Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
Stranger Than Fiction News was live. Follow
August 1, 2018
BREAKING: FLORIDA RED TIDE OUTBREAK SICKENS THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE AND DEVASTATES MARINE LIFE – BEACHES LINED WITH DEAD TURTLES, MANATEES AND FISH
BREAKING: FLORIDA RED TIDE OUTBREAK SICKENS THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE AND DEVASTATES MARINE LIFE – BEACHES LINED WITH DEAD TURTLES, MANATEES AND FISH
Posted by Stranger Than Fiction News on Wednesday, August 1, 2018
Medicare for All’s potential savings has us hungry for more, so here’s a breakdown of how it saves America money and provides better care for all of us… using donuts.
Your Donut Intake Will Not Be Limited Under Medicare for All
Medicare for All's potential savings has us hungry for more, so here's a breakdown of how it saves America money and provides better care for all of us… using donuts.
Posted by MoveOn on Friday, August 3, 2018
By Nafeez Ahmed, orig. published by Insurge Intelligence August 2, 2018
Published by INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded investigative journalism platform for people and planet. Support us to report where others fear to tread.
The extreme weather events of the summer of 2018 are not just symptoms of climate breakdown. They are early stage warnings of a protracted process of civilisational collapse as industrial societies face some of the opening symptoms of having already breached the limits of a safe climate. These events are a taste of things to come on a business-as-usual trajectory. They elicit a sense of how industrial civilisational systems are vulnerable to collapse due to escalating climate impacts. And they highlight the urgent necessity of communities everywhere undertaking steps to achieve a systemic civilisational transition toward post-capitalist systems which can survive and prosper after fossil fuels.
This summer’s extreme weather has hit home some stark realities.
Climate disaster is not slated to happen in some far-flung theoretical future.
It’s here, and now.
Droughts threatening food supplies, floods in Japan, extreme rainfall in the eastern US, wildfires in California, Sweden and Greece.
In the UK, holiday-makers trying to cross the Channel tunnel to France faced massive queues when air conditioning facilities on trains failed due to the heatwave. Thousands of people were stranded for five hours in the 30C heat without water.
In southern Laos, heavy rains led to a dam collapse, rendering thousands of people homeless and flooding several villages.
‘World On Fire’: Climate Breakdown
Most of the traditional media did not report these incidents as symptoms of an evolving climate crisis.
Some commentators did point out that the events might be linked to climate change.
None at all acknowledged that these extreme weather events might be related to the fact that since 2015, we have essentially inhabited a planet that is already around 1C warmer than the pre-industrial average: and that therefore, we are already, based on the best available science, inhabiting a dangerous climate.
Global warming reaches 1°C above preindustrial, warmest in more than 11,000 years
The breaching of the 1C tipping point — which former NASA climate science chief James Hansen pinpointed as the upper limit to retain a safe climate — was followed this March by atmospheric carbon concentrations reaching, for the first time since records began, 400 ppm (parts per million).
Once again, the safe upper limit highlighted by Hansen and colleagues — 350 ppm — has already been breached.
Yet these critical climate milestones have been breached consecutively with barely a murmur from either the traditional and alternative media.
The recent spate of catastrophic events are not mere anomalies. They are the latest signifiers of a climate system that is increasingly out of balance — a system that was already fatally struck off balance through industrial overexploitation of natural resources centuries ago.
The Climate “Doomsday” is Already Here
But for the most part, the sense-making apparatus by which we understand what is happening in the world — the Global Media-Industrial Complex (a network of media communications portals comprised of both traditional corporate and alternative outlets) — has failed to convey these stark realities to the vast majority of the human population.
We are largely unaware that 19th and early 20th century climate change induced by industrial fossil fuel burning has already had devastating impacts on the regional climate of Sub-Saharan Africa; just as it now continues to have escalating devastating impacts on weather systems all over the world.
The reality which we are not being told is this: these are the grave consequences of inhabiting a planet where global average temperatures are roughly 1C higher than the pre-industrial norm.
Sadly, instead of confronting this fundamentally existential threat to the human species — one which in its fatal potential implications point to the bankruptcy of the prevailing paradigms of social, political and economic organisation (along with the ideology and value-systems associated with them) — the preoccupation of the Global Media-Industrial Complex is at worst to focus human mind and behaviour on consumerist trivialities.
At best, its focus is to pull us into useless, polarising left-right dichotomies and forms of impotent outrage that tend to distract us from taking transformative systemic action, internally (within and through our own selves, behaviour psychologies, beliefs, values, consciousness and spirit) and externally (in our relationships as well as our structural-institutional and socio-cultural contexts).
These are the ingredients for the beginning of civilisational collapse processes. In each of these cases, we see how extreme weather events induced by climate change creates unanticipated conditions for which international, national and local institutions are woefully unprepared.
In order to respond, massive new expenditures are involved, including emergency mobilisations as well as new spending to try to build more robust adaptations that might be better prepared ‘next time’.
But the reality is that we are already failing to avert an ongoing trajectory of global temperatures rising to not merely a dangerous 2C (imagine a doubling intensity of the sorts of events we’ve seen this summer happening year on year); but, potentially, as high as 8C (the catastrophic impacts of which would render much of the planet uninhabitable).
EXCLUSIVE: Liberal philanthropy is dooming the planet to climate disaster, documents reveal
In these contexts, we can begin to see how a protracted collapse process might unfold. Such a collapse process does not in itself guarantee the ‘end of the world’, or even simply the disappearance of civilisation.
What it does imply is that specific political, economic, social, military and other institutional systems are likely to become increasingly overwhelmed due to rising costs of responding to unpredictable and unanticipated climate wild cards.
It should be noted that as those costs are rising, we are simultaneously facing diminishing economic returns from our constant overexploitation of planetary resources, in terms of fossil fuels and other natural resourcs.
Govt economic advisor warns British defence planners that growth is ending
In other words, in coming decades, business-as-usual implies a future of tepid if not declining economic growth, amidst escalating costs of fossil fuel consumption, compounded by exponentially accelerating costs of intensifying climate impacts as they begin to erode and then pummel and then destroy the habitable infrastructure of industrial civilization as we know it.
Collapse does not arrive in this scenario as a singular point of terminal completion. Rather, collapse occurs as a a series of discrete but consecutive and interconnected amplifying feedback processes by which these dynamics interact and worsen one another.
Earth System Disruption (ESD) — the biophysical processes of climate, energy and ecological breakdown — increasingly lead to Human System Destabilisation (HSD). HSD in turn inhibits our capacity to meaningfully respond and adapt to the conditions of ESD. ESD, meanwhile, simply worsens. This, eventually, leads to further HSD. The cycle continues as a self-reinforcing amplifying feedback loop, and each time round the cycle comprises a process of collapse.
Failing States, Collapsing Systems – BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence | Nafeez Mosaddeq
This model, which I developed in my Springer Energy Briefs study Failing States, Collapse Systems, demonstrates that the type of collapse we are likely to see occurring in coming years is a protracted, cyclical process that worsens with each round. It is not a final process, and it is not set-in-stone. At each point, the possibility of intervening at critical points to mitigate, ameliorate, adapt, or subvert still exists. But it gets harder and harder to do so effectively the deeper into the collapse cycle we go.
One primary sympton of the collapse process is that as it deepens, the capacity of the prevailing civilisational configuration to understand what is happening becomes increasingly diminished.
Far from waking up and taking action, we see that the human species is becoming increasingly mired in obsessing over geopolitical and economic competition, self-defeating acts of ‘self’-preservation (where the ‘self’ is completely misidentified), and focused entirely on projecting problems onto the ‘Other’.
A key signifier of how insidious this is, is in yourself. Look to see how your critical preoccupations are not with yourself or those with which you identify; but that and those whom you oppose and consider to be ‘wrong.’
Only ‘collective intelligence’ can help us stave off an uninhabitable planet
At core, the critical precondition for effective action at this point is for each of us to radically subvert and challenge these processes through a combination of internal introspection and outward action.
In ourselves, the task ahead is for each of us to become the seeds of that new, potential civilisational form — ‘another world’ which is waiting to be birthed not through some far-flung ‘revolution’ in the future, but here and now through the transformations we undertake in ourselves and in our contexts.
We first wake up. We wake up to the reality of what is happening in the world. We then wake up to our own complicity in that reality and truly face up to the intricate acts of self-deception we routinely undertake to conceal ourselves from this complicity. We then look to mobilise ourselves anew to undo these threads of complicity where feasible, and to create new patterns of work and play that connect us back with the Earth and the Cosmos. And we work to connect our own re-patterning with the re-patterning work of others, with a view to plant the seed-networks of the next system — a system which is not so much ‘next’, but here and now, emergent in the fresh choices we make everyday.
So… welcome. Welcome to a 1C planet. Welcome to the fight to save ourselves from ourselves.
Teaser photo credit: Greek Red Cross workers discovered 26 bodies in the devastated resort village of Mati near Athens after horrendous wildfires
Matt Bai August 2, 2018
If you’re too young to have experienced the 1990’s firsthand, if you have no memory of the O.J. Simpson verdict or the night Diana died or someone named Jewel, then you’re just going to have to take my word for this, because I know it’s going to sound bizarre and kooky, kind of like the QAnon conspiracy, but I promise you it’s true.
Long ago, in his prime, Rudy Giuliani was an important and visionary politician who probably had more influence on modern American cities than anyone else, for better and for worse.
I know, you see him on TV now, appearing as the president’s lawyer, and you think, “Hey, when did Montgomery Burns become a real person, and why is he having an entire conversation with himself like he’s hearing voices?” I get it.
Twenty years is a long time in American politics. Believe it or not, we once bounced a speaker of the House from office because he sidestepped the ethics rules on a book deal. I mean, that wouldn’t even trend on Twitter now.
But back in the mid-90’s, when he was still a respected former prosecutor with a trademark comb-over, Giuliani turned around a city that a lot of people had come to think was no longer governable. To a New York brought low by crack and corruption and neglect, the new mayor brought a ruthless kind of metrics and accountability.
Don’t let these liberals who lived there in the 90’s, as I did, tell you how dark and despairing life was under the repressive Giuliani regime. They disdained Giuliani, but secretly they loved his mayoralty. They branded him heartless and trashed him at dinner parties, then slept blissfully above quiet, well-patrolled streets where the subway rumbled reliably and the garbage didn’t sit around for weeks on end.
That’s why, despite being a Republican in a city dominated by Democrats, Rudy won reelection with almost 60 percent of the vote. Mayors all over America openly copied Giuliani’s data-driven approach.
Rudy’s popularity plummeted during his second term, as allegations of excess overshadowed his achievements. I first interviewed him at the low point, in 1999, when the police shooting of an unarmed black man named Amadou Diallo had ignited the city and shaken his mayoralty. Rudy sat stone-faced in the living room of Gracie Mansion, summoning all the contrition he could muster.
But then came the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the memorable images of him stalking through the downtown dust, barking out orders. When he left office a few months later, at 57, he was as close to a national hero as a politician can get.
That would have been enough for most people — celebrity, adoration, easy ways to get rich. For a guy with Giuliani’s ambition and grand sense of destiny, however, the post-mayoralty wasn’t so easy to navigate.
He had wanted to run for Senate against Hillary Clinton in 2000 — and did, for a while anyway, until he got prostate cancer and then decided to use a news conference to let his wife know he was leaving her for another woman. That was pretty much the end of that.
He remained a close ally of George W. Bush, but there just wasn’t a perfect fit in national Republican politics for an ethnic New Yorker who as mayor crashed on the couch of gay friends for a while. Giuliani was a useful guy to trot out at primetime during national conventions, but he wasn’t exactly Family Research Council material.
In 2007, Giuliani decided he could overcome all that by jumping into the Republican presidential field himself. For a long while, he led in every national poll.
But then Iowa spurned him, and so did New Hampshire, and he hung around the race for months, looking for the state that would validate him. He won zero delegates.
Eight years later, Giuliani saw another window of opportunity, casting himself as a shameless apologist for his longtime friend Donald Trump. He hoped his unflinching loyalty would land him in the running for attorney general or secretary of state. It didn’t.
Apparently, though, Rudy was unfazed. Because when Trump found himself in real trouble earlier this year, Giuliani offered himself up for the arena yet again, this time as the president’s counsel and mouthpiece.
This is what it’s come to: the sad last act of a once serious man. The final, cringey chapter of the eventual biography, as painful to read as it will be to write.
You’ve seen the calamitous routine, I’m sure. Rudy proclaiming that Trump directed a payment to a porn star to shut her up, and that Trump fired FBI Director James Comey because of Russia, then having to walk back both. Rudy characterizing Michael Cohen, the president’s chief confidant for many years, as a lifelong liar — a few months after describing him as an “honest, honorable lawyer.”
Rudy saying collusion isn’t a crime, and casually referring to a secret campaign meeting, before contradicting himself and claiming it never happened. Rudy confidently telling us that Melania Trump has accepted her husband’s explanation of the Stormy Daniels fiasco, only to have the first lady’s office issue a statement saying Melania has never talked to him about anything.
It’s pretty clear by now that Trump could have hired an appellate lawyer out of the Leavenworth library and he’d have had a more coherent defense than this.
I can’t tell you what’s going on with Giuliani, who turned 74 in May. The Rudy I knew over the years was as clever an intellectual jouster as you could find; once, in Iowa in 2007, he filibustered me amiably for a full 20 minutes, knowing damn well what he was doing, because he didn’t like the question I was trying to ask.
More recently, though, he’s been known to personally call a newsroom and unleash a get-off-my-lawn tirade about something he’s just read about himself. That’s not a great sign.
But I can tell you what Giuliani’s problem has always been. As I’ve written before, in politics, as in life, your greatest strength always turns out to be your greatest weakness, and Rudy’s strength was always his relentlessness.
Bill Bratton, the police chief who devised and implemented Giuliani’s community-policing agenda in New York, once told me that Rudy’s reforms took a dark turn during his second term because he didn’t know when to let up. Aggressive policing was supposed to be the first phase of the program, Bratton said, but for Giuliani, no amount of order was ever orderly enough.
And so it is in politics, where America’s mayor has never known when to stop. He hung around the primaries way too long in 2008. He debased himself in 2016, defending Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape when even Mike Pence was cowering under a desk.
And now here he is, charging ahead on a mission for which he’s clearly not well suited, because maybe, in a second term, there’s the promise of restoration, the hope of a powerful portfolio he will probably never get.
Say what you will, but this much I swear is true: Rudy Giuliani was a towering political figure at the end of the 20th century and a powerful force in reshaping urban America.
Maybe when this is all over, if he’s lucky, someone will still remember.
via Climate Facts
Record-breaking heat waves are rippling across the planet, bringing death and destruction in their wake. via Climate Facts
Posted by EcoWatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2018
By Jack Holmes July 31, 2018
YouTube
Monday was the first day of school for hundreds of children in Akron, Ohio. They will attend a brand new academy, the I Promise School, which was built by Akron native LeBron James through his LeBron James Family Foundation. The world’s greatest basketball player launched the school to give at-risk youth in the area, as he once was, the opportunity to thrive—academically, athletically, and otherwise—despite sometimes perilous circumstances. In an endearing touch, James will give each student at his school a bike, “because he often credits his bicycle as a huge factor in his childhood that gave him an escape from dangerous parts of his neighborhood and the freedom to explore.”
To mark the occasion, James sat down with CNN’s Don Lemon for a wide-ranging conversation that often strayed into far larger issues. That included race, and the president:
CNN: LeBron James (@KingJames) says Trump’s trying to use sport to divide people, but he believes it brings people together. He sits down with @donlemon at the opening of his new elementary school for at-risk children in his hometown of Akron, Ohio. Watch 10pET https://cnn.it/2K7QBS8
Rather than embrace their displays as an opportunity to discuss the realities of racial injustice in policing, Trump called the predominantly black athletes who have chosen to protest during the national anthem “sons of bitches” from the presidential podium. He also suggested they be fired. He has repeatedly sought fights with black athletes over whether they will attend championship ceremonies at the White House. There is no question he sees political gain in ginning up resentment among his supporters for wealthy athletes of color who exercise their First Amendment right to dissent. Of course, that’s part of a larger program of racial resentment and xenophobia. Elsewhere in the interview, James said simply that Trump has given people more confidence to air their racism in public—to “throw it in your face.”
One measure of this will be the reaction to the launch of James’ school. A calling card of those who oppose the anthem protests begun by Colin Kaepernick, and athlete activism more generally, is their accusation that athletes who protest on the field are not doing anything for their communities off of it. This has never been true: Kaepernick, for instance, has now given $1 million to charities serving underprivileged communities across the country, just as he promised. But James has now embarked on a grand mission in service of the community where he was born and raised by a single mother, from which he made it out against the odds. He will now intervene in the lives of hundreds of Akron children to try to give them the best shot of making it, too. Surely we can expect the same suspects who demand athletes walk the walk off the field to applaud him now—regardless of what he says about the president.
We can’t, of course, because none of this is about the practicalities. It’s not about Respect For The Anthem, which plenty of fans angry about the protests spend at the concession stand buying beer. It’s not about The Troops, whom so many people are so eager to speak on behalf of. (I spoke to four members of our armed forces, and they had a diverse array of viewpoints on the anthem protests. You know, like any group of Americans might.) And it’s not about “Chicago,” or “black-on-black crime,” or “doing something for the community,” as you might hear in the conservative infotainment sphere. It’s about telling a group of primarily black athletes to “shut up and dribble,” as Fox News’ Laura Ingraham once told LeBron James.
James himself is under no illusions about all that, as reflected in his answer to Lemon’s question on what he’d say to Donald Trump, American president, if he were sitting across from him:
Don Lemon asks LeBron what he would say to Trump if he were seated with them during today’s interview.
LeBron: “I would never sit across from him.”
This is reminiscent of an all-time James tweet: his response to Trump’s Mean Girls White House un-invitation to Steph Curry:
The whole interview is worth your time:
The farm manager at the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, Reyes approaches agricultural systems from a justice lens.
Anthony Reyes found his calling working at the intersection of farming and social justice with organizations such as the Tilth Alliance in Seattle, the youth education program Common Threads Farm in Bellingham, and now with the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz. Reyes credits his college days at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for his passion for sustainable agriculture with a food justice focus. Reyes, a biracial Millennial with Mexican-American roots, always wanted to return to the area, a hub for farming with a mission. In 2017, he returned to the community where he first learned to grow food and view agricultural systems through a justice lens.
In his first year at the Homeless Garden Project, Anthony Reyes says he was asked about every stereotype imaginable when working with this marginalized population. Chief among them: Do homeless people really work? There’s a lot of stigma associated with this population, he says. “For the record, the crews here are some of the most hardworking people I’ve ever met,” says Reyes of the participants in the non-profit’s year-long employment-training program at Natural Bridges Farm.
The project serves people in Santa Cruz County who are homeless or formerly homeless, who have experienced barriers to employment, and who want to maintain a stable productive place in society. “The crew tackles every task seriously with passion and heart.”
Reyes spends his days on the farm bouncing between different posts—whether the field, greenhouse, farm stand, or kitchen—helping crews with their tasks on the 3.5-acre farm, which grows row crops and flowers. He’s also in charge of the organization’s three-pronged Community Supported Agriculture program. CSAs, an alternative marketing model that features a direct relationship between farmer and consumer, accounts for about 10 percent of the 25-year-old institution’s income.
The program includes a traditional CSA, a U-pick version, and a scholarship fund, where people can donate to a CSA program for 10 local organizations serving the needy. Flowers go to a local hospice program and the program includes a value-added enterprise making and selling jams, dried herbs, and floral wreaths, which are sold at their downtown store, in a new shop in nearby Capitola, and online.
Relationships are central to Reyes’s job, he says, and inform every aspect of work on the farm, which is slated to expand to a 9-acre permanent site expected to be fully operational in 2020. The 28-year-old strives to treat each crew member with care, compassion, and respect. He says he learns as much from his 17-member crew as they learn from him. “Every single day they inspire me. The farm itself is such a place of radical inclusivity. Everyone is embraced and welcomed,” he says. “And that is reflected in the pride people take in the work and the collaboration on the farm. It’s really a beautiful thing to witness on a day-to-day basis.”
Reyes has farming in his blood: Wisconsin dairy farmers make up his mother’s side of the family. His father is of Mexican heritage and his paternal grandfather ran a “mow and blow” business in Los Angeles. The smell of grass and a four-stroke engine is embedded in childhood memories, he says, and he looked up to his grandfather, a gentle soul. In college, Reyes says his studies helped him begin to see agriculture and outside work though a social justice lens. A key mentor on campus: a UC Santa Cruz lead groundskeeper whom he worked with, Jose Sanchez.
His “juiciest” days, Reyes says, are whenever he can get his hands in the earth. “I make some of the deepest connections with our crew members simply working alongside them,” he says. “Working the soil creates a safe space for people to be seen and heard for who they are.”
Reyes has seen first-hand what a difference growing food can make in someone’s life. “There’s something very restorative and transformative about planting a seed and watering it and watching it grow into a flourishing plant that can provide sustenance,” he says. “From a little speck in your hand to the harvest for your lunch: That has a calming, therapeutic effect.”
Crew members see the fruits of their labor and the value that it brings. “There are very real, tangible benefits at the end of the day, whether someone has spent it building a bed, weeding, or picking. You can see the difference you’ve made,” says Reyes. “There’s ownership and a sense of accomplishment.”
As Reyes points out, homelessness and joblessness go hand in hand. Lack of job skills, a spotty work history, an absent social support network, and low self-esteem can all make the transition out of homelessness more difficult. The Homeless Garden Project’s program is designed to address these concerns, in addition to the challenges that come with substance abuse, mental health issues, physical or developmental disability, and the unique problems faced by veterans—all obstacles that disproportionately impact the homeless community.
Housing is one of the most immediate problems. Some of the Homeless Garden Project’s clientele live in shelters, while others camp outside or in cars, or reside in tenuous subsidized housing situations. A team of social work interns help garden crew members find stable employment and housing. The interns also help the crew find resources to address other obstacles like transportation, substance abuse, and mental health problems.
“Every single person on the crew has personal challenges they’re trying to work through. We very much meet people where they are,” says Reyes. In a region known for exorbitant rents and real estate, Reyes is well aware that many residents of the greater community—including some farm project volunteers—are just a paycheck or two away from homelessness themselves.
Measuring success comes in multiple ways. More than 90 percent of participants in the program find stable housing and employment at the end of their garden project tenure. There’s also the less quantifiable personal growth that Reyes observes in his crews over time: “I watch people try new things and come out of their shell.”
His own on-the-job goals? “I remind myself constantly to show up, and what it means to be present. I’ve learned so much about myself in this line of work,” he says. “It’s also given me more confidence and allowed me to be okay with, and find strength in, vulnerability. It’s not just me. Every single person who steps onto the farm is changed by it.”
Reprinted with permission from Hungry for Change, a publication of the Berkeley Food Institute. Read about other California emerging food systems changemakers here.
Photos: Fabián Aguirre and Maya Pisciotto, The Understory.
Related Articles
Aviva Paley is Cooking Up Second Chances with Kitchens for Good
For the Homeless, There’s More to Eating than Food
How Food Helps Homeless People Get Back on Their Feet
Food Waste Becomes Delicious Meals with an Agenda at Rooster Soup
Hmong farmers Blia and Phua Thao put their 40-plus years of experience to work in Spring Valley, where they grow organic produce entirely by hand.
Sandwiched among dairy farms and fields of conventionally grown corn and soybeans outside Spring Valley, Wisconsin, Thao’s Garden, is the only immigrant-owned, certified organic farm for miles.
“We grow all kinds of vegetables,” says Phua Yang Thao, who owns the farm with her husband, Blia Tou Thao. Phua corrects herself with a laugh, “mostly Caucasian vegetables.” She says vegetables common to cooking in the Thaos’ community of Hmong Americans, like bok choy and Asian bitter melon, are not as popular in the Upper Midwest as crops like asparagus and rhubarb.
The 28-acre farm has been the Thaos’ full-time occupation since 2007, building on more than 40 years of farming experience in the United States. They grow a diverse complement of garden vegetables, including peas, carrots, potatoes, beets, and peppers, and raise 400 chickens for eggs and meat. Phua says they don’t use pesticides and have no need for irrigation—though sometimes, after a wet spring, they must wait for the soil to dry out before planting.
The “organic farm” sign outside of Thao’s Garden.
Consistent with the farming practices used in the Hmong culture, Phua and Blia weed and harvest exclusively by hand. That’s why, for the past several seasons, they’ve kept less than half their land under active cultivation, farming on the same 13 acres each year.
This hands-on approach leads to a farm powered by many hands. They have assistance from extended family members, many of whom live nearby in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, and they sometimes hire local people to help out. Their son Boun, who lives with them, works on the farm most summer mornings before making a one-hour commute to Minneapolis for his job in the Hennepin County library system.
Phua’s highest concern as a farmer is growing food without pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. “Organic foods must be the future,” she says. “The conventional American farmer uses too many chemicals.”
Back in Laos, she says, many of her friends and neighbors lived long lives and died in their sleep. But after more than 40 years in the United States, she has seen members of the Hmong community face health issues unheard-of in Laos. “Now we have heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, strokes,” she says. “Is this from the food?”
The Thaos were invited to give the keynote address at The Food Group’s Emerging Farmers Conference in Minnesota earlier this year. But their journey to this green patch of farmland in the Upper Midwest started thousands of miles away and decades ago.
In 1961, Blia was 21 years old when he left Laos for a year of military training in Thailand led by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the years that followed, he joined the 30,000 men who were to serve as CIA guerilla fighters during the Vietnam War. Their covert military operations are now referred to as the Secret War.
“I had some schooling when I was young,” Blia says, “so the CIA trained me to operate radios.” The job meant he was not on the front lines, but he recalls the challenges of traversing an almost entirely roadless region of rugged mountains and dense jungle in Laos. “Sometimes they would pick us up in helicopters,” he says. “But sometimes the helicopters did not come. Then we walked for days.”
After American forces left the region and communist leadership assumed control in 1975, Blia recalls, “The CIA said we must leave.”
Phua (left) and Blia Thao at Thao’s Garden.
Blia and Phua moved to a refugee camp in Thailand with their four children, and the family’s future was unclear. Blia gave birth to their fifth and youngest child, a daughter, in the camp. After a year, they learned they could move to the U.S.
“Because of the war,” Phua says, “we never farmed in Laos.” But agriculture had long been an important part of Hmong culture, and her parents grew corn, rice, and squash. In her youth, Phua learned from them while helping to raise her younger siblings.
The Thaos stablished their first farm outside Beatrice, Nebraska, where the family moved in 1976 after leaving the refugee camp. A local Lutheran church sponsored their move, and its members also helped them take night classes to learn English. Blia took a job as a janitor and inspector with AT&T and worked for the company for 22 years.
Blia and Phua moved to western Wisconsin after one of their grown sons, a medical doctor, moved to Minnesota’s Twin Cities, 50 miles west. And for the past 11 years, they have been part of the Upper Midwest’s farm community.
The Thaos’ deep commitment to organics has helped them connect to a network of other producers in the region. According to a 2017 University of Wisconsin organic agriculture report, the state ranks second only to California in its number of organic farms, and third nationwide in organic acres.
It’s not clear how many organic farmers in Wisconsin are Hmong. But according to the 2010 U.S. Census, the state’s Hmong population of around 47,000 is the third-highest in the country, and Hmong producers are significant contributors to the area’s farmers’ markets.
Diane Mayerfield, the Wisconsin Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education state coordinator and an outreach specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension, notes that many Hmong producers in Wisconsin also grow ginseng to sell into the commodity market. But she says that diversified producer growers like Phua and Blia are more visible to the general public.
For example, Hmong producers at the enormous Dane County Farmers’ Market in Madison comprise nearly 20 percent of the market’s 270 members.
MOSES headquarters in Spring Valley, Wisc.
Many Hmong growers share Blia and Phua’s commitment to chemical-free farming, Mayerfield says, but the Thaos stand out for their full organic certification. They worked with the Spring Valley-based farmer resource nonprofit Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) to go through the process in 2012. They’ve also participated in trainings at the MOSES annual conference, the largest event of its kind in the U.S.
Blia and Phua know that organic certification makes their farm unique, but they’re reluctant to consider themselves innovators in other areas. More than anything, they prize the close personal connection they their land and their produce.
While the Thaos grow their produce in Wisconsin, all their off-farm sales occur in Minnesota. In addition to the farmers’ market, they have a contract to sell bulk produce to a Twin-Cities-based food hub, The Good Acre. The Good Acre works to expand producers’ access to markets, especially among immigrant and underserved farmers, and includes the Thaos’ vegetables in multi-farm CSA boxes.
Blia and Phua’s son Boun changes the oil in Thao’s Garden’s tractor.
“Their product is always good,” says Rhys Williams, executive director of The Good Acre. “Becoming a good farmer takes time, and I respect the work they do. And it’s all by hand!”
This summer, staff from The Good Acre will work with Phua and Blia to build an unheated high tunnel greenhouse at Thao’s Garden. Also known as a hoop house, high tunnels are season-extenders, Williams explains, because they provide protection from late-spring and early-fall frosts. “And since [The Good Acre’s] whole point is helping farmers make more money, season extension is one way to do that.”
They will also host a field day this fall for other farmers who are considering building their own high tunnels. Staff at the Good Acre and MOSES will invite other immigrant and underserved farmers to learn from the Thaos.
The Thaos are grateful for the help they’ve been offered since coming to the U.S.—from Nebraska to Wisconsin. “Anything we need, we go to any neighbor,” Blia says.
Asked about the future of Thao’s Garden, Blia tells a story about Isabella, one of his 12 grandchildren, who lives in nearby Stillwater, Minnesota, and visits often to help on the farm. Recently she said, “Grandpa, someday I want to take over your farm.”
“I am 78 this year,” Blia says, a hint of concern in his voice. Then he smiles. “Isabella is 17.”
Phua (left) and Blia Thao.
Mathew Lawrence; orig. published by Open Democracy July 26, 2018
Ownership matters. Who owns and controls the productive wealth of nations and communities is fundamental to how an economic system operates and in whose interests. The nature and distribution of ownership intimately shapes the distribution of power and reward within society, undergirding the present and shaping our economic futures.
For 40 years, the economy has been a one-way-street. Assets and equity have flowed upwards and outwards, and with them wealth. Margaret Thatcher promised a world ‘where owning shares is as common as having a car’. But the grand promise of a share-owning democracy, and with it broad-based economic power, has crumbled. Now, more than half of UK company equity is owned abroad and only just over 12% by individuals, while the richest 10% own more than 60% of the nation’s financial wealth. The interests of those who own Britain’s businesses, moreover, are often misaligned with those of other stakeholders, such as employees, customers, service users and local communities. And even where they are better aligned, a concentration of shareholding and the distant power of capital markets hollows out the agency of individual shareholders and workers.
Piecemeal reform that leaves current models of ownership and the distribution of economic assets untouched will leave the fundamental values, operations, and outcomes of our economic system unchallenged. In place of extractive, disconnected and short-termist forms of ownership, we have to build forms of ownership that are distributive by design, generative in purpose, democratic in orientation, and have a sense of connection to place.
There is no single step that can achieve this. What is required is a pluralistic and proactive strategy to scale alternative models of ownership that can reorient enterprise towards the common good, shape production toward democratic needs, stem financial leakage and build a future of shared economic plenty by sharing the rewards of our collective economic endeavours.
Co-operatives – a tried and tested means of democratising and equitably sharing the benefits of enterprise – must be central to this agenda. At their heart, they are free and democratic enterprises. Indeed, in the countries in which they have thrived, they are often rooted in resistance to oppressive government or the march of a market economy that is prejudiced in favour of an extractive and financialised model. Co-ops are by nature organisations with a purpose, and are very often established to achieve a specific social or environmental goal by pooling the resources of a defined group of people.
Co-ops exist to share risk, power and reward. They are therefore more democratic and accountable forms of business that cannot sell equity on capital markets and so are beyond the influence of the shareholding conglomerates. Recent studies have also shown them to be more enduring and resilient in the face of market disruption, more profitable, more productive, happier and longer-lasting than non-co-operative forms of enterprise.
Yet co-operatives – and indeed all alternative forms of ownership – operate in a hostile economic environment. From challenges in accessing finance to poorly tailored regulatory and legal systems to an underpowered supportive infrastructure, they face an uphill challenge. By contrast, the most successful co-operative economies such as Italy, France, and the USA, provide the legal, financial and operational arrangements for the sector to thrive. It is not surprising then that the co-op sector in those countries is much deeper than our own.
Given this, we should not expect significant co-operative expansion to happen in the current institutional context. Nor can or should we expect co-operativism to expand dramatically through the force of ethical example and exceptional effort, not least because co-operatives are currently subject to intense external pressures due to their operating in a wider, extractive and dysfunctional economy.
Instead, it should be because they are a form of purposeful, successful enterprise that most effectively brings together the ability and interests of ordinary people backed by a supportive institutional, financial and legal framework. Co-operatives should thrive, in other words, as a form of economic organisational ‘common sense’.
Public policy – and an ambitious politics for a new economy – are crucial to creating the conditions for this to occur. NEF’s new report, Co-operatives unleashed, sets out how this can be done.
First, a new legal framework for co-operatives should be established, including a statutory underpinning for the creation of co-operative indivisible reserves and an asset lock, and the introduction of a ‘Right to Own’ to support employee buyouts and the co-operatisation of existing businesses.
The second step is to develop a range of financial instruments and institutions tailored to the needs of the co-operative economy. This should include the creation of mutual guarantee societies, common across Europe, that help co-ops and SMEs pool risk and access funding, as well as the introduction of tax relief on profits reinvested in asset-locked indivisible reserves and on profits paid into a co-op development fund to incentivise common wealth creation.
Third, to develop and extend the capabilities of the co-operative movement, a new Co-operative Development Agency for England and for Northern Ireland should be established. These would seek to replicate and expand on the success of Cooperative Development Scotland and the Welsh Cooperative Center in developing the capacity of the co-op movement across the rest of the country. It should focus on facilitating knowledge exchange and sectoral co-ordination, supporting co-op business development, and help replicate, shelter and expand successful co-op models by providing an accessible co-op replication service.
Finally, cooperatives must be supported to thrive in their communities and localities as genuinely rooted businesses capable of retaining power and control within that place and returning value to communities. This requires creating real life contexts across the UK where people can come into contact with coop ideas and realise how they can be applied to their livelihood and community. Innovative place-based community wealth building and local industrial strategies are crucial to this and hence to co-operative development. This could include encouraging local procurement and commissioning strategies to support, where appropriate, co-operatives and social enterprises, and local authorities, in combination with the community, social oriented enterprises and unions, should work together to increase the capacity of co-ops and other local businesses to bid for anchor institution contracts.
As the political sun sets on neoliberal economics, and demand grows for greater wealth-building and sharing of value with those that add it, there is a real need for policy that creates the kind of enterprises that can fulfil this demand.
What is needed – alongside an expansion of the co-operative sector – is a deep economic heartbeat that consistently and over time transfers the ownership and control of businesses to workers and other key stakeholders. Alongside the co-operative specific proposals, we therefore set out a new institution called an Inclusive Ownership Fund to do just that. Under this proposal, all shareholder or larger privately-owned businesses would transfer a small amount of profit each year in the form of equity into a worker or wider stakeholder-owned trust. Once there, these shares would not be available for further sale.
When the fund reached a controlling level of ownership of a firm (or, in the case of businesses succession, proposed takeover or crisis, a lower but significant level of ownership) the stakeholders controlling the fund could opt to assume control of the business. But prior to that, steps could be built into the fund that would see incremental improvements in worker or wider stakeholder participation when the fund reached certain levels. In other words, the Inclusive Ownership Fund would act as a mechanism for transforming ownership over time, putting power and control in the hands of people rooted in places that depend on the success of purposeful business rather than remaining the preserve of rootless capital.
Ownership matters. It is both a force and fulcrum; it is no coincidence that the two major transformations in the UK’s political economy were under-girded by changes in ownership models, with nationalization securing the post-war settlement, and privatization driving its undoing. As we urgently seek a third transformation, new models ownership – as today’s report sets out – must be at the heart of our economic re-imagining.
Dahleen Glanton, Contact Reporter, Chicago Tribune July 19, 2018
When a friend is in trouble, our instinct is to try and steer them away from danger.
Sometimes that means putting the friendship on the line by saying things they don’t want to hear. You gently nudge them toward the light when their eyes are blind to the truth.
This message is for my Republican friends — those smart and compassionate people I argue with fiercely over political ideology but with whom I share an unfaltering respect for our democracy.
My friends, you are in an abusive relationship with Donald Trump. It is time to let him go.
It is clear that you have struggled with your victory in putting Trump into the White House. He wasn’t your first choice as a mate, but with the country’s changing demographics, you feared the glory days of conservative governing were over.
Then Trump extended his hand. And you accepted it, though tepidly.
Some of you fell for his cunning promise to go to Washington and drain the swamp. You were disappointed early on when he instead created a bigger swamp and filled it with crooks and bigots who have nothing in common with you.
Many of you, though, found him so deplorable from the start that you could not cast your ballot for him. But a year and a half into the relationship, you have decided to settle in and just see how things go.
Most of the time, you are miserable. You cried with the rest of us when you saw refugee children separated from their parents at the border. You detest his bigoted and misogynistic behavior. You still cringe when he mentions that ridiculous wall.
You hold your breath whenever he steps onto the world stage, fearing that he will at the very least embarrass you, or at worst, weaken the nation. You watched in horror as he stood beside Vladimir Putin and sided with Russia over America regarding meddling in the 2016 election.
You didn’t buy that pitiful forced apology, where he claimed his betrayal was not intentional but rather a simple misspoken word. But you held your tongue and accepted it, because that’s what people in abusive relationships tend to do.
You tell yourselves over and over that no relationship is perfect. When friends try to warn you that Trump is no good, you point out the way he has shown his love.
You explain that Trump turned out to be more politically conservative than most Republicans ever thought he could be. And that he’s has been awfully good to you. He’s given you a Supreme Court justice who thinks like you, and you are about to welcome a second.
He has flooded the federal courts with right-wing conservatives who agree with the direction you think the country should be headed. And look at the stock market, you say. Everybody who had money to begin with has gotten richer.
These things alone make up for any pain he has caused on the sidelines, you surmise. You have tried to convince yourselves that the benefits of having a Republican, any Republican, at the helm of the country far outweigh the bad.
Perhaps you are beginning to think that maybe a second presidential term might not be as tough as it might seem. There is a chance you could get a third Supreme Court pick who will push the high court to the right for generations to come.
Deep inside, however, you know how selfish that would be. It is clear that another four years under Trump could bring irreparable harm to America. You are flirting with calling it quits.
You have never trusted him, anyway. Now you suspect that the man who stands at the helm of the nation may not have its best interests at heart. You aren’t sure that he grasps the magnitude of his actions in the presence of adversaries. You cannot depend on him to stand with U.S. allies in a united front.
You suspect that the rumors are true, that he is in love with someone else on the other side of the world. But you are paralyzed to confront him.
So you continue to set yourselves up for disappointment, secretly hoping that his latest misstep will be the one that does him in. But he rises from the rubble unscathed, perhaps even stronger and more vicious than before.
When will it end, you wonder. Who can stop this nightmare, you ask?
Only you, my Republican friends, can stop him immediately.
The rest of us are pawns in Trump’s “Game of Thrones.” You are our Lord Snow and our Dragon Queen. With no political strength in Washington right now, we are like “smallfolk” with no real voice.
Republicans, you have to stop this abuser before it’s too late. If your party is to survive this tumultuous reign, you must find the courage to stand up to Trump in your own House — before the rest of us have to come to your rescue and kick him out.
MORE COVERAGE
Column: Trump is on Putin’s side, not America’s »
Column: Trump’s shots at NATO allies reflect an ugly attraction to tribal leadership »
Commentary: Perhaps Trump should read ‘The Art of the Deal’ »
