United States

Former Grassroots International Board member and current Board member of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Bill Fletcher Jr. recently blogged on CNN.com about the "frequent tendency to misrepresent the lessons of [the U.S. black freedom] movement and apply them to other social movements overseas in a way that misses the mark.

Historian, activist, and Grassroots International friend Howard Zinn died January 27 at the age of 87. I remember introducing Grassroots International to Howard when I was Executive Director. He had heard of Grassroots, but he didn’t know much about it. I had just come back from the West Bank. I remember the moment when we bonded. I was trying to describe some indescribable injustice I had witnessed. Someone else who was part of the conversation asked me how I could do this work, wasn’t it just too depressing. I said, “No, it’s inspiring. What’s depressing is when people are oppressed and they can’t or won’t fight back.

Grassroots International ally Food First's executive director Eric Holt-Jimenez wrote recently -- on HuffPost -- on the long roots of the disaster in Haiti. His point about the "historic bleeding of Haiti's economy and the systematic undermining of its political institutions" being at the root of the disaster as much as the "tectonics that leveled Port-au-Prince" is right on the mark. Grassroots' partners and allies in Haiti have long struggled against that bleeding and undermining, and fought for better Haitian and international policies on agriculture, trade, and food that would sustain their people, and their land.

Bill Quigley of our ally the Center for Constitutional Rights wrote recently on what he thought the US can and should do for Haiti in response to the devastating earthquake.

As a founding member and part of the ad hoc steering committee, Grassroots International proudly announces the following Call from the US Working Group on the Food Crisis. The statement coincides with the World Food Summit, taking place now in Rome, and it calls the the US government to take bold actions to resolve the global food crisis, including 10 specific recommendations.

Call for U.S. Leadership at the World Food Summit

Despite a press release from the office of Senator Jim DeMint yesterday evening declaring that he has secured a commitment from the Obama Administration to recognize the Nov. 29th elections in Honduras regardless of Zelaya’s reinstatement, it is not too late for the Administration to reverse this position and do right by the people of Honduras.

As the food crisis showed us last year, adding food to the speculation market can have serious -- and sometimes deadly -- consequences when the bubble bursts. Surprisingly, the food and gas crises weren’t caused by a shortage of food or oil. Instead, they were brought on by the same thing that caused the global economic crisis – market deregulation. While we had to pay more for our gas and food, big-time investors made a bundle. A new video and accompanying website helps explain how speculators brought about last year’s food and oil bubbles.