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| Open Letter to Sarah Palin from a Community Organizer
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 Huffington Post - September 12, 2008
Sarah Palin, I'd like to introduce you to a woman named Jo Ann Gibson
Robinson, who passed away in 1992. Based upon your recent comments
about community organizers, I'm certain you've never heard of her. Most
people haven't, and most people don't know a whole lot about the
principles and history of organizing. But unlike you, most people don't
go out of their way to disparage a group who has done so much to make
this country great.
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| Meet the Wealth Gap
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The Nation - June 30, 2008
For a delivery worker, perched on a bicycle with plastic bags of food
dangling from each handlebar, Manhattan's East Side offers many
opportunities for a trip to the emergency room. I learn this one May
afternoon as I trail 26-year-old Apolinar Perez, a chubby-faced Mexican
immigrant who skillfully steers his black mountain bike through the
chaos. A taxi switches lanes without warning, nearly clipping my front
wheel.
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| The Good-Behavior Bribe
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New York Magazine, October 28, 2007
At 5:30 in the morning, Ruddy Mieses, one
of the first participants in Michael Bloomberg's radical new
antipoverty plan, parks his rented white Crown Victoria in front of a
forbidding brick complex in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and
takes stock of his finances. The livery-cab driver's
ten-and-a-half-hour shift has earned him $145. Not too bad.
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| The United Nations of Brooklyn
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The New York Times, October 21, 2007
Hudoykul Hafizov, a soft-spoken, slightly built immigrant from
Uzbekistan, works as inventory manager at Silver Rod Pharmacy in
Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and he has a favorite joke: "A person who knows three languages is trilingual. Someone who knows two languages is bilingual. But do you know what they call a person who speaks only one language?"
Pausing for a beat, Hafizov replied triumphantly to his own question: "American!" |
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| Dark Hopes for Peace
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 Brooklyn Rail - July/August 2007
On a gorgeous late afternoon I follow an energetic boy through his
father's desert garden on a hillside. It has been another sweltering
day, but by now the weather is cooling off nicely out here in the
country. As the orange sun hovers low the sky continues to turn darker
shades of blue, and I stumble over rocks in order to keep up with the
child and his dog.
Below us is a valley. In the distance
one can make out two villages, to our left and right. "Do you ever go
over there?" I ask, wiping a slight sweat from my forehead. |
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| Immigrants Push Western Union to Share the Wealth
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The Nation - May 11, 2007
For Mother's Day, Martha Ugarte sent $100 from Los Angeles to her
67-year-old mother in Oaxaca, Mexico. For this, she paid $14.95 to
Western Union, and lost another $2 in the exchange rate commission.
It's this 17 percent fee that has her outraged, and it explains why she
decided to travel across the country to protest outside a midtown
Manhattan skyscraper on May 10, where Western Union was holding its
first shareholder meeting since spinning off from parent company First
Data in 2006.
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| Alan, Alien
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 New York Magazine - April 17, 2006
On Saturdays, when Alan's father works a twelve-hour shift as a cook at
a nearby restaurant, his best friend, Daniel, comes over to play. If
it's warm they run about, and if it's cold they sprawl out on the
mattress in Alan's bedroom, which he shares with his parents and
younger sister, and play video games. It is cold right now—two homeless
men will be found frozen to death tomorrow in Brooklyn—so they are
inside, and Alan's 9-year-old face, normally gentle and wrinkle-free,
is stuck in a grimace. He's losing the fight.
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