Ten Groups Who Make a Difference

We get queries many times a month: "Tell us where the good groups are." You want to know who's worth supporting. So now, we give you some groups we know are doing fine things. As always, our search for these groups has shown us that there's never a dearth of capable organizers fired with high ideals, and never a national horizon that doesn't blaze forth victories great and small.

The Southern Center for Human Rights, an anti-death penalty group, performs heroic feats on a budget of about $650,000 per year. That money supports a staff of 16, including nine attorneys, none that is paid more than $25,000 per year. In 1998, the Center saved the lives of a number of people facing the death penalty, including that of Floyd Hill, who was sentenced to death in Cobb County, Georgia, in 1981 for allegedly killing a police officer. Hill has always maintained his innocence and there were no direct witnesses to the crime. Lawyers for the Center finally won a new trial for Hill in March when the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the district attorney who prosecuted the case, Tom Charron, had flouted the trial judge's repeated warnings to not refer to Hill's refusal to talk to police before seeing an attorney. (The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that silence at the time of arrest cannot be used against a defendant during trial.) Another big victory came with a Center lawsuit that won compensation for prisoners abused by guards in Georgia. The suit involved several raids made on state prisons during which unresisting and restrained inmates were savagely beaten by guards ("Blood went up the wall," one guard, not involved in the beatings, testified. "Blood went all over the wall, all over the inmate. I heard a sickening cracking sound.") Damages won by the Center--$238,000--are the largest ever paid by the Georgia Department of Corrections. Southern Center for Human Rights, 83 Poplar Street NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30303, 404-688-1202.)

Up in Fairbanks, Alaska, a small environmental group is fighting one of the biggest battles of the decade: the move to open the vast and untrammeled U.S. National Petroleum Reserve to oil drilling. The Northern Alaska Environmental Center maintains a small staff and a hardy corps of volunteers, ranging from trappers and back-to-the-land types to Inuits, botanists, and former oil pipeline workers. The challenge ahead of them is formidable. Arco, Exxon, Chevron, and British Petroleum have steam-rolled the Clinton Administration into giving the green light for oil giants to drill in the heart of the 24-million acre reserve. The Northern Alaska Center has been nearly alone on the frontlines, attacking the Administration's cowardly capitulation to big oil. Many of the national environmental groups have failed to put any energy into the fight to save the largest swath of undeveloped land in North America. Why? Because they are anticipating a trade-off. By giving the NPR-A to Arco, they feel they can secure protection for the smaller, but more high-profile Arctic Wildlife Reserve. But the Northern Alaska Center realizes that the oil companies want it all and the place to stop them is at the NPR-A. The next year will determine the fate of this irreplaceable landscape. Northern Alaska Environmental Center, 218 Driveway Street, Fairbanks, Alaska 99701-2806, 907-452-5021, naec@mosquitonet.com.

Jobs with Justice works with labor, community, and religious groups to organize campaigns for workers' rights. In 1998, in Oregon, the County Council of Multnomah (which includes Portland) passed a living wage ordinance that requires companies that contract with the county to pay their workers at least $8.65. In Washington state, JwJ helped mobilize support for an initiative that ensures that the minimum wage is indexed to inflation. Voters approved the initiative handily in November. JwJ also helped organize support for nationwide bargaining campaigns that resulted in major contract gains for hundreds of thousands of workers employed by U.S. West, Bell Atlantic, and Southwestern Bell. In Massachusetts, JwJ helped workers for the first time win union recognition from two big--and violently anti-union--nursing home companies, Sun Health Systems and Genesis. Jobs With Justice, 501 3rd Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20001, 202-434-1106.

It's been nearly two and a half years since the San Jose Mercury News published Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series, which exposed the CIA's complicity in Contra drug running and its role in the rise of the California crack cocaine trade. Webb has been run out of the journalism business and his story has been smeared by the mainstream press, but the evidence against the CIA continues to mount. A coalition of groups has kept the pressure up, hounding the Agency and the media. One of the leaders of this campaign is the Citizens' Truth Commission, sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies. The project is run by Martha Honey and Sanho Tree. "We are convening a panel of experts to take testimony in Los Angeles and Baltimore on who's profiting and who's paying the price for the war on drugs," Martha Honey tells us. Hearings will be held in Los Angeles in March and in Baltimore later in the year. Honey said the commission will also work with journalists to keep the story alive and to explore how the press failed this story in the past. Honey says the project needs volunteers. Citizens Truth Commission, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 733 15th Street NW Suite 1020, Washington, DC, 20005, 202-234-9382 ext. 266, stree@igc.org.

Essential Information, a group founded by Ralph Nader that fights for corporate accountability, also notched up some impressive wins this year. Near the top of the list was Essential's successful effort (in coalition with other groups) to block a move that would have given tobacco companies immunity from civil lawsuits. Thanks to a lobbying campaign led by Essential, which has been backed by countries such as Haiti, Mozambique, and South Africa, the World Bank has agreed to rethink its policy of supporting construction of medical waste incinerators in the Third World. Essential can take some credit for two other victories: the federal government's surprising decision to pursue an anti-trust case against Microsoft and the Clinton Administration's issuing of an executive order last September that commits the federal government to buying recycled paper. The government is the biggest single paper purchaser--the feds buy 19 billion sheets per year. Essential Information, PO Box 19405, Washington, DC 20036, 202-387-8030.

In October, the House and Senate passed a law that bans the use of U.S.-supplied weapons in East Timor--which was invaded by Indonesia, with U.S. backing, in 1975--and forbids the Pentagon from offering International Military Education Training to the Indonesian forces. Lynn Fredricksson, who works out of the East Timor Action Network's D.C. office, says the bill's passage "could be the most support any Congress has shown for rights of East Timorese" since the invasion. Thanks to ETAN, even the State Department has begun to timidly offer support for the Timorese. It now has an official position--though an unpublicized one--calling for the release of jailed resistance leader Xanana Gusmao and other political prisoners. East Timor Action Network, PO Box 1182, White Plains, NY 10602, 202-544-6911.

The D.C.-based Center for Community Change helps local groups in low-income communities organize campaigns for housing, jobs, and other critical issues. An especially important win this year was buried in the Transportation bill, which set aside $750 million to be used to improve public transportation in poor neighborhoods. The bill also gives community groups an unprecedented role in helping develop plans for using all federal transportation money. The Center also helped win a number of victories in attempting to crack down on insurance redlining against poor neighborhoods.Center for Community Change, 1000 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Washington DC, 20007, 202-342-0567.

For the past five years, Nike, one of the world's most profitable companies, has been relentlessly hounded by a fierce outfit called Press for Change, a group that fights for workers' rights around the world. It has brought attention to the shoemaker's use of child labor, forced overtime, hazardous working conditions, and sub-living wage payscales. As a result, Nike's bottom line has suffered its worst losses in the company's history, and CEO Phil Knight has been forced to make one concession after another. The pummeling of Nike is one of the great triumphs of the year and no group played a greater role in the battle than Press for Change. Press for Change, E-502, 75 cambridge Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02142, 617-496-0918.

When other organizers sank down in their foxholes after Chiquita hit the Cincinnati Enquirer with a lawsuit and brought charges against its star reporter, Mike Gallagher, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs held firm and kept the story available to the public on their website. For years the council has also put pressure on Gen. Augusto Pinochet, demanding that the Chilean butcher be brought to justice for his bloody crimes. Larry Birns, the Council's president, tells us: "Next year we're also going to stress the bankruptcy of the policy on Cuba. The Clinton administration shows an absence of courage and rationality. They adopted a policy of economic asphyxiation, which has been repudiated by nearly every country in the world." Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 1444 I Street NW, Suite 211, Washington, DC 20005, 202-216-9261, http://www.coha.org/.

One of the most improbable victories of the year was engineered by a coalition of groups in Texas that fought off a nuclear waste dump slated for the Hispanic community of Sierra Blanca, in west Texas. The victory was improbable for three reasons: the nuclear industry usually gets whatever it wants, the opponents were poorly financed, and the advocates of the dump ranged from George Bush, Jr. to Anne Richards and Bernard Sanders. The fight was led by the Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund and their message was simple: just because people are poor, brown-skinned, and disenfranchised doesn't mean their communities can become the dumping grounds for toxic waste from affluent regions. The battle is far from over; now the waste merchants want to shift the dump site a few hundred miles to the northwest in the parched cattle country near the New Mexico border. The Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund plans to continue the fight. Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund, 517 Navasota, Austin, Texas, 512-472-0855, http://www.compassionate.org/sbldf/.

--Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn