A crisis kept quiet.

I've been on the hunt for more blogs that are my niche- be that D.C. area, women's interest, progressive politics, or international health -- I'm hungry. I came across one mentioned in Utne magazine today (feminism 2.0 article) feministing.com

I immediately read the second story (as of now) regarding an op-ed ran in the LA Times entitled "What rape crisis?" 2/25/08. After reading this piece, the op ed, the source article, and all 92 comments on feministing I was prompted to write the following. It is personal, real, raw, and well quite frankly, not something I've shared like this before.

A far too common tale- any college campus, any semester.
I have a personal story that may help the doubters out there; and I invite victim advocates to use as an example. I am a strong willed woman, not a victim or passive by any stretch of the imagination. In college, I maintained a stellar academic record and balanced extracurriculars. I helped found a national advocacy organization and participated in everything from marching band to student government.

I made the decision when I turned 18 to no longer engage in sexual intercourse until marriage (Sure, I was pressured into that decision when I was 11 by my church, but I finally felt like it was the right decision for me in my religious walk, and my high school boyfriend wholeheartedly supported that decision). Jump ahead three years to when I was spending a semester studying in a different city: I became the unthinkable 1 in 4 victim.

I had two male peers escort me back to campus from an off-campus party. I knew them from the cafeteria and conversations in the dorms. We were what you would consider casual acquaintances. Back on campus after the party, we shared wine and other drinks- and I became pretty intoxicated quickly (I wasn't a big drinker, and I had the false security of being in my dorm room). One of my male friends hung around- (where was my roommate? I ask now)and eventually led me down one stop on the elevator to his room. I don't remember agreeing to go with him or how he convinced me it would be a good idea at midnight on a school night to go hang out in his room. I don't remember that part- and the next thing I do remember is horrifying. He was holding me down by the chest and what I considered then as having sex with me. Coming to at that point was frightening. I didn't know what to do- it was dark, I was confused, I tensed up and stayed quiet. I waited for him to fall asleep and then slipped out of the room at some point in the night. As I was leaving- I noticed his roommate asleep in the bed no more than 6 feet away.(How did he not hear anything- was he used to this?)

I didn't call a rape crisis center or go to the police. Why? Looking back I think I blamed myself. I walked away from this encounter and blamed the alcohol and my foolishness for getting into such a situation. I called a couple girlfriends that morning and tried to describe what happened- and they didn't call it rape either.

The next couple times I saw him- I tensed up, felt a rush of adrenaline, and was so embarrassed. Then I figured, I messed up- I ruined my vow of celibacy- what does it matter and tried to make things right by talking to the guy. I thought if I tried to develop a relationship with him it would make it somehow ok, and take away the shame- that if this guy wanted to have me as a girlfriend and exercised poor judgment that once that it could be forgiven. Instead, I wound up engaging in a sexual act a couple weeks later and feeling even worse about the situation afterwards.

I immediately fell into depression- I gained 30 pounds in 3 months and felt so alone- yet I didn't know why. It took 6 months for me to realize that my experience was rape. (sparked by a print story on an Afghani woman gang raped during the war I had an emotional outburst and cried for days- somehow I realized that pain and unfairness struck a chord deep within me). You see, I always thought rape was a physically violent act and you would most likely die from it. Apparently, my closest girlfriends thought that too. Once I realized that it was rape, I sought counseling- and started to piece my life back together. After researching more and talking to more of my peers bluntly about it- I found a handful of my friends who had been raped or otherwise assaulted- a few of them spoke out at events like "Take back the night", a couple were pressing charges, but most shrugged and said it's a part of life that we have to deal with-- and many more didn't even consider drunken encounters with little recollection and no consent as assault and rape. When I finally told my mother what had happened she blamed the alcohol and said that is a part of life. She too has been misled and quite possibly had a similar experience to respond so coldly (when my mother would usually threaten anyone's life who hurt me).

In summary- though I am an intelligent, strong woman I was victimized and raped by an acquaintance and did not consider it rape at first. I did not have a working definition that occurs in reality- I did not have the resources or tools to combat the violence taken out against me or the support system to overcome it. Now, 4 years later I am able to say that the rape experience does not define me and I am so much more than that- and I am finally at a point where I think sharing my story- though it is still painful, embarrassing, and not the "physical violent" rape you see on CSI, but I believe my story is more common than pop culture's perpetuated misleading definition of and about rape.

Understanding the mortgage crisis...

This site clearly explains just how f***ed we are in a nice visual format. Hey, it's a start.

Sayonara SotP

I'm saddened to report that one of the best blogs, if not the best, in South Florida has been disbanded. Stuck on the Palmetto has shut down because of really a media blitz. Read about it here on Mayo's blog post "Blog eat blog world"

Now there is just a sad little goodbye note and strange video clip on sotp.I'll keep the link up on my blog roll for awhile longer.

the most productive thing I did all day

GJAS Leadership Committee self-nomination

I first heard about the dire conditions of children’s health internationally at the launch of SCCS in the fall of 2002 and it changed my college major, career path, and my worldview. I aligned myself with Global Justice and served on the SCCS coordinating committee for a year and started a local chapter at the University of Miami which hosted our schools first “die-in” (which quickly became a biannual tradition), a meeting with Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and sent five delegates to a national conference. In the spring of 2004, I also interned at the GJ office, but through the years Global Justice gave me a whole lot more in return. The unique power of students in advocacy and the role they can play in reshaping the way development funds are facilitated motivated me to remain in non-profit activism throughout college and into my current job. I was thrilled to see that alumni started to organize and took a couple days off work to fly up for the GJAS planning conference this past fall.

The GJAS can serve an important function for GJ’s growth and sustainability as well as mentoring college campaigns. Serving on the leadership committee would be an exciting way to stay involved with the efforts of GJ while setting up the system for the GJAS to operate. The team of alumni planning the GJAS are great leaders, creative thinkers, and efficient planners with a wealth of experience and I would be honored to work with them to develop the GJAS into a functional part of the organization which can benefit students and strengthen the organization as a whole. Right now, I am out of the child health sphere on a daily basis, and would love the GJAS to be my productive outlet to follow global health policy and partake in GJ actions. Specifically I would like to serve the GJAS leadership committee as the communications or events and programming chair. In my current job I plan events and run communications, so both positions appeal to me and I would love to volunteer for either role.

Overall, I credit Global Justice for giving me a foundation of an “empowerment” rather than charity focus in development work as well as personally giving me leadership opportunities and practical tools for mobilizing students and running successful targeted campaigns – be it for child health, or my work today in the labor movement. I hope to continue participating in Global Justice efforts and would like this opportunity to be a member of the GJAS inaugural leadership committee.

business woman?

This sun-sentinel story shows how one has decided to abuse the system for her own gain.

I'm not sure why I'm posting it-- something about it though made me chuckle. Hey, though she was exploiting those in need, she did have a good idea working out for her there-- almost vigilante justice getting people in the country, but then she got greedy.

(don't try this at home).

Liberating Fisher Island video

Whose Beach? Our Beach!!!

Fisher Island Liberation Day a Huge Success!

With more than 200 community members demonstrating in support of Fisher Island workers last Saturday, we were able to bring a message of justice to Fisher Island and hope to Fisher Island workers struggling to support their families and facing discrimination on a daily basis.

Please see the following press coverage of the day as well as photos from the action and a short video which captures the challenge of swimming to shore and the excitement of marching through the island.

While we as members of the community were denied access to the public marina slip, we did make it to the beach and even found the public pathway to the ferry. Once at the ferry as you will see in the video, we were not allowed to board to safely exit the island and were forced to swim back to our boats.

The workers are excited that we made it to shore and want to continue bringing the community presence as often and loudly as possible until Fisher Island addresses the abusive treatment workers face and improve the conditions on the island.

View the photos from the day of action: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlosmiller/sets/72157603237226769/

Watch the Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psL61pVP8O4

Media Coverage:

1. “Finding Way to Fisher Island” Miami Herald. By Nicholas Spangler 11/18/07

2. “Fantasy Island’s super-rich face upstairs, downstairs rebellion” The Times. By Jacqui Goddard. 11/19/07

3. “Downtrodden Workers Dirty on the Filthy Rich of Fantasy Island” The Australian. (Crosspost of The Times article by Jacqui Goddard) 11/20/07

4. NBC6 coverage. Reporter Ian Wood. 11/17-11/18 http://media.vmsnews.com/MonitoringReports/111907/678006/A001237597/

5. World Have Your Say. BBC blog. “Fisher Island” 11/19/07

6. Other blog hits include: “The Union News,” “Critical Miami,” “Miamism,” “Stuck on the Palmetto,” and “Community Benefits Coalition” all link found here.

7. Rustbelt Radio. Pittsburgh, PA. 11/20/07 Interview regarding action and campaign. http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2007/11/28387.php?cover=print#Rustbelt_Radio_for_November_19_2

8. Radio Caracol. Miami. 11/20/07 Interview regarding action and overall campaign.

Finding way to Fisher Island

November 18, 2007
BY NICHOLAS SPANGLER

For over a year the Service Employees International Union has been trying to organize the 360 housekeepers, groundskeepers and security guards of Fisher Island, a private community so exclusive you can only get to it by yacht, helicopter or private ferry.

The Fisher Island Community Association (FICA), responsible for maintaining the island's common areas, ferries and island security, argues its employees -- who earn an average of $13.81 an hour -- don't want or need a union, and has fought to keep the SEIU out.

The fight has involved arresting protesters off the MacArthur Causeway, until recently the closest they could get; an incident aired on YouTube.com about a stolen SEIU banner; and the Ferarri driver who allegedly called a ferry operator a peasant.

But on Saturday afternoon came the invasion.

Nine vessels took off from Jimbo's, the bar on Virginia Key, and steered as close to the island as the law permits. Thirty swimmers swam to shore, unfurled their protest banners and started a racket.

Chants of Justice Now! and ¡Si, se puede! echoed off the $5 million condominiums as they never had before. Airhorns exploded, megaphones blurted.

SEIU lawyers had found a way onto the island. Turns out the beach in the most exclusive community in South Florida, composed of sugar-white sand imported from the Bahamas, is public.

Not only that: the covenant developers made with the county years ago seems to guarantee public right of way on a pathway leading from the ferry landing to the beach.

''It feels good to be back,'' said Wisly Jonatas, a security guard who says he was fired earlier this month for violating island policy on the ferry -- walking through the residents' parked cars to get to the employee cabin, an action forbidden because of the danger to the cars' paint jobs.

''They're nice cars,'' said Jonatas, who now works at the Port of Miami. ``Mercedes, Bentleys. But I was tired.''

Yellow plastic tape lined the beach, behind which stood dozens of security guards, Miami-Dade police and residents, some with cameras, some in golf carts designed to look like Bentleys. There were few smiles and no words exchanged.

When the swimmers walked down the beach toward the public access path, security guards kept pace. More waited at the path, which turned out was not much of a path at all: more yellow tape had been laid down on walkways and on the side of Fisher Island Drive, too narrow for two people to walk comfortably.

It did, per the law, extend to the ferry landing. Almost. The tape ended outside the security office. This created a bottleneck of sandy-footed chanting protesters. More residents in fancy golf carts showed up, including one woman wearing a three-quarter length fur coat and a fur hat. She drove a cart painted in tongues of flame, that looked like a dragster.

Mark James, FICA president, emerged from the security office and after discussion allowed the protesters to continue to the ferry landing. The path should have, after all, extended to the ferry terminal area -- James grudgingly admitted as much in a recent letter to the union, which you can read online at MiamiHerald.com -- but there would be no ferry ride back to land. The protesters turned around, walked back out to the beach and swam out to the boats that had brought them. Nobody was arrested.

It seems the covenant provided for a public access path, but no actual access; the path is a path to nowhere.

''That's correct,'' said Jose Cancela, a public relations man recently hired by FICA, later that afternoon.

Cancela didn't feel much had been accomplished. A publicity-hungry union had chosen a fat target, the richest community in the United States, populated by people who are sensitive, if not to the cause of social justice, then at least to the cause of their own quality of life and their privacy; but they'd only mustered 30 protesters, some flown in and some high school students.

''It's obvious that the employees are very happy,'' he said. ``They were fully guaranteed every right [to protest] and they chose not to.''

This was almost true. Housekeeper Marette Casseus came to see the boats off but didn't swim, because she injured her knee in an accident at work in the summer. She'd been making $8.50 at the time. 'Nobody ever called me, even one day, to ask me, `Marette, how do you feel? How are you?' They proved to me they don't care.''
###

Fantasy Island’s super-rich face upstairs, downstairs rebellion

November 19, 2007

Jacqui Goddard in Miami

It is America’s wealthiest postcode – 216 acres of tropical gorgeousness and palatial living reachable only by private ferry, yacht or helicopter.

Surrounded by sand imported from the Bahamas, planted with orchids and palms brought from the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, and a-twitter with the sound of caged toucans and macaws that enjoy daily outings with a bird walker, Fisher Island is known as Fantasy Island. So monied are residents of the enclave, three miles off Miami, it is said that if you waved at everyone you saw in a ten-minute drive there, you would have waved at more than $1 billion (£500 million).

But those who tend its manicured lawns and golf course, guard its residents’ riches, shine their Bentleys and Lamborghinis and wash their champagne glasses for as little as £40 a day, have had enough.

In a case highlighting the upstairs, downstairs hierarchy, its mainly black and Hispanic workers accuse management and some home owners of racial discrimination, abusive treatment and unfair wages.

“When you have the super-rich who can have a little isolated fantasy island of their own, they unfortunately develop a plantation mentality, and that’s what the workers are dealing with; people who see them as workers, not as human beings,” said Magdaleno Rose-Avila, executive director of Interfaith Workers Justice, an advocacy group.

Fisher Island is the epitome of the growing divide between rich and poor, says the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and it has become the battleground for a workers rights campaign.

Claiming that their dignity and human rights have been violated, the SEIU and 19 employees have filed a class-action complaint with the Miami-Dade County Equal Opportunity Board alleging, in particular, that Fisher Island’s private ferry service, which makes the 15-minute trip to and from the mainland, exercises segregationist policies. “There is terrible discrimination on that ferry. When you get on, it’s whites on one side, blacks on the other,” Mariette Casseus, a housekeeper, said.

While residents relax in an air-conditioned lounge, employees must spend the trip in a separate room whose cooling system is often broken, they say. If they do not board the ferry before residents have driven their cars on, they are not allowed to squeeze past the vehicles to reach their room because they might sully the bodywork with smudges or fingerprints.

“Rather, the employee passengers are forced to stand under an outside awning that fails to protect them from heavy rain, debilitating heat, severe wind and ship fumes,” the complaint alleges. Seshma Sheth, of the Miami Workers Centre, said: “We are seeing two Americas, we are seeing two different worlds and Fisher Island typifies that. To get on that ferry, it’s basically taking a trip back in time. You are going back to a racist and backward time . . . We market Miami as a city of the future and then we have this island that’s just a throwback to our past.”

The first owner of Fisher Island - created by dredging the sea off Miami Beach in 1905 – was Dana Dorsey, south Florida’s first black millionaire.

In 1925, it was bought by William Kissam Vanderbilt, a member of one of America’s wealthiest families, who built a winter estate that is now a luxury hotel.

The public are not allowed on to the island unless invited and the privacy of its mainly white residents – largely financiers, corporate executives and property barons with little public name recognition who live there part-time – is fiercely guarded. Aides to the President of Venezuela, who visited in the 1980s, commented that it was easier to gain access to the White House than to Fisher Island.

Oprah Winfrey, Julia Roberts, Boris Becker, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, the founder of the Samsonite luggage empire and the heir to the Bacardi rum fortune have all, at some time, had homes there.

The latest census, in 2000, gave the population as 467 and the island operates as a private club where cash is not required, just a membership card. It has eighteen tennis courts, two marinas and a heliport. Some residents are even rumoured to have paid for separate apartments for pampered pets.

The island’s management says that it works hard to address workers’ issues. But in a protest staged at the weekend, 100 SEIU activists “invaded” Fisher Island’s exclusive beaches to protest against the community’s perceived social failings. “Because they are so isolated, Fisher Island residents think they can wall themselves off from the poverty they create,” Hiram Ruiz, an SEIU representative, said. “We set out to make a point: there should be only one Miami, not one Miami for the wealthy and another for the rest of us.”

Island strife

$17.5m cost of a 8,300 sq ft seaside property

$236,000 average income per capita

467 number of residents

51 average age of residents

0.3 size in square miles of Fisher Island

Source: Times database, fisherisland.com

###

Downtrodden workers dirty on the filthy rich of Fantasy Island

Jacqui Goddard, Miami | November 20, 2007

IT is the US's wealthiest postcode - 87.5ha of tropical gorgeousness and palatial living reachable only by private boat or helicopter.

Picture: AFP

(Repost of The Times article in The Australian found here)

BLOG HITS

BBC Blog: World Have Your Say

Monday, November 19, 2007
http://worldhaveyoursay.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/monday-19th-november/
Fisher Island
America’s wealthiest area (once home to stars like Oprah Winfrey, Jula Roberts, Robert De Niro) has come under the spotlight…Fisher Island, better known as Fantasy Island is in the midst of a racial segregation row…Workers who are employed by wealthy residents on the Island say they are being discriminated against.
Http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2896782.ece
In 2007 should these workers made to feel like second class citizens just because they are not as wealthy? Or is this kind of divide inevitable because of the wealth divide? Is Fisher Island being left behind the rest of America because of it’s racial practice?

The Union News
“SEIU organizers boat, swim to class-warfare protest”
http://theunionnews.blogspot.com/2007/11/seiu-organizers-boat-swim-to-class.html
(Posted Herald article. )

Critical Miami
http://criticalmiami.com/
(Posted Herald article. )

Stuck on the Palmetto
“Fisher Island Protests”
http://stuckonthepalmetto.blogspot.com/2007/11/fisher-island-protests.html
(SOTP featured the Herald article, the resident snatching the sign you tube clip and the short youtube clip of the beach invasion with promises to cover more. )

Community Benefits Coalition
“Boatloads of Activists”
http://www.developmentthatworks.org/?p=136
(Video of invasion)
On November 17th, 2007, several boatloads of activists pulled up to Fisher Island in Miami-Dade County, the wealthiest zip code in the country; an island accessible only by boat or ferry.

The activists, organized by Service Employees International Union, hopped off the boats and swam up to the exclusive and segregated beaches of Fisher Island, which under Florida law is open to the public.

Then they marched through the public-funded streets of Fisher Island, demanding better treatment and wages to the workers who clean and maintain the buildings on the island.

Miamism
“Fisher Island Invasion Update”
http://www.miamism.com/2007/11/19/fisher-island-invasion-update