WHILE it is true that Brazil , despite its RISE as a vibrant economy in South America..STILL has plenty of problems , particularly large pockets of poverty....here is an example of what a collaboration of:

a famous successful individual, townsfolk willing to cooperate towards their own common improvement, the government willing to listen and help, and others willing to "lend a hand" - and the result, DESPITE the relative poverty of the town featured is, as the townsfolk say:

"WE are poor but we have ....dignity". and pride in where they come from despite their poverty.

something quite a LOT of RICH POWERFUL people or entities or COUNTRIES do NOT have.

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October 13, 2009
Salvador Journal
Musician Changes Tone of Impoverished Village
By FERNANDA SANTOS

SALVADOR, Brazil — From a veranda at Candyall Ghetto Square, a recording studio and rehearsal space for his percussion band Timbalada, the musician Carlinhos Brown appraised the contrasting worlds that define the neighborhood where he grew up.

An unfinished brick house stood to his left, all that its owner could afford to build. Behind him were the modest stucco homes that line a slope rechristened Bob Marley Street. By the soccer field down below was a row of shacks made of discarded wood. At the top of the hills that surround the area, the elegant high-rises that house the upper class in this city, the third largest in Brazil with about three million people.

“Poverty is not an excuse for anything,” Mr. Brown, 46, said on a recent gray afternoon here, his eyes shielded by a pair of oversize sunglasses. “Poverty is an opportunity.”

Mr. Brown — a singer, songwriter and percussionist who is one of Brazil’s best-known artists — once made music banging on the water barrels that he used to carry home to his mother, who earned a living washing clothes. Back then, his neighborhood, Candeal Pequeno, or Little Candeal, had so many fruit trees that a kid would go hungry only if he could not climb.

But as Salvador grew, Candeal (pronounced KAHN-djee-AHL), developed on what used to be a belt of tropical forest in the middle of the city, became so big so fast that it could no longer sustain itself. Sewage flowed openly on the streets where children played. Unpaved roads flooded when it rained, dumping mud, garbage and disease into homes. Illegal connections to the electric grid abounded, yet many of the houses went dark at night.

With money and prestige, Mr. Brown said, came the realization that to help his neighborhood, he would have to do more than write lyrics portraying its plight.

Fifteen years ago, he took a first step, founding a music school for children who were once like him: poor and short on hope, but full of dreams. He named it Pracatum, after the sound made by the hand drums used in percussion bands, instruments like the timbau and tan-tan.

So began Candeal’s profound transformation, made all the more remarkable because it was fostered by a black man in an overwhelmingly black city where blacks are rarely agents of change.

Mr. Brown coaxed local residents to join a civic association he had founded and went on to press whomever he would come across: politicians, philanthropists and dignitaries like King Juan Carlos of Spain, who visited Candeal in 2005, and the United States ambassador to Brazil, Clifford M. Sobel, who went there in February. “The day my street was paved, I realized that we could accomplish anything,” said Maria José Menezes dos Santos, 68, an active member of the association who has lived in the neighborhood for 38 years and raised 11 children there.

Candeal has a privileged location, close to the beach and halfway between Salvador’s old downtown and its new financial center. It is not a shantytown or an “invasão,” or invasion — communities illegally built on vacant land. But it does have elements of both. The only comprehensive neighborhood survey to date, done in 1997, concluded that nearly one-fifth of its 5,500 residents were unemployed and that four out of five earned $80 a month or less. In addition, the survey showed, 25 percent of the homes were at risk of collapse.

While Pracatum School churned out a cast of talented musicians — people like Léo Bit Bit, who plays with the band Scorpions; the twins Du and Jó, who play with Caetano Veloso; and Marivaldo dos Santos, who plays in “Stomp” — the association went to work fixing up Candeal. It persuaded the city’s health department to open a clinic there, the neighborhood’s first. It raised money to build and renovate more than 200 homes and plaster and paint 60 others. It got the mayor’s office to install sewer lines and refurbish a public water fountain that many families use to this day to wash their clothes.

This year, residents got together to patch up the battered soccer field, the sole source of recreation for many of the local children.

“People used to look for ways to move out of here because of what this place was like,” said Mario Sena, 27, a Candeal resident who was one of the first to enroll at Pracatum in 1994 and is now in charge of the school’s music studio. “Now, nobody wants to leave. Candeal is poor, but it has dignity.”

Pride in where they came from is what Mr. Brown said he had sought to instill in Candeal’s people, through his music and his social work, and by many measures he has been successful. At a fashion workshop Pracatum School started three months ago, for example, 20 women who had never before picked up a needle chose to use their neighborhood and neighbors as inspiration for a line of jewelry and key chains.

(article continues below)

The "humanitarian" arm of the elite establishment wants to feed people instead of teach people to feed themselves.

How to feed yourselves:

1. Inform and organize yourselves.

2. Achieve land, water, food rights for all.

3. Gather/grow your own food sustainably, independently.

4. Smash elite barriers to 1, 2, and 3.

Why? See: Why U.S. Food Aid Benefits Big Business and Not Starving People

Sure, feed the poor of the world while Americans go hungry. No doubt, the rest of the world will eat before American's do. Amerian's do not rise up because they are smart enough to see that America is already collapsing. It's just a waiting game.

I seem to remember when in Bush's first term, he denied birth control help to the third countries, and the Pope encouraged the women not to use birth control. That would have decreased the population. Now we have the world health organization complaining again, as in the 70's, the world is over populated, and another spread of swine flu, as was back then when thousands died.-- So I wonder if the combination of the Flu, Starvation, and the Continued wars, the W.H.O./GOP will get what they want? The GOP has wished for 8 years to eliminate the Arabs, by war, the W.H.O,- the third countries, perhaps by starvation/ virus by genocide. The pharmaceutical companies will make millions from the vaccine. Innocent people will suffer to please the wealthy few.

On one hand this is a tragedy and of course, we should do as much to ease the suffering of others.

However, on the other hand, if the study of human and animal nature, as well as, the examination of the effects of the Green Revolution has taught us anything it is that the more you feed, the more they will breed. At 6 billion in population and stretching the planet to the breaking point we have to do things a little differently.

Should we feed starving people? Absolutely. But that food has to be accompanied by teaching people a means to feed themselves and, the most important part, access to, and education about, over-population and birth control.

Increased food production and distribution unaccompanied by population control sets the stage for collapse and extinction of the human species.

This sounds cold and heartless, but it is a reality which must be addressed if mankind is going to survive and live a sustainable existence.

Donate to the Friends of the World Food Program:
http://www.friendsofwfp.org

Yawn...........

POPULATION PERIL

Remarkably, the most crucial environmental reform measure is often ignored. Until population growth is curtailed, starvation and related suffering will only worsen despite relief efforts. Other environmental reform measures are secondary by comparison.

Americans have a mandated duty to assist the third world nations in their pursuit of ecological friendly development, while surviving the conditions resulting from the global warming and pollutio-- for which we bear much responsibility.

The environmental reform measures thus far pursued by this president may be encouraging--albeit far past due. However, until the radical right and special interests, who have successfully blocked family planning and other cruial environmental measures, are detoothed; hunger and related suffering will not only persist but will expand.

I see four players: the peasants, the juntas, the big banks and us.

The big banks loan billions to the juntas, who in turn extract all the wealth they can from the peasants. We then can feed a few of these robbed peasants for a month, or we will let them starve.

Or, we could make this particular behavior of the big banks a felony, or pass legislation to allow the peasants to internationally recover damages from the big banks in response to future bank malfeasance. That would stop this repulsive bank behavior.

Aside from all the horror, misery and hatred induced by the failure of the wealthy countries to meet their much boasted-about, signed and sealed, and by the standards of the recent criminal "bail out" payments to the criminal class of wealthy financiers who caused the destruction of half the world's capital, absolutely TINY monetary commitments to provide emergency food relief to those third world nations affected by the current "perfect storm" of food supply and distribution problems, such horrendous stinginess is also not even in the best, if crassest, interest of first world citizens, or even their, still in firm control, banksta-gansta ruling elites.

Why not? Well, the denial of the previously-pledged food aid will cause aggregate consumer demand on the part of the many millions who agonizingly starve to death, or even the other many millions, many only slightly better off, who will survive, but only by spending all their remaining meager monetary resources on what is sure to be grossly-overpriced, where obtainable at all, rice, wheat, corn, cassava, or potatoes etc. to plummet. And as every economist since Keynes -- except, alas, the idiots running our own basket-case economy -- well knows, the best way to stimulate any moribund economy, like virtually every national economy in the world today, is to provide loans [and, heaven forbid!, even outright monetary "aid"!], but to target these stimuli, not to the richest classes in the society, as all of our endless Republican sponsored "trickle-down" "tax-breaks" since Reagan have done, since the wealthy will usually merely deposit such funds to their hidden offshore assets somewhere, but rather to target the very poorest, most desperate sectors of society, those who will be virtually forced to spend the money immediately and locally, on necessities. In the latter case, and only in that case, the stimulus money will be put to work in the economy, and, as long as it remains in circulation, to stimulate additional consumption, as each person receiving it, or parts of it, as payment re-spends it in turn.

Thus it is that all of the economies of the third world countries currently being "stiffed" on the food and other aid promised by the forgetful first world countries, will be driven a bit deeper into recession. And hence, rather than becoming less of a drag on the already badly under-consuming global marketplace, will become more of one, as, just to state the simplest case, all the millions of tons of grain that were supposed to be shipped to starving people overseas instead sit, maybe even to rot, in silos in the first world. In doing so they merely increase the already glutted "supply," and hence serve to drive down the price of grain on the market, and therewith the profits on which first world farmers live, and therewith, in turn, their own ability to consume more, to get their own economy moving again.

So, to sum it all up in one phrase, what we see here is a thoroughly irrational, and totally short-sighted, decision, taken for all the wrong reasons, at just the worst possible time, which, as the article rightly says, will cause enormous human misery and death to millions of desperate people, [living human beings just like us, let us never forget!] right now, and for at least a generation to come, while even doing much more harm than good to the countries that mock-solemnly undertook the obligations to provide the ever more urgently needed aid!!

Send food, used computers, and put them online.

Words are inadequate to define the human suffering that is caused by greed and twisted priorities.

What has been spent through the centuries, including the beginning of this one, to make war for selfish gains would have been and is enough for no one to go hungry, for no one to not have clean water to drink, for no one not to have a shelter and clothes on their back, for no one not to be cared for.

We continue to fail as a species except when it comes to active or "passive" extermination of our own kind.

And obviously by continuing on in the same way, we doom ourselves. What goes around comes around.

Outrageous and terribly sad.

/cm

So here we are, worrying about millions starving because the 'big boys' want to keep maximizing profits in the food shuffle game with an almost whopping 7,000,000,000 people on this planet having to rely on the 'elitist' unfettered global market, which by the way is NOT to feed the world but feed those 'elitist' bank accounts, and speaking of 'unfettered', the human population has twiddled its tumbs thinking or believing in the unfettered growth of humans is appropriate and sanctimonious, nope, no regulation here anywhere.

There is plenty information out there(Mike Davis' 'Late Victorian Holocausts) to describe what is about to happen, replete with pictures and all of emaciated humans or more like walking skeletons with skin clinging to their bones, I just wish all the 'elite' could be rounded up and put in a dessert and allowed to die the same way because 'their' economic systems holds for none the 'put up' hypocracy of their feigning love of god or compassion for fellow humans, which isn't really feigning anymore but blatant.

So, just from the mike davis book you can and should expect for not just millions but 10s of millions or 100s of million if not billions of people falling over dead and becoming food for the jackels and dogs and other 'opportunists' hungry animals because that is what those 'great' nations of europe, especially great britain, created in the 1700s and on with their devious marketing plans.

The total dollar cost to the U.S. of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds $874 billion.

Last year, the richest nations gave the World Food Programme "a record $5 billion" to feed
100 million desperate men, women, and children.

Of that $5 billion, the U.S. gave $2 billion. We have cut our donation by $800 million this year.

"They, too, will ask, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or as a stranger or in need of clothes or sick or in prison and didn't help you?'

"Then He will answer them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.'"--Matthew 25:44-45

What part of that do our Bible-thumping Congress and sanctimonious president not understand?

Can we thank the GOP and Conservative Christians for this global depression?