NYT story involves Richard Estabrook:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/travel/escapes/23american.html?emc=eta1

Brought to our attention by Beverly Ward.

--Alvin Wolfe

-----Original Message-----
From: urbanth-l-bounces@...
[mailto:urbanth-l-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Angela Jancius
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 10:05 AM
To:
Subject: [URBANTH-L] APPLIED Anthropology Job: Director, US Government
Relations, Health GAP (Global Access Project)

From: Jennifer Flynn <flynn@...>


Salary information included

http://www.healthgap.org/usgovtrelationsjob.htm

Director, US Government Relations, Health GAP (Global Access Project)

Health GAP, a leading international advocacy organization comprised of AIDS,
trade and human rights activists, is seeking a Director of US Government
Relations. For more information about Health GAP and our current campaigns,
please refer to www.healthgap.org

The primary focus of this job is on devising and winning new or reformed
U.S. Government policies, including outreach and relations with relevant
policy makers in all branches of government; formulating innovative policy
solutions; convening, strengthening and coordinating diverse networks of
allies at the national and grassroots levels in support of Health GAP
campaign priorities and developing and coordinating overall and day-to-day
campaign strategies relating to U.S. policies.

Health GAP is deeply committed to fostering an affirming and inclusive,
multi-cultural, multi-ethnic environment for its staff, and core members.
Applicants are requested to include a description of how they will assist
Health GAP in creating this environment and to write about their commitment
to global justice in cover letters. People of color, people living with
HIV/AIDS and immigrants from the global South are strongly encouraged to
apply for this position.

A proven track record including a lead role in successful legislative or
policy campaigns, preferably at the federal level, is a must, and a
commitment to global social justice is a paramount requirement for the
position. We deeply value lived, personal experiences that will contribute
to our organization's culture and enhance our ability to win campaigns for
people with HIV/AIDS worldwide.

The ideal candidate should have existing relationships with key civil
society stakeholders in the global AIDS movement and with policy makers in
the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government.
Preferred candidates have five-plus years of experience in organizing,
advocacy, government relations, public health, policy or other relevant
areas. Candidates should be knowledgeable about the issues addressed in
Health GAP's campaign work. Instigating and maintaining frequent, regular
communication with federal policy makers is expected. Experience pitching
stories to journalists is a plus. Comfort with direct action tactics and
organizations is a bonus.

Duties include:
. Direct advocacy with U.S. policy makers; . Formulating policy
recommendations, crafting regulations and legislation; . Develop and direct
ongoing new policy and campaign initiatives focusing on U.S. policy and
policy makers; . Provide written strategic policy analysis; . Convening,
coordinating, and building networks of allies in support of Health GAP
priority campaigns; . Regularly attending in-person meetings in Washington,
DC multiple days out of the week; . Grassroots organizing and actions in
support of coordinated national campaign strategies, including national and
local actions, in collaboration with Grassroots Organizer; . Facilitating
direct access to decision makers by grassroots activists whenever possible;
. Working with Grassroots Organizer, build new activist groups in key
locations; . Assist in maintenance of Democracy in Action database; .
Materials production as needed; . Attend biweekly conference calls and
working group meetings; . Submitting monthly workplans and reports; . Attend
weekly staff calls, monthly in-person staff meetings and quarterly
organizational retreats.
Assist with:
. Advocacy related to international agencies such as the Global Fund to
Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria and UN agencies; . Solidarity efforts with allies
in the global South; . Communications efforts, including action alerts and
mobilization efforts; . Fundraising efforts.

Health GAP is unique in that we are a non-hierarchical organization with no
physical office, a steering committee that meets primarily by conference
call, and each of the staff develop home and travel-based schedules for
their work. However, we are prioritizing a candidate based primarily in
Washington, DC or the immediate surrounding area.
Applicants should be prepared for long and irregular hours, including some
weekends and holidays. Health GAP offers full health insurance, including
dental and basic vision.

Health GAP is committed to the principle of pay equity among staff so the
salary is between $50,000-$53,500 depending on local costs of living. March
1st, 2009 is the ideal start date.

Please send resume and cover letter to jflynn@... immediately.
Candidates will receive an email confirmation that their application was
received. If you do not receive this confirmation, please resend.
Informational phone calls are welcomed and encouraged. Please direct your
questions to Jennifer Flynn, Managing Director at (212) 537-0575 x 3.
Position will remain open until filled.




--
Jennifer Flynn
Managing Director
Health GAP (Global Access Project)
429 West 127th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10027
+1.212.537.0575 x 3
F: +1.212.937.5283
jflynn@...
www.healthgap.org
Help support our fight against the global AIDS pandemic
www.healthgap.org/donate.htm _______________________________________________
URBANTH-L mailing list
URBANTH-L@...
http://lists.ysu.edu/mailman/listinfo.cgi/urbanth-l

If you haven't already, read Ernest Hooper's Saturday column about Nancy Hamilton

http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/article979961.ece

 and read my Letter to the Editor, below.

To the Editor, St. Petersburg Times:

Ernest Hooper's column "Don't let addicts be victims yet again" (Times, Feb 28) moves me to say "Amen" in agreement with Nancy Hamilton, whom he quotes as saying "I think people will realize we are our brothers' keepers. If we don't take care of our communities and the people who live in them, we don't have anything." 

The concern goes well beyond the addicts that Hamilton and Hooper were talking about. The additional cuts that Florida legislators and county commissioners are threatening will hurt not only addiction services, but all manner of health and human services just at a time when the economic collapse, loss of jobs and income, drastically increases the need for those very services, not just in the abstract, but in our communities.

The closing of the Smithfield Foods plant moves 760 workers into the unemployed category, automatically putting more than 1,000 children into the at-risk category for abuse and neglect. Those families are our neighbors. That is only the tip of the iceberg in our community. Do we recognize that we must help them through sharing human services, counseling, mentoring, and meaningful education?

I don't see our legislators and commissioners seeking ways to increase the resources needed for "keeping" our brothers, our sisters, our children. Instead, I see them calling for easing construction permits and lowering environmental controls, in a foolish attempt to resuscitate the bubble of "development" that helped to cause the crash in the first place.

Our legislators and commissioners talk only of further cuts as if all our state and community resources are gone. That is only in their minds. Most of us still have houses, automobiles and incomes. In order to save our communities we are willing to pay taxes to ensure that those who have real needs � the jobless, the homeless, the disabled, the mentally ill, the addicts, and especially the children � get the services they need. We do want those taxes to be fair, however � and even progressive, so that those who have more should pay more.

--Alvin W. Wolfe

Lutz

Dear Members of the Anthropology Connections Committee and, in fact, all Anthro
Friends and connections:

I want to remind you that our out-going chair Elizabeth Bird has agreed to speak
at our luncheon meeting at Latam,  1913 Nebraska Avenue, Tampa, on Friday July
10. All are invited, it's a "dutch" lunch.

We want your participation and your help in finding ways to use all possible
resources to better connect the alums of Applied Anthropology not only with each
other but with a lot of others � "friends of anthropology."

We believe that the Department's Anthropology Connections Committee (ANTCONN)
can make better use of the Department of Anthropology web site to communicate
better about anthropology's connections with applied anthropologists (for
example the SunCoast Organization of Practicing Anthropologists [SCOPA), USF
Applied Anthropology Alumni The USF Anthropology Alumni Society, and friends of
anthropology (public persons who though not anthropologists themselves are
helpful to anthropology).

We think we could use the anthro web site to reach more people that we need to
reach, motivate, and energize.
We have had some discussion with webmaster Sue Regonini about AntConn's relation
with the Anthropology web site.

Dr. Bird's professional interests include the media in everyday life, "with
particular interests in the role of news and journalism in framing cultural
issues, and the relationship of media texts and audience practices."  We can use
that right here at home!

We are sure that Dr. Bird will be able to give us some great ideas  and that our
new department chair, Dr. Brent Weisman, will help us operationalize them.
--Alvin

Alvin W. Wolfe
Distinguished University Professor Emeritus
Department of Anthropology
4202 E. Fowler Avenue, SOC107
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL  33620-8100   813-974-0794

As a practicing anthropologist you spend a large portion of your expenses on insurance. If you are working for a firm, whether for profit or not, a large portion of your expenses go to insurance companies, to try to cover for health, liability, property, automobile or other risks. This is a serious part of America's costs of all services.  It wouldn't have to be that bad!

Declaration of Independence from the Insurance Industry

With gratitude to and respect for the founders of our great nation, I submit the following Declaration of Independence from control by the Insurance Industry.  The Version of the Declaration used for constructing and editing this document was found at The Constitution Society.

Alvin Wolfe, Lutz, Florida, awolfe1@...

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them, and to assume the station to which the laws of nature entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any system becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new system, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness and good health.

When a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce them under despotism it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such dominance, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the people of these United States; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their system of organizing health and other human services.

The history of the Insurance Industry is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of a greedy dominance over the people of the United States.

To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

The Insurance Industry has refused to submit to laws pertaining to national regulation, wholesome and necessary for the public good.

In the Nineteenth Century when the Government of the United States moved to regulate all industries against the tyranny of monopolistic practices, especially the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Insurance Industry claimed that it should not be regulated by the federal government because it was already regulated by the several states.

The uncontrolled growth of the Insurance Industry made it feasible for it to continue legal manipulations that maintained the Insurance Industry's freedom from control for decades, even after the Supreme Court ruled in 1945 that the Insurance Industry should be regulated as is every other industry.

Through major contributions to political campaigns the Insurance Industry enticed its representatives in Congress to pass the McCarran-Ferguson Act in 1945 specifically exempting its business from regulation under the Sherman Antitrust Act, the only industry so exempted.

The Insurance Industry continued to use its overwhelming financial advantage in the succeeding fifty years to get its spokespersons in the states and in the Congress of the United States to pass laws requiring citizens to purchase insurance of many kinds (automobile insurance, property insurance, professional liability insurance, etc.). We had to buy it from one of a panoply of companies regulated weakly by the several states. State regulation was too weak to protect buyers from exorbitant pricing.  Setting aside the monopoly aspects of the business itself, the use of public government force to require private transactions contravenes the rules of the Market as interpreted by Adam Smith.

The Insurance Industry creates false crises such as the tort reform "crisis" of the 1980s  which they use politically to justify raising premiums and ultimately increasing its share of financial resources. In 1986 alone 41 states passed laws limiting the ability of victims to sue and to collect damages if they won. The National Association of Attorneys General found, however,

that the causes of what was presented by the Insurance Industry as a national crisis lay within the Insurance Industry itself.

The Insurance Industry has over the years collaborated with other industries that have the wherewithal to buy political influence  � pharmaceutical, medical, hospital industries � to prevent passage of legislation of immediate and pressing importance  -- such as public health insurance.  Popular attempts to "reform" the American health system were heartlessly stopped in 1945, 1948, 1965, 1970, 1974, 1993, and 2009.  They were not only stopped but were turned to the advantage of the Insurance Industry. This  sector gave nearly $170 million to federal lawmakers in 2007 and 2008.  Senator Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee responsible for health care reform, collected $3,000,000 for his own Political Action Committee from 2003 to 2008.

We, therefore, as representatives of the people of the United States of America, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these states, solemnly publish and declare, that these United States are, and of right ought to be free from allegiance to the Insurance Industry and that as a free nation, we do have full power to levy taxes, contract alliances, establish and regulate commerce, including the insurance business.  In the words of our immortal forefathers, "for the support of this declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."

To see the names of the nearly one thousand persons who have already signed a petition to Congress to repeal the exemption Congress gave to the insurance industry in 1945, go to:   http://www.petitiononline.com/Lutz0001/petition.html

--Alvin Wolfe, Lutz

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jayne Howell [mailto:jhowell@...]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 3:42 PM
> To: kkoester@...; graiko@...; jmullooly@...;
> npgreenman@...; cguerron@...; nataliehanson@...;
> pebeverly@...; susan.mann@...; gillian grebler; Glenn
> Brown; wapapresident@...
> Cc: Jayne Howell
> Subject: Re: LPO Information for the SfAA Newsletter
>
> Hello again:
>
> Don't mean to clog your mailbox, but I did want to remind you that
> there's room in the LPO column for information about events you may be
> planning for fall, a recap of events held this summer, or an
> invitation to members to contact you for more information.
>
> Please send any text to me by the 9th.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Best,
> Jayne
>
>
> On Jul 21, 2009, at 3:19 PM, Jayne Howell wrote:
>
> > Hello everyone:
> >
> > I just received a request from Tim Wallace for information for the
> > LPO column in the August 2009 SfAA newsletter.  If you would like to
> > announce upcoming events, invite SfAA members to contact you, or
> > write up a few paragraphs about the importance of LPOs or anything
> > else you consider relevant for the column, please let me know by the
> > 5th of August so that I can relay the information to Tim.
> >
> > Thanks very much.
> >
> > Best,
> > Jayne
> >
>
>
>
> Please note: E-mail communications sent to and from the Children’s
> Board of Hillsborough County are subject to the public records laws of
> Florida.


Please note: E-mail communications sent to and from the Children’s Board of
Hillsborough County are subject to the public records laws of Florida.

Dear SCOPA members, AntConn Committee members, Anthro faculty and others:

This is a reminder of the Dutch Lunch AntConn meeting scheduled for September 9,
at Latam at el Centro Asturiano, 1913 Nebraska Avenue.

The meeting was originally announced in the  report on our July 10 AntConn
Meeting that was sent to as many alums and friends that I could reach
electronically.  I don't have a formal  agenda, but the number one thing we want
to do is get the alumni (and friends) involved in the upcoming Applied
Anthropology Colloquium scheduled for Friday, October 23.

  If you need a copy of that  report on the July 10 meeting that detailed  what
our interests and possibilities are, let me know and I will send you one. The
main thing is to improve connections among anthropologists, students, alums,
faculty,  and our friends.

--Alvin



Alvin W. Wolfe
Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, and chair of the Ant Conn Committee
of the
Department of Anthropology
4202 E. Fowler Avenue, SOC107
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL  33620-8100   813-974-0794

Does anyone know of a community organization where I can volunteer? I am a
graduate student at UCF and I am taking an Applied Anthropology course. I really
would like to volunteer at an organization that focuses on culture or
anthropology in some way. I live in Orlando, but I am willing to commute any
where in Central Florida on the weekend just for the experience.

Thank you