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Stories of injustice and justice
Fact Checker, from The Washington Post posted a new episode.
May 4, 2018
Unraveling President Trump's top 5 claims
We're keeping a running list of Trump's false or misleading claims, including the ones he says the most. Here's our latest tally as of May 2018.
Posted by Fact Checker, from The Washington Post on Friday, May 4, 2018
By Mary Papenfuss, HuffPost May 6, 2018
Not only did the multi-talented star and creator of “Atlanta,” Donald Glover, host “Saturday Night Live,” but he also debuted powerful new Childish Gambino music on the program.
It’s the first new music Glover has released as Childish Gambino since his Grammy-nominated album “Awaken, My Love!” in 2016.
He was introduced by “Black Panther” and “Get Out” star Daniel Kaluuya for “This is America.”
The shirtless Glover was highlighted by lazer beams as children in school uniforms danced. “Don’t catch you slippin’ now. Look at how I’m livin’ now. Police be trippin’ now,” he sang.
A number of elements in the performance echoed those in the official video for “This Is America” — which dropped on YouTube shortly before the “SNL” performance. Check it out here, but be warned: It involves two violent, disturbing scenes.
He debuted another new track titled “Saturday” for the first set of “SNL” and was introduced then by Zoe Kravitz.
Watch Saturday Night Live on Yahoo View.
Glover is expected to release a new album later this year, and appear this fall with Rae Sremmurd and Vince Staples. He has said the next Childish Gambino album he releases will be his last.
By Korsha Wilson, Food and Farm Labor, Food Justice, May 4, 2018
When Jillian Hishaw was studying agricultural law at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, she learned about the many the hardships Black farmers have faced in recent decades. Not only did Black families lose land at a rate of 30,000 acres per year in the 1990s, but the land rush fueled by developers and larger corporate farms has also left many of these farmers especially vulnerable.
Today, Black farmers make up less than 2 percent of the country’s farm population, and they’ve faced ongoing discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In 1999, a federal judge ruled that the agency had systemically denied Black farmers loans and disaster payments between 1981 and 1996, and awarded a group of farmers and their relatives $1 billion in damages as a result of the Pigford vs. Glickman lawsuit.
When Hishaw read about that case, as well as Keepseagle vs. Veneman—a similar discrimination lawsuit involving Native American farmers—she was moved to action. “The discrimination was so blatant to me that I wanted to do something about it,” says Hishaw. Her family had also directly experienced the toll that losing farmland can take. Hishaw’s grandfather lost his farm in Oklahoma; after they relocated to Kansas City, they learned that the lawyer they’d been paying to maintain the farm and pay taxes on the land had pocketed the money instead.
“There was oil on the property, so it was sold to collect the tax debts,” she says. And even though the troubles happened before she was born, it still weighs heavy on her grandfather. “Honestly, he did not like talking about the loss that much,” adds Hishaw.
Jillian Hishaw.
In 2012, six years after she graduated, Hishaw launched Family Agriculture Resource Management Services (FARMS), an organization that helps Black farmers in Southeastern states retain ownership of their land. Now, she spends her days visiting farmers in the Southeast who face losing their property and assets due to mounting debt.
FARMS is part of a growing number of organizations that want to assist Black farmers in this part of the country. “Our primary mission is to provide legal and technical assistance to aging farmers [who] don’t have many resources,” says Hishaw. She and her team help owners write and apply for grants, create fundraisers, and connect land owners to lawyers.
“It’s truly a blessing,” says LeTanya Williams, a farmer living in Chester, South Carolina, of FARMS’ work. Her livestock and alpaca farm was facing foreclosure when she reached out to the group for help applying for grants. The biggest obstacle was the fact that the land had been passed down from a slave owner to Williams’ mother’s family without an official deed.
Williams and Hishaw worked together to track down and contact the descendants of the original owners and then applied for grants to keep the property out of foreclosure.
“What Jillian does is so unique,” Williams says. “There are so many components to it, and she worked with us all the way.”
Hishaw and a team of pro bono lawyers step in to help farms navigate confusing agricultural law and avoid foreclosure. She also works with farm owners to fundraise or create additional revenue streams to keep their farms profitable.
In addition to working to keep Black farmers on the land, Hishaw also created the Farms Eliminating Hunger program, which helps farmers sell surplus produce and meat at a discount to food banks in their communities. “Three hundred thousand people in our local 20 counties struggle to have [at least one] meal a month, and her providing the meals is a tremendous way to feed the local community,” says Doug Groendyke, food sourcing coordinator at Harvest Hope Food Bank in Columbia, South Carolina.
Since 2014, Farmers Eliminating Hunger has delivered more than 200,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables to food banks. The program draws its success from farmers like Williams, who noted that her town of Chester was hit hard by the economic downturn. Fresh vegetables have been hard to come by there and Williams is happy to sell the corn, tomatoes, kale, cucumbers, and other vegetables she grows on her land for less than she would otherwise, if she knows it’s helping the community. “A lot of people here rely on the food banks,” she says.
Even though Hishaw’s work is focused on those who need immediate assistance, she says that she always has her mind on the next several generations of Black farmers. “The average age of the U.S. farmer is [nearly 60] and I’m seeing more and more abuse, predatory lenders, and Medicaid liens against farmland,” she says.
Given all these challenges, it can be hard to see a future for the Black farmer. But Hishaw has hope. One reason is that the latest agriculture census showed a small but significant bump in their numbers—up about 15 percent over 10 years to 44,000. She’s also heartened by the enthusiasm she’s seeing for urban agriculture among young people. “I would love to see people with urban farms moving to rural areas,” she adds, noting that she is currently creating a scholarship designed to support a next-generation family farmer studying agricultural science.
FARMS turns six this year, and Hishaw is looking to expand her staff to help more people. Currently she has a program manager, an intern, and a few agriculture lawyers and attorneys who offer their services pro bono. “It’s really a group effort,” she says. This year, FARMS earned a $10,000 grant through the Renewal Awards.
“It reaffirms our mission,” says Hishaw, who is committed to helping to right past wrongs and ensure that today’s farmers can keep their land despite financial hardship. “I think from what happened to my grandfather to what I’m doing now, it’s all full-circle,” she says.
Photos courtesy of Jillian Hishaw.
A study showed that Congress almost always votes in support of the opinions of the wealthiest 10% of America, while routinely ignoring what the other 90% think.
If there’s an issue where 90 percent of Americans think one thing and the richest 10 percent of people think something else, Congress almost always votes in the interest of the wealthiest Americans. That is not democracy.
Congress is Only Listening to Rich People
If there's an issue where 90 percent of Americans think one thing and the richest 10 percent of people think something else, Congress almost always votes in the interest of the wealthiest Americans. That is not democracy.
Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Sunday, April 29, 2018
By Charles P. Pierce May 2, 2018
Getty Images
Let’s talk about a mass shooting. Let’s talk about an ordinary, everyday mass shooting. Let’s talk about terrorism. Let’s talk about ordinary, everyday terrorism. And, because we are talking about an ordinary, everyday mass shooting, and ordinary, everyday terrorism, let’s talk about guns. Let’s talk about ordinary, everyday guns and their ordinary, everyday use. Let’s talk about St. Claude Avenue, in the lower Ninth Ward in the city of New Orleans. From the unconquerable New Orleans Times-Picayune:
“NOPD said the shooting was reported at 12:46 a.m. in the 3200 block of St. Claude Avenue (map), which is between Louisa and Piety Streets in the St. Claude neighborhood. Those shot were ages 25, 37, 34, 35 and 38.”
“According to preliminary information from NOPD, officers were responding to a report of gunfire in the area when they found three victims, which were taken to a hospital via EMS. Two additional victims later showed up at a hospital after they were taken there in private vehicles. A preliminary NOPD report issued Tuesday states the victims were at the same location when they heard gunshots coming from the direction of Piety Street.”
(Why does New Orleans so fascinate writers? Because names like “Piety Street” can appear in police reports. And, just for the record, there are two St. Claudes in the Calendar of the Saints and they have given their name to two cities in Canada and five cities in France, as well as a neighborhood in another part of New Orleans.)
OK, that’s the ordinary everyday use of guns in an ordinary, everyday mass shooting. What about the ordinary, everyday terrorism? That’s the second-day story for Emily Lane of the Times-Pic.
“Three U-Haul boxes sat stacked on top of each other in the living room of a St. Claude Avenue home on Tuesday morning (May 1). The resident at the double shotgun said he bought and filled the boxes with his belongings that morning, hours after opening his front door to find a gunshot victim leaning on his front stoop.”
“The man, who asked not to be named out of concern for his safety, said violent crime in his neighborhood has gotten “progressively worse,” in the last two years. He had thought before about moving, he said, but Tuesday’s shooting in his block that left five people wounded “was the last straw.””
“In the four years he’s lived at the St. Claude neighborhood home, he has three times opened his front door to find a person who had overdosed lying unconscious or dead on his front stoop. He estimated hearing nearby gunshots about once a month. Just last week, he said, a car was shot up across the street.”
That is terrorism—disorganized and apolitical, devoid of ideology or even coherent thought, but there’s been so much shooting that this guy is moving away because of it, and that’s terrorism by any reasonable definition, and certainly, by his.
My eye was caught by this story because, three years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the simultaneous arrival in the Ninth Ward of Hurricane Katrina and the Industrial Canal, I was walking down St. Claude Avenue. I visited a remarkable place called the All Saints Community Center about 20 blocks from where five people were shot on an ordinary Monday night. But, if it weren’t for that transient connection, this mass shooting would have gone unremarked, at least as far as I was concerned. It was an ordinary, everyday mass shooting in the inchoate terrorism of ordinary, everyday life in America, where so many ordinary, everyday people have ordinary, everyday guns.
RELATED STORY
Robert Reich posted a new episode. May 1, 2018
The 5 Biggest Failures of the Trump Tax Scam
The giant tax cut for corporations and the wealthy is the only legislative accomplishment of Trump and his congressional enablers. By any standard, it’s been a complete and total disaster. Our latest video looks at the 5 biggest failures of Trump's tax scam. What do you think?
Posted by Robert Reich on Tuesday, May 1, 2018
By Amanda Abrams – Farm Bill, Food Justice May 1, 2028
More than 50,000 people struggle with food insecurity in Durham, North Carolina. So when a group of public health workers, farm advocates, and member of the Duke University community came together in 2016 to create a food policy council in the region, access to healthy food was at the top of their list.
First, the council—called the Durham Farm and Food Network—mapped out the resources available to hungry households in order to gain an understanding of the depth of the problem in the 300,000-person county.
Then, when the federal government proposed cutting almost $200 million over a decade from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) last year, the group mobilized. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, formerly known as food stamps, helps 12 percent of the county’s households get food on the table and is a critical component of the area’s food system.
“We recognized are these federal programs [are effective], and any amount of effort we can apply for hungry people should be put there,” said Neal Curran, one of the Network’s leaders.
Members reached out to another food policy council in eastern North Carolina, which includes the district of House Agriculture Committee member David Rouzer, suggesting that the two collaborate on an advocacy effort aimed at protecting SNAP in North Carolina and nationally.
In the end, 11 food policy councils from around the state joined the effort, co-signing a letter that urged no cuts to SNAP or other federal nutrition programs, and 120 other North Carolina organizations and municipalities signed on as well. Letters were delivered to Rep. Rouzer, both of North Carolina’s senators, and several other members of Congress last month.
It’s not clear what impact the letters will have, if any. In fact, when the House Agriculture Committee’s first draft of the 2018 Farm Bill was unveiled earlier this month it included significant changes to SNAP that raised red flags for the council members. But the group will continue pushing for a bill that protects SNAP. The organization just co-wrote an op-ed with several partners and is discussing coordinating with other food councils in key states.
This type of coordinated action marks a big step forward for the state’s food policy councils, and one that’s being echoed throughout the U.S.
Food policy councils have taken root around the country over the past decade, creating grassroots political power to address the specific needs of their communities. And the recent effort to protect SNAP is just one example of the ways these groups have begun to draw powerful connections between their local work and federal-level policies.
Food policy councils, which tend to be city- or county-based, often consist of a range of stakeholders—including unusual allies like longtime farmers, social services staff, and educators—who convene in order to expand dialogue about the local food system and address food insecurity. The first groups originated back in the 1980s, but the movement didn’t reach a critical mass until about 2010.
With 35 councils, North Carolina may be the state with the most in the country (an official tally underway at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future, which tracks food councils around the country, isn’t final yet). Much of that growth has been attributed to Community Food Strategies, a North Carolina nonprofit collaborative run by several major food-related organizations; it’s one of the biggest and most active food council networks in the country.
The group itself does not advocate on issues, but it does provide training and information to food councils on topics including how to hold community forums, reach out to elected officials, and conduct advocacy campaigns. It also hosts gatherings that bring the state’s councils together, allowing their members to learn from one another.
“We’re interested in having local councils that have a sense of what’s happening, that can be a go-to group for the community and also for decision makers,” said Abbey Piner, the project lead at Community Food Strategies.
For instance, the organization works with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Food Policy Council, one of the state’s oldest and most active. In 2015 and 2016, the council held candidate forums to draw attention to issues of food insecurity and healthy eating; by 2017, it had become an authority on the subjects. These days, the council works closely with Rep. Alma Adams, a local congresswoman who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, providing her with information about regional needs and receiving regular updates on federal activity.
Community Food Strategies also works with smaller food councils like the one in the town of Alamance, which started out by conducting a community assessment outlining the area’s food system. Three years later, the collaborative is launching a branding campaign, “Authentically Alamance,” to educate residents about supporting local produce.
For the group’s members, who had never engaged in federal advocacy before, signing the letter opposing cuts to the SNAP program was eye-opening—and vital.
“[SNAP] is a very important program for our community,” says Ann Meletzke, director of the Alamance Food Collaborative. And not only because it supports low-income families, she adds. “The farmers [at our farmers’ markets] are running small businesses; there’s a reciprocity between them and those who are using SNAP to shop there. It needs to be cultivated.”
North Carolina is ahead of the game when it comes to federal-level advocacy, but food policy councils around the country are responding, especially when it comes to the farm bill, says Karen Bassarab, a program officer at the Center for a Livable Future. “With reauthorization [of the farm bill], we’re seeing an increased interest—and also since the change in the federal administration.” But local and statewide groups vary greatly in their strategies, she added.
For example, Kentucky’s food council network, the Community Farm Alliance, is launching statewide community forums about the farm bill next month. The Los Angeles Food Policy Council is hosting an awareness-raising party this month; the group will also be working with the mayor’s office to pass a resolution in defense of SNAP. Michigan’s Center for Regional Food Systems, the state’s food council convener, regularly meets with Sen. Debbie Stabenow, ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. And the Chesapeake Food Policy Leadership Initiative has launched a series of webinars educating the councils in its network about how to engage with the bill.
Many groups around the country are still getting up to speed on the intricacies around federal nutrition programs and the farm bill, says Bassarab. “Some are not at the point where they can engage immediately,” she explains. And that means they’ll probably have to wait until the next farm bill cycle—or another federal food issue—comes around.
However, given the widening gulf between the Democrats’ and Republicans’ approaches to the bill, there’s a chance the House Agriculture Committee will be too deadlocked to move it forward, and might simply extend the current bill for another year. That might give the country’s food policy councils more experience and clout: In another year, many more councils might just be prepared to go to battle to save nutrition benefits for the country’s neediest.
By Ted Howard, Orig. pub. by The Next System Project April 26, 2018
Ted Howard’s remarks to the Environmental Funders Network in Cambridge, England, on February 2nd, 2018. These prepared remarks have been lightly edited for publication.
Good afternoon.
I want to begin by thanking the conference organizers for extending an invitation to address you during your important annual deliberations.
I come before you today not as an expert on environmental matters, but as someone who has devoted his professional life to social justice concerns, in particular addressing economic and social inequality in the United States and in the Global South.
While much good work has been done on the inequality issue, the very bitter truth is that despite our best efforts, inequality is growing dramatically in nations around the world, including here in the United Kingdom and in most of Europe.
To cite just two figures: in the United States, just 400 people own as much wealth as the bottom 204 million people.1 Globally, just 8 billionaires own as much wealth as 50% of the entire population of our planet.2 And this negative trend – representing a medieval concentration of wealth and power that is deeply problematic for democratic culture – is escalating.
While I am not an expert on environmental issues, it appears to me that very large order negative trends are similarly impacting your field.
Like most, perhaps all, of you, I remember the landmark 1972 study “The Limits to Growth” by Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens. I was blessed in the 1980s to work closely with Donella Meadows on the issue of the persistence of hunger, and to call her friend before her untimely death. “The Limits to Growth” study showed that if we continued along the same path we were on over four decades ago we would eventually reach a breaking point: what the authors called environmental overshoot. Knowing what we knew back then, and despite the important victories won over the years, it’s astonishing to see that we are very much still on the same path projected in the study despite all the efforts since to get on a different track.3
Simply by way of example:
Today, soil depletion has destroyed one-third of all arable land, which means we have only sixty harvests left,
Natural resources are being consumed at around 1.5 times the Earth’s ability to regenerate them,
We’ve already lost nearly two-thirds of all vertebrates since 1970 – the sixth mass extinction.4
And even the most progressive and far-reaching climate agreement (the Paris Agreement), in the unlikely event that we adhere to it, puts us on course to a three to four degree increase in temperature, instead of limiting the increase to below two degrees, the clear and agreed-upon threshold to keep us within a climate safety zone.
I do not intend to dwell on this difficult news, but simply to indicate that there are very large order trends taking place that are negative and that are escalating. Rather, I would like to focus the remainder of my remarks on the question of “Why?” Why are these trends seemingly impervious to our ability to alter within the context of the work we do? And how might we create a new approach that addresses the root cause of these trends – be it escalating inequality or environmental degradation and destruction?
Let me be clear: I recognize that everyone in this room is doing extraordinary work, has devoted your lives to this cause, and are making some real difference – but in the main the difference is being made at the margin. The inconvenient truth is that we face a problem beyond politics and reform, beyond good projects and initiatives and campaigns – ours is a systemic crisis at the very heart of our 21st century political-economy.
One of my colleagues is James Gustave Speth – an esteemed environmentalist who founded leading U.S. organizations such as the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and who served as chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and as the administrator of the United Nations Development Program. As Gus Speth has said “We have won many victories, but we are losing the planet.”5
In my view, whether we are working on inequality or the environment, our activities, even when successful, essentially amount to slowing bad things from happening as fast as they might without our efforts – we are trying to hold back the tide, at least for a bit, as best we can. But at the end of the day a tsunami is coming and it threatens to overwhelm all of the good work we have done. Deep in our hearts we know that somehow while what we are doing is absolutely necessary, it is also woefully insufficient, because the longer term negative trends continue unabated.
When long, long trends get steadily worse (or get no better), year in and year out, it is clear that something more profound, something systemic is at play.
As the ecological rift widens, we must recognize that core features of the current system – unrestrained growth, measuring our success by the growth of GDP, ever greater concentrations of wealth and power, a commitment to short-term and even negative results to maximize the corporate bottom-line – are simply incompatible with a sustainable, just, and equitable future. We are trying to go up the down escalator, which is moving faster and faster against us.
We will never be able to go far enough, or fast enough, doing the right things on climate – or equality – without addressing the defining features of our political economic system, which continuously work against equitable, sustainable solutions.
This conclusion – that we must address the nature, design, and implications of the system – by which I mean extreme forms of corporate capitalism, may sound radical to some. But in fact it was the very conclusion reached by much of the environmental movement of the 1960s and early ’70s, when many of the leading environmental thinkers and practitioners of the period concluded that deep economic and societal transformation was needed if we were to succeed in saving our planet. Gross Domestic Product and the national income accounts were challenged for their failure to tell us things that really matter.
The overall point of these early environmentalists was that we should strike at the root causes of environmental decline. They saw that doing so would require us to seek fundamental changes in our prevailing system of political economy – to proceed down the path of system change. In other words, they believed that the problem was the system itself.
They realized that what was needed was to step outside the system to change it before it is too late.
The good news is that the two major systemic problems I am addressing today – economic and environmental – are two sides of the same coin. To solve one, we must solve the other. And there are ways that hold promise for solving both at the same time.
The starting point, I believe, resides in our communities. A community that is not economically secure cannot be ecologically sustainable.
It is very difficult for communities to deal effectively with ecological issues if they are overwhelmed with issues related to economic instability.
When a community is at the mercy of the investment decisions made by corporations concerned primarily with their bottom line and maximizing shareholder value – and at the mercy of government decisions that are unduly influenced by corporate power – that community can neither be certain of its economic future nor self-confident enough to undertake aggressive local sustainability initiatives.
There are many examples of this in practice. The evidence suggests that economic stability is good for environmental legislation: it tends to reduce the fear of job loss that may come with regulation. Conversely, the same fear—as we are experiencing in our own day —keeps those negative trends moving in the wrong direction when the economy falters. One analysis shows that only six major environmental laws were enacted since 1970 in the United States when annual unemployment was over 7 percent, and none at all with unemployment greater than 7.7 percent.6
As studies have found over and over again, at the end of the day economically successful regions and localities have stronger and more effective environmental regulations and outcomes.
Furthermore, for a community to sustain its environmental gains it also needs to be economically sustainable. Economic stability is not only important to get us where we need to go, but also to keep us there.
Lack of economic stability will eventually lead to rollbacks despite years of our hard work and progress achieved.
Negative political feedback loops can come and throw all the progress away, as we have seen with the election of Donald Trump – who in less than one year in office has been able to undo decades of environmental gains in the United States,7 not to speak of withdrawing the world’s largest economy and polluter from the Paris Agreement.
So let us talk about the system question and how to address it.
My view is that we have entered what is best understood as an unusual form of systemic crisis, not simply a political crisis. Which is to say that the large system of our form of corporate capitalism is in trouble, not simply its political system. Long, long trends of growing inequality, of ecological destruction – trends that do not bend in more than token ways to the politics of reform – these define problems that have their origins much deeper in the political-economic design of the system itself. These trends – including climate change – are not aberrations. They are logical outcomes of the nature, values, and construction of our system.
System change is essential because our environmental problems are rooted in defining features of our current political economy. Again, to quote my colleague Gus Speth:
An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth at virtually any cost; […] powerful corporate interests whose overriding objective is to generate profit and grow, including profit from avoiding the social and environmental costs they create; markets that systematically fail to recognize these costs unless corrected by government; government that is subservient to corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred endlessly by sophisticated advertising; social injustice and economic insecurity so vast that they paralyze action and empower often false claims that needed measures would costs jobs and hurt the economy; economic activity now so large in scale that its impacts alter the fundamental biophysical operations of the planet – all these combine to deliver an ever-growing economy that is undermining the ability of the planet to sustain human and natural communities.8
It’s clearly time for something different – a new kind of environmentalism. And here is the core of this new environmentalism: it seeks a new economy. It seeks to escape from the system just described and move to a next system.
When you live within a system, it looks like it will never fundamentally change – that we can tinker around the margins but not really change the heart of the system. It has been said that it is easier to envision the end of life on our planet than it is to envision the end of capitalism.
And yet systems change. I imagine that during almost 3,000 years of Pharoah’s Egypt, people thought life would always be dominated by pharaohs and priests, with slaves building Pyramids. And now that system is in the British Museum. The same is true with Medieval Europe – who could envision a system beyond the nobility, the church, and serfdom?
What holds a system in place, often, is a failure of imagination that things can fundamentally change, and that there are real, viable alternatives for organizing a new or a next system.
In our own day, can we envision bringing forth a new system in our countries and world that, as a matter of the daily functioning of the system, produces greater equality and more rational environmental outcomes? Imagine that! We take for granted that our current system produces enormous negative outcomes. Can we imagine a system that does quite the opposite – regularly produces better environmental outcomes, produces more equality – just as part of the natural functioning of the system?
How do we establish the basis of something far more transformative beyond our current system and situation?
How might it be possible to move forward, especially in difficult political times, to lay foundations for a transformation in the direction of a serious new systemic answer? Part of the answer – part – lies in on-the-ground experimentation and model building that embraces the design and principles of a new systemic alternative. There is precedent for this.
As the Great Depression took hold in the United States in 1929 and the early 30s, the levels of pain across the country grew. But the ideology of the then Federal government was that the government should do nothing to address the growing depression – the market would correct itself. And so in community after community, people began to address their problems themselves. Historians call this period in the life of the United States, the “Laboratories of Democracy” … when new approaches were devised that could eventually be lifted up and scaled when there is a new political opening.
America’s primary social safety net – the Social Security system – began in Alaska and California communities as people grappled with their challenges. When the politics changed nationally, when the Roosevelt Administration came into power, these small models were lifted up into a comprehensive national system of support for older Americans.
In Britain, when health minister Aneurin Bevan launched the NHS in 1948, he drew as inspiration from the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, a community-based model in South Wales that began in 1890. This small Welsh experiment was scaled up into one of the great health systems in the world.
As former Labour leader Neil Kinnock later wrote:
As he [Bevan] testified, the experience of a local working model that embodied all the principles of universal donation during fitness for universal provision during illness was invaluable. It made the rapid establishment of a national system feasible because that task was then more a matter of refinement and enlargement rather than one of raw invention.9
What are some models and ideas that start to point to the outlines of a next system approach in our own time? And that might have the opportunity to move toward much larger scale over time?
Boulder, CO: local residents and city officials have embarked upon a long and ambitious project to replace the existing giant for-profit electrical utility that produces much of its energy from coal with a democratically accountable, publicly-owned utility to speed up the green transition. Rather than try to impose regulations on the corporate utility, the community has decided to own its own green power source for energy. This reinforces democratic control, will produce wealth in the community as money is not siphoned off to outside investors, and will improve environmental conditions.
Cleveland, OH: the Evergreen Cooperatives, a linked network currently consisting of three worker-owned businesses located in severely disinvested neighborhoods, that focuses on providing green and sustainable goods and services to local “anchor institutions” like hospitals and universities. This is beginning to bear fruit for roughly 140 local workers – many with serious barriers to employment – who are building their capital accounts in addition to receiving living wages, profit-sharing, and good benefits. Evergreen anticipates that it will double the number of its employee owners in 2018.
Each of the three cooperatives was purposefully designed to be green–from the decision to use some of the most efficient laundry machines to operating out of LEED certified and energy efficient buildings to focusing one business line on solar panel installation and lighting retrofits, to producing millions of heads of leafy greens locally, thus eliminating 1,500 miles of carbon based transportation – the localization of the services have in itself a great direct impact in reducing transportation emissions as services are no longer coming from out of state or even out of the country, but rather a few miles away from where they are needed.
These initiatives are not only happening in traditional Blue, democratic states across the Atlantic. Red states, very conservative areas of America, Trump voting areas, are also leading the way with initiatives such as:
Greensburg, Kansas several years ago was leveled by a tornado. In rebuilding after the devastation, this community in America’s heartland became—in a deep red state, under a Republican mayor—one of the greenest towns in the country when the government acted as partner and catalyst to rebuild the town.
Similarly, in the heart of coal country, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth organized for participatory economic planning around a post-coal future in Appalachia, fighting for the Clean Power Plan when it was blocked at the state level. Citizen action creating a more sustainable and economically viable future.10
Next system models that build equality and produce better environmental outcomes are also growing in the United Kingdom.
Preston: Another opportunity is currently taking place in NW England in the city of Preston. You may have read about what is being called the “Preston Model” in The Guardian.11 The Preston Model is being built in the de-industrialized area of England, an area that expressed itself against the status quo through Brexit – I believe every single district of Lancashire voted to leave the EU.
When a large retail investment that was going to be made in Preston fell through in 2011, local city councilors embarked upon a bold system changing plan to rebuild the Preston economy. This has included:
Enlisting local anchor institutions – UCLAN, the city government, the local police authority and more – to refocus their supply chain to buy locally: repatriated 70 million pounds; 1,648 jobs supported
Development of a public bank to get out from under the power of the five large banks
Cooperative businesses being incubated by the university to put people to work
Fairer Power Red Rose, a public energy supplier
$100 million pounds of pension funds locally invested
and much more
This is more than a project. It is a system changing approach to taking control of their own future and to build community wealth for the many, not just the few.
These are examples of how people and groups and local governments can come together to take control of their communities’ futures and plant the seeds of change through innovative initiatives that provide inspirational models of how things might work in a new political economy devoted to sustaining human and natural communities.
Beyond these very place-based, on-the-ground “laboratories of democracy” models that are being put in place today, and can be scaled up to help build the next system – we also need to work on bigger order things, bold new proposals that can intervene in the current system.
Here are two examples of what we at The Democracy Collaborative are doing:
Quantitative Easing for The Planet: More than anything else, due to the climate emergency we need to buy time. At a science conference ahead of the December Paris meetings in 2015, the dean of climate science, Joachim Schellnhuber argued that:
In order to stay below 2 C (3.6F) [the internationally agreed limit for global warming], or even 3 C, we need to have something really disruptive, which I would call an induced implosion of the carbon economy over the next 20 to 30 years. Otherwise we have no chance of avoiding dangerous, perhaps disastrous, climate change.12
In that spirit – creating something truly disruptive of the carbon economy – a year ago my colleagues at The Democracy Collaborative proposed a unique and important idea that if rightfully implemented can, at once, keep the vast majority of US fossil fuels in the ground – an essential step to limit temperature increases to a safe level– and remove the opposing interests of energy industry against the 3rd energy revolution. The idea, which we refer to as “Quantitative Easing for the Planet”, proposes a Federal Reserve-financed $1 trillion buyout of the US fossil fuel industry using QE (not tax dollars) on the model of the rescue of the banks and of past crisis interventions, nationalizations, and buyouts, which have been common in US history. In effect, buy out the fossil fuel industry and strand the reserves of carbon in the form of coal, gasoline, etc. in the ground.13
2 Degree Lending: But buying time is just one of several steps needed. We also need to move capital away from fossil fuels and into building the array of institutions so green initiatives can reach the critical mass and allow us to break through on climate and other issues.
To do so, we recently launched the 2 Degree Lending project. Through this project we aim to help create the “green” financial ecosystem at scale that is required to quickly close the climate finance gap. The idea here is to promote an unprecedented shift on how bank lending – the world’s largest source of finance – and investment decisions are made. Initiatives include promoting the creation of a new International Climate Bank on the model of the UK’s Green Investment Bank and also to create an accelerator to help advanced cities and metropolitan regions get over the line in creating new banking institutions locally, including public and community banks, that can finance the transition to a climate-positive local and regional economy.
These are just some approaches and models and innovations that begin to rise to the level of systemic interventions. I’m sure you all have other examples. But the point is to move beyond tinkering at the margins to address head on the nature of the systemic crisis we face, and build the alternatives now that can move to scale over time.
Let me conclude with some brief thoughts about your role in all of this – the role of philanthropy. I have been on both sides of the equation. As CEO of an NGO that is largely grant-funded, I interact with funders in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and continental Europe to raise money for my organization. I have also served as a Senior Fellow with the Cleveland Foundation, the oldest community foundation in the United States, and I have advised numerous foundations on strategies to foster systemic change of the kind I have been speaking about with you.
The role of philanthropy in helping to catalyze deep systemic change is key: We are only going to be able to reboot our vision and strategies to make breakthrough changes in the current trends if philanthropy is ready to invest in meaningful, bold, systemic action. This means moving beyond projects – what I call “project-itis” – to promote serious systemic disruption.
Philanthropy needs to be ready to invest in ideas that go beyond conventional projects that may achieve limited short-term results but are woefully insufficient to the need for a long-term solution.
The reason we at The Democracy Collaborative have been able to do this kind of thinking and work on-the-ground is because we have been fortunate to partner with several funders who believe in this vision and the need for systemic change – work in which results may not able to be measured immediately but that nonetheless has shown successful outcomes and openings over time.
Are we as individuals, and is philanthropy as a sector, ready to go beyond the current approach and invest in ideas and innovations that are truly capable of producing sustainable, lasting, and more democratic outcomes?
For at the end of the day, each of us must ask again the basic question: “What is an environmental issue? Air and water pollution, of course. But what if the right answer is that environmental issues include anything that determines environmental outcomes.”14 Then surely we must look to transform our system that gives rise to the environmental challenges our planet faces.
Thank you.
1.Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, “Billionaire Bonanza 2017: The Forbes 400 the Rest of Us,” Institute for Policy Studies (2017), accessed March 28,2018, https://inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/BILLIONAIRE–BONANZA-2017-Embargoed.pdf
2.OXFAM, “An Economy for the 99%” (2017), accessed March 28, 2018, https://d1tn3vj7xz9fdh.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/file_attachments/bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-en.pdf
3.Graham Turner, “Is Global Collapse Imminent?,” Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute Research Paper No. 4 (2014), accessed March 28, 2018 http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf
4.Mathew Lawrence, Laurie Laybourn-Langton and Carys Roberts, “The Road to Ruin: Making sense of the Anthropocene,” Institute for Progressive Policy Research volume 24, Issue 3 (2017), accessed March 28, 2018, https://www.ippr.org/juncture-item/editorial-the-road-to-ruin-making-sense-of-the-anthropocene
5.James Gustave Speth, Angels by the River: A Memoir (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014).
6.Daniel J. Weiss, “Anatomy of a Senate Climate Bill Death”, Center for American Progress (201, corrected on May 7, 2013), accessed March 28, 2018, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2010/10/12/8569/anatomy-of-a-senate-climate-bill-death/
7.For a full list of Trump’s Administration environmental rollbacks, please visit Sabin Center for Climate Change Law’s Climate Deregulation Tracker at http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker/
8.Gus Speth, “The Joyful Economy: A Next System Possibility,” Next System Project (2017), accessed March 28, 2018, https://thenextsystem.org/the-joyful-economy
9.Jones, Gareth. The Aneurin Bevan Inheritance : The Story of the Nevill Hall and District NHS Trust. Abertillery: Old Bakehouse Publications, 1998.
10.To learn more about the initiative, please visit https://www.kftc.org/
11.Aditya Chakrabortty, “In 2011 Preston hit rock bottom. Then it took back control,” The Guardian, January 31, 2018, accessed March 28, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/preston-hit-rock-bottom-took-back-control
12.Damian Carrington, “Fossil fuel industry must ‘implode’ to avoid climate disaster, says top scientist,” The Guardian, July 10, 2015, accessed March 28, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/fossil-fuel-industry-must-implode-to-avoid-climate-disaster-says-top-scientist
13.For more information please see Gar Alperovitz, Joe Guinan, and Thomas Hanna, “The Policy Weapon Climate Activists Need,” The Nation, April 26, 2017, accessed March 28, 2018 https://www.thenation.com/article/the-policy-weapon-climate-activists-need/
14.Gus Speth, “The Joyful Economy”, https://thenextsystem.org/the-joyful-economy.
D. Parvaz May 1, 2018
President Trump claimed that the unverified contents of Israeli prime minister’s presentation on Iran’s “secret” nuclear weapons program proved that he has been “100 percent right” in wanting to scrap the deal. Credit: Screenshot of CNN broadcast.
Israel and the United States have issued a steady volley of statements against Iran over the past few days that have built a familiar case for war against Tehran, culminating in a bizarre presentation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday in which he used old information to argue that the Iran deal was based on lies.
A stream of news and analysis pieces cropped up Thursday about Israel’s willingness to strike back against Iran if Tehran struck first — as if Iran was seriously considering a first-strike against Israel.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis on Thursday went so far as to say that war between Iran and Israel is “very likely,” even though he wasn’t sure how this war would start. This is the beat of a drum that has been played before, most loudly in 2007, when Vice President Dick Cheney pushed for a war against Iran, Israel openly threatened Iran after bombing Syrian nuclear facilities, and Sen. John McCain sang about bombing Iran.
Subtle: Israeli Prim Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech on Iran’s nuclear program in Tel Aviv on April 30, 2018. Credit: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images.
Following that familiar script, over the weekend, newly-minted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited U.S. allies in the Middle East and Iran was, of course, at the top of his agenda in Saudi Arabia and in Israel, where he emphasized President Donald Trump’s view of the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and accused Iran of being a threat to regional security.
Pompeo even managed to squeeze in a shot against Iran in his meeting in Jordan.
By Monday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused the United States of waging an economic war against Iran, while encouraging other states to take military action against the country.
“Today, the war room against us is the U.S. Department of Treasury,” said Khamenei, according to the semi-official Mehr News Agency. “One way of confrontation with the Islamic Republic establishment is an economic one; another way is the provocation of certain dim-witted and ignorant states in our region [against us],” he said, referring to Saudi Arabia and Israel.
“The [Americans] seek to shift onto others the costs of confrontation with the Islamic Republic establishment and the powerful Iranian nation,” he said. “What Washington does best is cause insecurity. Everywhere they have set foot in, they caused insecurity and brought misfortune for the people,” he added.
French president aims to talk President Trump out of bailing on Iran nuclear deal
Mehrzad Boroujerdi, professor of political science at Syracuse University told ThinkProgress he’s worried that the stage is being set for military action against Iran.
“What is happening, in light of the missile attacks [by Israel against Iranian forces] in Syria, it really seems like we are entering a stage whereby the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia have really decided to take it a notch up in terms of militarily challenging Iran and making sure that the recent victories scored there can be nullified to some extent,” he added.
Boroujerdi said that what’s in play is a more orchestrated plan to provoke Iran — or the force it supports in Lebanon, Hezbollah — to retaliate against Israel in some way. This could also set the stage for further Israeli attacks on Hezbollah territories.
Trump: “I’ve been 100 percent right”
A potential military action would complement Trump’s likely plans to pull out of the JCPOA, as Pompeo indicated last week.
The president has until May 12 to extend sanctions waivers to Iran under the JCPOA, which, in exchange, requires that Iran continue to limit its enrichment activities and allow inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, to inspect its facilities on a regular basis.
But the president is unlikely to do so, and said as much the last time he extended the sanctions in January. He has repeatedly accused Iran of not complying with the deal, even though the IAEA has repeatedly — and consistently — said that Iran is compliance with the terms of JCPOA. So too has the U.S. State Department, and Pompeo, a vocal opponent of the deal.
European partners try — and fail — to pass new Iran sanctions to appease Trump
On Monday, after his visit with Pompeo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a presentation in Tel Aviv in which he alleged — as he has many times in the past — that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon. While Israeli officials claimed the presentation was based on new intelligence, the IAEA was aware of the information Netanyahu spoke of well before the Iran deal and published material about it in 2011.
Shortly after that speech, President Trump took questions from reporters on the deal. He praised Netanyahu’s presentation, and said that he remains convinced that the deal is not worth keeping.
“We’ll see what happens. But I think, if anything, what’s happening today and over the last little while and what we’ve learned has really shown that I’ve been 100 percent right,” said Trump.
But there has been zero evidence of that, according to the United Nations.
In the lead up to his U.S. visit, Saudi prince continues to say dangerous things about Iran
Given that Iran has not actually violated the deal, the Trump administration has, for the past several months, taken an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to trying to dismantle the deal.
Last October, the president accused Iran of violating the “spirit” of the deal. Earlier this year, he alleged that Iran is providing missiles to Houthi rebels in Yemen, where the United States has supported the Saudi Arabia-led coalition to bomb the country for over two years, triggering a massive humanitarian crisis. During German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit last week, Trump said, “Wherever there’s a problem, Iran is right there.”
President Trump has asked the European partners in the deal — France, the United Kingdom, and Germany — to “fix” the deal. But they fell short of passing new sanctions against Iran, which has repeatedly indicated that it would not renegotiate the deal three years after it was struck, nor would it remain in the deal without the United States.
In October, President Trump also refused to recertify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA, as he is required to do under U.S. law every 90 days. That decertification left the door open for Congress to snap back economic sanctions on Iran with 60 days, which did not happen.
But if it does this time around, and if the banking sanctions snap back, things will become dire in Iran. And that’s not good for anyone, said Boroujerdi. To start, Iran will have to turn to China, because they’re the only country offering the no-strings-attached funds Iran will need.
Iran will also face other hard choices — and some of them might prove to be destabilizing, which, said Boroujerdi, is the Trump administration’s “game plan.”
“They are hoping that by pulling out of the nuclear deal, with the formidable challenges that Iran is experiencing, in terms of the water crisis, the currency situation, lack of foreign investment, etc., will lead to some sort of popular uprising,” he said.
“This can really set the region ablaze. Having a country like Iran becoming unstable, in this situation, when the whole Middle East is imploding in one way or another, can really raise the stakes, considering Iran’s size, population, and the geopolitical position it occupies,” said Boroujerdi.
“I’m not sure Washington really wants to see that happen, but they are perhaps naively hopeful that this will be a self-contained regime change.”
Teachers in Colorado are taking to the streets today! #Solidarity
We're in Denver, Colorado where thousands of teachers walk out of class, rallying over low pay and funding.Tens of thousands of teachers are expected to stage walk outs across two states. https://abcn.ws/2JxNbrM
Posted by ABC News on Friday, April 27, 2018
ABC News is live now — in Denver, Colorado.Follow
We’re in Denver, Colorado where thousands of teachers walk out of class, rallying over low pay and funding.
Tens of thousands of teachers are expected to stage walk outs across two states. https://abcn.ws/2JxNbrM