By Freddie Allen
NNPA Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – A new study by the Black AIDS Institute says that the end of the AIDS epidemic is within reach, but to get there it will cost the federal government roughly $300 million, a tough sell at a time when a fractured Congress stumbles toward the next fiscal deal.

The report, titled “The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Ending AIDS in Black America,” showed that infection rates have slowed nationally, but the Black community still has an HIV infection that is eight times higher than the rate for Whites.

The report states: “Black women are 15 times more likely to be living with HIV than white women. And new infections among young Black gay and bisexual men rose 48% from 2006 to 2009.”

The Black AIDS study outlines five key strategic goals:

Ensure that at least 95 percent of Black Americans living with HIV know their HIV status;
Eliminate gaps in the HIV treatment cascade for Black Americans living with HIV;
Deliver high impact prevention services to all Black Americans at risk of HIV;
Invest in strategic HIV-related research to accelerate the end of AIDS in Black America and Build the capacity needed in Black communities to accelerate the end of AIDS.
Reaching the five strategic goals will ultimately lead to 80 percent viral suppression among the 515,000 Blacks living with HIV by 2017, according to the report

Viral suppression is crucial in stemming the flow of the AIDS epidemic, because it not only extends the life of the HIV-positive person but it also reduces the chances that they will spread the virus.

Still, the price tag estimated at just south of $300 million for the ambitious plan on top of the $14.8 billion the U.S. is projected to spend treating people living with HIV in 2013 (if last year’s spending numbers hold).

“With every new case of HIV infection representing lifetime treatment costs that exceed $600,000, it is a no-brainer that programs that prevent new infections before they occur represent a sound investment for American taxpayers,” the report states.

Recognizing the current political climate, the Black AIDS Institute suggested a parallel plan of action to be implemented under current fiscal constraints. The plan includes pushing for better HIV treatment, educating grassroots organizations on the benefits of biomedical and behavioral interventions and pushing for the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

The report called the Affordable Care Act “one of the most important pieces of legislation ever enacted for people living with HIV,” especially Blacks living with HIV. Blacks who continue to struggle with unemployment rates that often double the rate that Whites face have a harder time accessing traditional health insurance plans through work.

“More than one in five Black Americans have no health coverage, a rate that is almost twice as high as for whites,” stated the report.

Although the report says that the ACA has the potential to close gaps in the care of people living with HIV, it also may usher in the decline of smaller Black AIDS organizations across the nation that depended largely on government subsidies to serve their communities.

According to the report the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also plans to decrease funding to Black groups that focused solely on HIV prevention, education and outreach.

The Black AIDS Institute said that it will assist those organizations in navigating the new health care landscape dominated by ACA regulations in some cases connecting them with local clinical providers in an effort to expand their original missions.

The Ending AIDS report showcased Harlem United, an AIDS nonprofit based in New York City. Harlem United grew from a small grassroots organization to a $40 million dollar expansive health services organization that provides adult health care programs, housing services for at risk clients. Last year, Harlem United managed 586 units and reduced the number of emergency room visits for their clients by 8 percent.

According to the report: “Harlem United was among the first AIDS service organizations to venture into the delivery of adult day health care services, and the agency took early steps to diversify its funding by creating Medicaid-reimbursable services.”

Harlem United CEO Steven Bussey said that the risks for smaller AIDS organizations are real but avenues exist for them to remain relevant even as state and federal governments are pressured to reduced costs.

“This is going to force people to explore strategic alliances, joint ventures, and consolidation,” said Bussey. “It’s going to be harder and harder for agencies to survive when they are providing only one service.”

By Freddie Allen
NNPA Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – President Obama has been accused of everything from not being born in America to secretly being a Muslim. But the most surprising – and accurate accusation – is that the nation’s first Black president has a cabinet less diverse than that of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

And unlike his first term, Blacks are not biting their tongue about their disappointment in President Obama.

“He’s not being held accountable for his policies or his appointments,” said Mary Frances Berry, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. “In politics, the squeaky wheel gets the most oil.”

And there are plenty of squeaky wheels in President Obama’s second term.

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) said on MSNBC that the criticism of President Obama’s lack of diversity in his cabinet is “embarrassing as hell.”

He explained, “If it’s the first term, you could see people got to know who is around that’s qualified in order to get this job, No. 1. I had thought, and maybe it’s so, that it could be the Harvard problem where people just know each other, trust each other and women and minorities don’t get a chance to rub elbows and their reputations and experience is not known.”

Every if that were the case, Berry states, that still wouldn’t be an acceptable excuse.

“Black people go to Harvard, too,” she said. For example, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick graduated from Harvard Law School in 1982 cum laude.

Blacks graduating from the nation’s most prestigious university is not a recent phenomenon. Historian and civil rights activist W.E. B. DuBois received his doctoral degree from Harvard in 1895. William Monroe Trotter, the crusading editor of the Boston Guardian, graduated from Harvard that same year magna cum laude and earned a Phi Beta Kappa key. DuBois and Trotter were among the founders of the Niagra Movement in 1905, the forerunner of the NAACP.

More important, an Ivy League degree is not the ultimate measure of one’s ability to serve in top positions, said Berry, who graduated from historically Black Fisk University in Nashville and Yale University Law School.

While Rangle speculates that Obama might have had few Black contacts beyond his Harvard and Chicago inner circle during his first term, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) said the Congressional Black Caucus vetted in sent the names of 61 potential appointees to the White House that were qualified to serve in his second term.

Speaking at the National Newspaper Publishers Association mid-winter convention in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Hastings said, “Not one of that 61 was selected – not one.”

One seems to be the magic number with the Obama administration. Of the permanent cabinet positions –not including positions that can be elevated to or demoted from cabinet level at the direction of the president – Obama has had only one Black in his permanent cabinet – Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. In fact, he has had more Republicans in his permanent cabinet than African-Americans.

By contrast, President Bill Clinton, a southern Democrat who grew up during segregation, appointed a record four Blacks to his cabinet during his first term and three during his second term.

During his first term, Bill Clinton appointed Ron Brown to serve as Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Energy Hazel D. O’Leary, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jesse Brown.

Serving during Clinton’s second term were Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Togo D. West, Jr.

Two Blacks served in the cabinet of Republican President George W. Bush during each of his terms. Bush made history in his first term by selecting retired General Colin Powell to serve as Secretary of State. Powell was the first African American to hold that position.

During Bush’s second term, he appointed Condoleezza Rice to succeed Powell, making her the first African American woman State Secretary. The Secretary of State is third in line in succession to the President of the United States.

Alphonso Jackson served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during Bush’s first and second terms.

Under his administration, Obama has conferred Cabinet status to UN Ambassador Susan Rice, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

Although Obama was considering picking Susan Rice as his next Secretary of State, former Senator John Kerry disclosed last week that he was offered the job before Rice asked that her name be withdrawn from consideration.

Professor Berry said diversity is not an issue President Obama or anyone else should get a pass on.

“Inclusion is not only important to the individual, it’s important for the pipeline,” said Berry. “Diversity strengthens the institution, as well. You have to have different perspectives in the mix.”

Dianne Pinderhughes, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, said Blacks must insist on a larger share of appointments.

“People can complain about his response or how he’s not doing things for the Black community. I think that’s a lousy strategy,” she said. “I think people ought to be proactive and aggressive.”

At press time, five cabinet-level positions were still open: Interior, Commerce, Labor, Transportation and Energy. In addition, Jackson has resigned as EPA Administrator and Ronald Kirk has quit as U.S. Trade Representative, two positions Obama had elevated to cabinet status.

“I would love to see more Black women in the cabinet,” said Avis Jones-DeWeever, executive director of the National Council of Negro Women. “I would also love to see a Black woman on the Supreme Court.”

Obama is asking the public to withhold judgment on his diversity record.

“We haven’t completed the formation of my Cabinet,” he said . “So I’ll let people judge it after all my appointments have been made whether or not we’ve made progress.”

Special to the NNPA from The Final Call

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Haiti Grassroots Watch) – A World Bank-funded community development project in Haiti appears to have inadvertently harmed or even dissolved some of the grassroots organizations it was designed to strengthen.

As World Bank economists Ghazala Mansuri and Vijayendra Rao note in their work, the people and organizations that tend to benefit the most from “community driven development” or CDD projects in poor countries are those who already enjoy privilege and power at the local level.

“A few wealthy, and often politically connected, men—who are not necessarily more educated than other participants—tend to make decisions at community meetings,” the researchers write in their June 2012 paper “Can Participation Be Induced?”

This phenomenon is known as “elite capture” and was listed as a risk in early PRODEP documents. While Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) could not conduct a complete survey of the Southeast department projects, anecdotal evidence and many interviews suggest ample “elite capture.”

“When someone gets a project, they do it not only to make money, but also, they immediately start making plans to become mayor or deputy,” reported elderly farmer Elace Dirou, a well-respected member of Kòdinasyon Oganizasyon Bene or Coordination of Bainet Organizations.

Astoundingly, PRODEP’s national director boasts about the phenomenon. At a press conference last July, Michael Lecorps told reporters, “There are a lot of people who became deputies because of PRODEP. They created platforms, they became leaders.”

While Mr. Lecorps may see the use of World Bank dollars to consolidate political fiefdoms as positive, others associated with PRODEP—even those sitting on the local community committees that approved the projects—do not.

Farmer Emile Theodore, from Anba Grigri where HGW investigated PRODEP projects, deplored this construction of “political capital” as well as the sudden birth of dozens of “organizations” created solely to go after the funding.

“The fact that there was $17,500 for small projects meant that a lot of organizations got created so they could get those grants,” Mr. Theodore told HGW.

In the Bainet region, the PRODEP method appears to have also hurt authentic or what authors Mansuri and Rao call “organic” grassroots organizations. KOB’s Dirou lamented that “when these projects come into our communities, they actually destroy organizations. They make people become enemies. People that used to share what little they had—salt, matches, etc.—now turn their backs.”

Mr. Dirou, also said that KOB—founded in 1990, just after the end of the Duvalier dictatorship—decided not to participate in PRODEP when it realized such social and political reengineering might result.

Writing in 2011, researchers Mansuri and Rao partially corroborate Mr. Dirou’s claim, noting that in areas where CDD projects have been run, “some evidence points to a decline in collective activities outside the needs of the project.”

“Induced participation” is not the same as homegrown, they note, since organizations that “arise endogenously” are part of social movements, while “induced” ones tend to organize because they are seeking “cash and other material payoffs.”

Anthropologist Mark Schuller has been documenting such societal changes in Haiti since 2001.

A professor at the University of Illinois as well as the State University of Haiti, and author of the recently published book “Killing With Kindness—Haiti, International Aid and NGOs,” Mr. Schuller said, “With the influx of NGOs and projects, people lose their sense of solidarity, of working together. I think this is one of the most direct effects NGOs have had here. NGOs are based on contracts, on money, on ‘what can you do for me?’

“There are a lot of organizations founded to channel funding from ‘NGOs,’ ” he added. “You could call those organizations ‘fake’’ or maybe ‘pocket organizations,’ because they have a piece of paper in their pocket that says they are an organization, but for the majority of the population, they don’t really exist.”

Mr. Schuller also deplored what he sees as dependency and loss of self-reliance: “Because foreigners are the ones helping, after a while, people even cease to believe in Haitians! They say ‘Haitians can’t do anything’ because the NGO is doing all the work in their neighborhood.”

Haiti’s ‘failed state’ fails again?

One of the other questionable outcomes of the PRODEP system is what appears to be a deliberate undermining of what is often called Haiti’s “failed” state.

For decades, development and emergency funding has mostly bypassed the Haitian state, which many foreign governments and agencies dismissed as corrupt and/or inefficient. A 2011 study from the UN Office of the Special Envoy showed that in 2007, for example, only three percent of bilateral aid, and 13 percent of multilateral aid, was “budget support,” meaning funding for government ministries as well as for local authorities like the community council in Anba Grigri.

UN Deputy Special Envoy Dr. Paul Farmer prefaced the report by noting that “creating jobs and supporting the government” is key to ensuring “access to basic services.” He called on donors “to directly invest in the Haitian people and their public and private institutions. The Haitian proverb sak vide pa kanpe—‘an empty sack cannot stand’—applies here. To revitalize Haitian institutions, we must channel money through them.”

The World Bank economists agree, noting that CDD projects like PRODEP also work better when they work with local governments. But the PRODEP program was designed to deliberately channel its funding to non-state service providers almost exclusively: agencies CECI and PADF, and the so-called community- based organizations or CBOs rather than bolster Haiti’s local authorities, whose budgets pale in comparison to the PRODEP funding.

Criticism for CDD

HGW’s extensive fieldwork concentrated on the Southeast department, but new reports by economists from the “Poverty and Inequality Team” at World Bank—the very institution that funded PRODEP—support the idea that the findings can be extrapolated.

In their articles and a new book on “induced” versus “organic” participation, researchers Ghazala Mansuri and Vijayendra Rao found that similar projects around the world tend to benefit “wealthier, more educated” participants who are “often more politically connected” and who “tend to make decisions in community meetings.”

In their work, the economists raise questions about “community driven development” since, they comment in a June 2012 paper, the World Bank has spent “close to 80 billion (dollars) on participatory development projects over the past decade.”

“There is little evidence that induced participation builds long-lasting cohesion, even at the community level. … (P)eople are induced to participate and build networks. But they do so in order to benefit from the cash and other material payoffs,” researchers Mansuri and Rao write.

“Overall, projects tend to have very limited impact in building social cohesion or in rebuilding the state. They tend to exclude the poor and are dominated by elites,” the authors noted. “Induced participation—particularly when it is packaged within a project—is almost set up for failure.”

In 2008, the six PRODEP projects in Anba Grigri received nearly $100,000 altogether, while the community council had an operating budget of only about $6,500 for the entire year.

A ‘successful approach?’

According to researchers Mansuri and Rao, over the past decade the World Bank has spent some $80 billion on participatory development projects worldwide. At least $61 million was spent in Haiti.

Was the Haiti experience a success?

Yes, according to its stated objectives. World Bank documents posted online note that the projects built or rehabilitated 785 kilometers of road, 444 water distribution points and 448 classrooms, and also contributed to building or stocking other community services like health clinics.

But questions persist, regarding the 20-30 percent of the projects that failed, and the apparent harm done to Haiti’s social fabric and the existing grassroots groups.

In an e-mail to IPS, Diego Arias Carballo, a senior agricultural economist at the World Bank, noted that the Bank’s total portfolio in Haiti is $635.7 million, with many projects that focus on improving the government’s own capacity to implement projects and deliver services.

Mr. Carballo added that a restructuring plan is being implemented to help problematic subprojects achieve the initial intended objectives before project closing. The World Bank financing is ending in June 2013.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication, the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters, community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti. This is the second of a two-part series on the PRODEP community development project in Haiti.

By Saeed Shabazz
Special to the NNPA from The Final Call

NEW YORK (FinalCall.com) - Hundreds of members of the diverse Muslim communities in New York City gathered for a January vigil and press conference in the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens to call attention to ongoing violence targeting Muslims in the city.

The December subway pushing death of an Indian immigrant at a Queens subway station was the fourth incident of violence against members of the Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian communities in two months, according to protesters.

“As bias motivated crimes occur with more regularity, it is time for our policy and decision makers to acknowledge that hateful rhetoric and discriminatory policies can lead to violence,” Muneer Awad, executive director of CAIR-NY told the gathering.

“The common theme between these incidents is the effect of the hostile environment on the minds of the perpetrators,” noted Kazi Fouzia, a racial and immigrants rights organizer for DRUM (Desis Rising Up & Moving), a co-sponsor of the event.

Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, chairman of the Committee on Immigration, said: “We must respond quickly and condemn these reprehensible acts. These heinous ideas simply have no place in one of the most diverse and tolerant cities in the world.”

Shahina Parveen, a DRUM member speaking at the gathering, said, “We have to ask why these incidents keep happening again and again.”

As if answering her own question, she noted, “In the last 12 years, the policies of our government and institutions have created a hostile environment against Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians.”

These policies stoke the fears that affect the minds of the public in the city of 8 million people, she added.

Some analysts say such policies as the New York City’s Special Registration program that requires men from Muslim nations register with government agencies, NYPD surveillance programs and creation of an atmosphere of guilty until proven innocent; and Federal Bureau of Investigation manufactured terrorism plots are part of the problem.

Activists also place blame for the city’s Islamophobic atmosphere on mainstream media and the entertainment industry with movies such as “Zero Dark Thirty,” which justifies torture of Muslims and the television series “Homeland” that provides ideological justification for the global war on terror.

“We must find a way to challenge the hostile anti-Muslim environment in New York City which engages people to participate in violence against Muslims,” Fahd Ahmed, legal director for DRUM told The Final Call. It is exasperating that political leaders such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg refuse to speak out against the violence against Muslims, he said.

Some say Mayor Bloomberg missed an opportunity to condemn the violence when speaking to the press after the death of the Sikh mistaken for a Muslim as the mayor urged New Yorkers to keep the tragedy in perspective and he touted lows in city homicide and shooting deaths.

“It’s a very tragic case, but what we want to focus on today is the overall safety in New York,” Mayor Bloomberg told the press.

Mr. Ahmed said activists would be taking steps in the future to deal head-on with government agencies such as the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the NYPD, however, he did not reveal what actions would be taken.

The MTA continues to allow anti-Muslim ads and billboards to be placed in subway stations, saying the ads reflect freedom of speech. Pamela Geller, who helped created concern over the so-called “Ground Zero” mosque in 2010, sponsors the negative billboards.

“We will continue to remain vigilant against these acts of violence against Muslims cease in this city,” Mr. Ahmed said.

Calls to Mayor Bloomberg, the MTA and the police commissioner’s office were not returned by press time.

Other organizations taking part in the gathering included the Interfaith Center of New York, Islamic Leadership Council of Metropolitan New York and Jews Against Islamophobia.