despite hopes for the contrary, the level of repression experienced by those protesting the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us, the continued despoiling of the environment by fossil fuel companies, the targeting of the undocumented, and the profiling of Muslims grew during the Obama administration’s first term. With the economy remaining bad, the corporations still dominating our government, the police having been militarized, and local, state and national law enforcement agencies remaining intent on branding dissenters as terrorists, we are likely to see an escalating demand for our help.

We’ve received many new applications this fall. They range from Grand Jury resisters to anti-war war protesters to a worker fired for attempting to organize a union. This reflects the ongoing agitation of an aroused populace that has endured five years of economic privation. Obama’s actions in early 2009 may well have prevented a total economic meltdown. However, most of us have seen precious little improvement since then, and there is scant indication that Tuesday’s results will turn things around.

From its start the RFC’s purpose has been to aid the children of targeted activists over the long haul. The day after Obama’s victory it still looks like we’re in for a marathon. I’m not saying that the costs of continuing dissent have increased because of the election. Rather that they already were high and I doubt they will be reduced any time soon. Simply put, what we face is more of the same.

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