Category: Politics and American Democracy

A New Crop of Food Justice Fellowships Seed Future Leaders

Castanea and Seeding Power fellows are addressing racial inequities within the food system.

By Elizabeth Hewitt, Food Justice      July 25, 2019

Since 2013, Mark Winston Griffith has been working to launch a food co-op in central Brooklyn. In a neighborhood where gentrification has squeezed to the margins the community that has been there for generations, Griffith and the Brooklyn Movement Center, where he works, envision a co-op as part of a broader effort for the local Black community to gain control over the neighborhood food system.

 

Over the course of planning, Griffith has considered local economic impacts, employment, pricing, and more. But after meeting in June with the rest of his cohort in the inaugural year of the food justice-focused Castanea Fellowship (pictured above), Griffith realized he’s been overlooking a key player: farmers.

Now, as he works to revamp the urban neighborhood’s food system, he’s planning to focus his energy on building relationships with food producers in the regions that surround the city. “We really have to have a deeper understanding of how our work is impacting farmers,” he said. “We have to contribute to making sure that they are making a healthy living.” He’s also starting to reconsider how pricing should work at the co-op, looking beyond how costs impact the local Brooklyn neighborhood to how they impact producers.

The two-year Castanea Fellowship, which launched this year with a cohort of 12 fellows, brings together leaders from across the country with a broad range of expertise and experiences, including indigenous agricultural practices, issues impacting farmers of color, inequity in urban food systems, health, and more.

In selecting fellows from a pool of 415 applicants, the program sought out people from diverse racial and geographic backgrounds on the “front lines” of the movement, according to executive director Farzana Serang. “We want folks who are leading the conversation about improving the food systems to be the ones who understand those issues the most,” Serang said.

The program provides each fellow with $40,000 in grant funds to be used toward a charitable purpose, plus transportation. When fully operational with two cohorts, the annual budget will be slightly over $1 million.

Castanea is part of a new crop of fellowships at the regional and national levels aiming not just to train the next generation of food leaders, but to foster connections among advocates working in different aspects of the food system. The idea is to create a more unified movement with a focus on pushing for greater racial equity.

Unifying the New York Food Movement

In New York, the newly launched Seeding Power Fellowship from Community Food Funders is striving to coalesce a unified food movement within the region. With a budget of roughly $230,000, the fellowship brings together food system leaders from Long Island, New York City, and the Hudson River Valley where, despite working in close quarters, advocates are often disconnected from each other even when they have shared goals, according to Adam Liebowitz, director of Community Food Funders.

“It creates a false impression of competition, or being at odds, or at the very least not being allies,” Liebowitz said.

Organizers at Seeding Power set out to unite people from different backgrounds to create a more comprehensive movement pushing for racial equity in New York. In order to leverage the power of the fellowship, the program limited applicants to people who are already established in their careers and in positions of leadership within their organization. The program’s 12 fellows, selected from a pool of 57 applicants, represent farmers, urban farmers’ markets, rural education initiatives, and more. Each fellow receives $5,000 for participation.

The Seeding Power fellowsThe Seeding Power fellows.

Sandra Jean-Louis, a Seeding Power fellow whose work with Public Health Solutions focuses on food security among older public housing residents, said uniting advocates from different corners of the food system creates more efficiency. Right now, organizations working toward the same public health goals can end up inadvertently competing with each other for resources. “We are running after the same dollars,” Jean-Louis said. If organizations could coordinate on grant applications with other like-minded groups, she said, it could amplify their efforts.

The fellows, who have so far gathered for two of the total of five retreats they’ll participate in over the course of the 18-month program, have already started finding new common ground.

Mohamed Attia, a Seeding Power fellow and co-director of The Street Vendor Project, was surprised to learn that access to driver’s licenses for immigrants, a hurdle for city street vendors, is also a major issue for rural farmworkers. New York state just passed a law expanding access to driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants last month.

Workers on farms, in restaurants, and at street vendor carts face similar “injustice and unfairness,” according to Attia, who worked as a food vendor in New York, first selling pretzels and hot dogs in Times Square and later running a halal cart. The program, he said, offers space for people from different backgrounds to connect around common issues.

“I’m sure there are hundreds or maybe thousands of organizations with food workers all across the nation. But imagine if all these people have one voice,” Attia said. “I think that would be super helpful and super powerful.”

A Focus on Racial Equity

Both the Castanea and Seeding Power fellowships identify addressing racial inequities within the food system as a central part of their mission, and both cohorts include a majority of people of color.

Shorlette Ammons, of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) at North Carolina State University and a Castanea fellow, said the diversity of the cohort sets the stage for the conversation to center on communities that have historically been marginalized.

Ammons, who grew up in a small town in eastern North Carolina and focuses on the experience of rural Black farming communities, says those perspectives are key for helping to build collective solutions, as are others represented in the group.

“I think we have a lot to learn from indigenous communities, [and] we have a lot to learn from Black country people and rural communities,” she said.

The members of the Castanea cohort are deeply connected to their cultural roots, noted Rowen White, a fellow who works with the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. The diversity within the group encourages participants to draw on their backgrounds, she said, which stands out. “A lot of the times in professional spaces, people are asked to check a lot of things at the door.”

She added, “It just gives insight into where the food systems movement can go when we really allow ourselves to really be present with all of the ancestral wisdom and lineage and knowledge and power that comes with our cultural inheritance.”

A Cohort Approach to Food Justice Work

While fellowships tend to serve only small numbers of people, food policy experts say they can be effective ways to shape conversations over time.

For author and advocate Anna Lappé, her participation in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation-sponsored Food & Society/Food & Community fellowship programs, which operated from 2001 to 2013, helped her make connections and develop skills that are the foundation for her work with the food system. “New organizations have been born, lifelong relationships cultivated, and deep strategic thinking has come out of fellowships,” she explained by email to Civil Eats.

Now a member of Castanea’s steering committee, Lappé sees fellowships as “critical” to tackling the major issues connected to the food system. “I’ve always believed that the transformational work needed to address these food system-driven crises cannot be achieved in isolation,” Lappé said.

Food justice advocates are often focused on one aspect of the system, like improving nutrition or calling for the rights of laborers, according to Nick Freudenberg, professor of public health and director of the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute and a member of Seeding Power’s selection committee. The splintering of efforts within the sector, he said, has “compromised the effectiveness of the food movement and the food justice movement.” But by bringing people together, fellowships can overcome those barriers.

“Having more knowledgeable, skillful, strategic leadership in the food justice movement will increase its impact and move us towards having a healthier food system and reducing food insecurity, diet related diseases, unfairly paid food workers,” Freudenberg said.

Kathleen Merrigan, executive director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University and the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sees fellowships as valuable training ground for emerging leaders in the food system. Not only are farmers and ranchers aging, food policy experts in the federal government are also retiring, she said.

Programs that provide resources and time to people working in the food system help them prepare to take on bigger roles. Fellowships also provide valuable spaces where people can collaborate, exchange ideas, and find community.

“The work is hard, and sometimes the work can be lonely,” Merrigan said. “It’s really great to have a cohort approach to problem solving and food system work.”

Food Fellowships on the Rise

Fellowships are currently popular within the food sector—both Merrigan and Freudenberg are launching their own. Merrigan is helping establish a program for food policy leaders, and Freudenberg is creating one aimed at young adults.

Neither worry about duplicating efforts too much. Some programs coordinate with each other; for instance, leaders from Seeding Power, Castanea, and a third program, the HEAL Food Alliance, have been in contact about their efforts. However, Merrigan does caution that there could be limited financial resources to support programs.

But, while interest in food is at high right now, Merrigan doesn’t see a unified reform movement. “We have a long ways to go before it’s a sufficiently powerful social movement to transform the system, as many of these fellowship programs suggest is their aim,” she said.

For Griffith, who is working to open the neighborhood food co-op in Brooklyn, the fellowship is a launching pad. He feels the results of the Castanea Fellowship will play out over years and generations, as factors shaping the food system change. Griffith hopes participating in the fellowship will help Brooklyn Movement Center’s hyper-local work connect with efforts across the country to change food structures.

“At the end of the day, you know, your local community cannot be an island,” he said. “You have to fit into broader structures; you have to be able to change policies and the ways of doing business, across the board.”

Indigenous Food Security is Dependent on Food Sovereignty

New research shows that hunting, fishing, and foraging for traditional Native foods help nourish tribal members—but first they need access to their ancestral lands.

By Andi Murphy, Food Access, Indigenous Foodways  July 24, 2019

  

Several times a year, the locals at Orleans, California see a surge of sport fishermen and trophy hunters come through town, driving big trucks decked out in camouflage and sporting polarized fishing sunglasses.

The locals, including some of the Native people from tribes in the Klamath Basin, have to enter the same lottery and buy the same hunting permits as the outsiders who may or may not see the cultural and nutritional value of the animals they are harvesting. For some Native people, including Lisa Hillman, seeing their food treated in this way was an unpleasant shock.

“It makes me want to turn away,” Hillman said. “Otherwise I might say something I shouldn’t, as a mother and as a leader in the community.”

Study after study has shown that access to healthy food is critically low in Native communities across the U.S. In Orleans, a small, unincorporated town with limited resources, Native people have a hard time accessing food, let alone traditional, indigenous food.

A new study from Hillman, a member of the Karuk tribe and the manager of its Píkyav Field Institute, and colleagues from U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, explores the profound lack of food access among tribal members in the northwestern corner of California.

Over the course the last five years, the researchers received more than 711 survey responses, conducted 115 follow-up interviews, and worked with 20 focus groups to determine the food access challenges that members of the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath tribes face. The study found that 92 percent face at least some level of food insecurity—compared with 11.8 percent of all U.S. households.

“We only have one highway,” Hillman said about Orleans, a hub for the Karuk tribe with a population of 600. “Getting food here is really difficult,” she said, and the nearest grocery store is a two-hour drive away.

The study also showed that essentially everyone who participated wants more access to indigenous foods, but they first have to overcome limited access, regulations, and a legacy of colonialism to eat the food that has been part of their tribal identity and culture since before colonization.

“It was just astounding how widespread these feelings of loss, need, want, and frustration were in our area and across the tribes,” said Hillman.

Sixty-four percent of Native households in the area rely on food assistance, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, sometimes called commodities or “commods.” And 21 percent of those households reported using these food assistance programs because Native foods weren’t available. About 40 percent of participants said they rely on Native foods for food security.

A Lack of Access to Native Foods

It wasn’t always like this; 84 percent of people didn’t used to run out of food or worry about running out of food in the past. Traditionally, indigenous people in the Klamath Basin lived off of an abundance of wild game and fish, nuts, berries, and herbs. They also had unlimited access and the practical and cultural knowledge to gather, cook, and preserve these foods.

A sturgeon caught by Yurok fishermen on the Klamath River. (Photo CC-licensed by DocentJoyce on Flickr)A sturgeon caught by Yurok fishermen on the Klamath River. (Photo CC-licensed by DocentJoyce on Flickr)

Tribal members face a number of barriers that have cropped up over the last 170 years as a result of the California Gold Rush, forced assimilation, broken treaties, and changing land jurisdictions. Their traditional territory is massive compared to the tiny pieces of land now known as reservations.

The Karuk don’t technically have a reservation. They have multiple, small sections of land held in trust by the government. The Hoopa Valley Tribe has a small reservation, which includes a section of the Trinity River. The Yurok reservation stretches 44 miles along the Klamath River from the Pacific Ocean to the town of Weitchpec and meets the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. Similar to the Karuk tribe, the Klamath Tribes (Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin) have land held in trust by the government that is spread across Klamath County.

Each tribe has limited rights to hunting and fishing on their own traditional territories (not on reservation land), but off-reservation hunting and fishing are subject to state and federal fish and game laws, yet another obstacle to accessing their traditional foods.

“We aren’t ‘allowed’ in the eyes of the federal government to do these things,” Hillman said. “We have to apply for a permit to hunt our own Native species that we’ve hunted for a long time and managed for a long time before somebody decided this was their land.”

Salmon is always a hot-button issue in the Klamath Basin. Salmon populations are most affected by dams and the Hoopa Valley Tribe has been in a decades-long legal battle with California and Oregon to get four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River removed.

“We haven’t had access to the fish that we’ve had access to for decades,” Hillman said. This year, the Karuk Tribe put tighter restrictions on salmon fishing and the tribe is petitioning the California Fish and Game Commission to list Spring Chinook as a protected species.

Focus groups conducted as part of the five-year study also listed misguided resource management policies, logging, and criminalization of hunting, fishing, and gathering practices as contributing to food insecurity.

“We have to go off of the reservation, so basically, they call us outlaws, poachers, whatever. We’re not poachers or outlaws. We are providers. Native man is a provider,” according to one confidential interview highlighted in the study. “He goes out and he gets food for his family. He ain’t out there looking for trophies. He’s looking for meat to feed his family … The Creator give us these animals so we can live. Now you got to go buy a ticket, a tag, a license to go out and be who you are.”

Food Security Through Food Sovereignty

According to the study, 7 percent of Native households said they are Native food secure, meaning they have access to indigenous foods like pine nuts, acorns, chestnuts, huckleberries, elderberries, wild potatoes, wild mushrooms, eels, salmon, sturgeon, and deer, to name just a few. The study also finds nearly 83 percent of households consumed Native foods at least once in the past year and that there is a strong desire—according to 99.56 percent of survey respondents—to have more access to these foods.

Glenn Moore, Hoopa/Yurok Cultural Practitioner arranges salmon on skewers during a traditional baking demonstration. (Photo CC-licensed by the U.S. Forest Service)Glenn Moore, Hoopa/Yurok Cultural Practitioner arranges salmon on skewers during a traditional baking demonstration. (Photo CC-licensed by the U.S. Forest Service)

These findings led the report authors to make a number of recommendations to better reflect Native food needs in future food insecurity studies. In addition to recommending the USDA factor in Native foods and travel to far-distant stores to use SNAP or WIC in future studies, researchers would like state and federal agencies to strengthen hunting and fishing rights, promote tribal stewardship to the land and natural resources, and increase funds for tribal education, research, and extension programs.

In a nutshell: Native people want food sovereignty.

“Really, food is at the core of everything we do, who we are. It’s our identity,” Hillman said. “We’re really trying to get it [Native food education] back into the schools, because that’s where we can sort of bridge that knowledge gap.”

The Píkyav Field Institute has developed a K-12 curriculum that includes Native food in every lesson. The children take field trips to collect acorns and learn food origin stories.

Over at the Hoopa Valley Tribe, Meagen Baldy, district coordinator for the Klamath Trinity Resource Conservation District, also helps connect tribal members to traditional foods through cooking demonstrations, food workshops, recipe writing, a community garden, and connecting food to the Hupa language.

“My main model is using accessible food, whether it’s traditional, commodities, fished, or hunted foods,” Baldy said.

In food workshops, for example, Baldy will combine fresh canned salmon using local fish with kale and leeks from the garden. Or she’ll make traditional huckleberry jams and jellies and dumplings with Food Distribution Program ingredients.

“I always tell the kids that ‘Now you’re connected to that jar of jam. When you open it, you’ll be connected back to all of us,’” she said.

Establishing that deeper connection with food, its stories and culture is what Baldy’s work is all about. She’s also working to get restrictive food policies changed.

“To us, traditional gathering is ‘agriculture,’” Baldy said. “It’s getting that [through] to the USDA.”

She sees some light at the end of the tunnel. With 60 provisions in the 2018 Farm Bill concerning tribes, such as more support for locally grown and produced foods and more tribal management of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, tribes have fodder to continue writing the beginning chapters of their tribal food sovereignty stories.

“We want to have economic development in our communities and sustainable agriculture, but we need to get rid of barriers,” Baldy said.

Trump Administration Moves to End Food Stamps for 3 Million People

Bloomberg

Trump Administration Moves to End Food Stamps for 3 Million People
Mike Dorning, Bloomberg             July 23, 2019
White House to propose rule that would remove 3 million people from food stamps

(Bloomberg) — The Trump administration moved to end food stamp benefits for 3.1 million people with proposed new regulations curtailing the leeway of states to automatically enroll residents who receive welfare benefits.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said state governments “have misused this flexibility.”

“We are changing the rules, preventing abuse of a critical safety net system, so those who need food assistance the most are the only ones who receive it,” he added.

Conservatives have long sought cuts in the federal food assistance program for the poor and disabled. House Republicans tried to impose similar restrictions on the food stamp program last year when Congress renewed it but were rebuffed in the Senate.

The proposed rule changes released Tuesday for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — often called by its former name, food stamps — would deliver on the goal as the administration has agreed to a deal to lift caps on federal spending, ushering in a return to trillion-dollar budget deficits.

Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said the Agriculture Department’s action “is yet another attempt by this administration to circumvent Congress and make harmful changes to nutrition assistance that have been repeatedly rejected on a bipartisan basis.”

“This rule would take food away from families, prevent children from getting school meals, and make it harder for states to administer food assistance,” the Michigan senator added.

Income Cap

The Trump administration rule would rein in states’ ability to enroll recipients earning more than 130% of the federal poverty guidelines — in most cases capping eligibility to an annual income of $32,640 for a family of four. Households are also limited in most cases to $2,250 in countable assets, such as cash or money in bank accounts.

Forty states and the District of Columbia currently use alternative eligibility criteria that allow participants in some federally funded welfare programs to automatically receive food stamps as long as their income is less than double the poverty level.

Brandon Lipps, an acting deputy undersecretary in the Agriculture Department, told reporters in a conference call previewing the regulatory changes that in some cases states enroll residents for food stamps even though they are receiving federal welfare benefits of minimal value — including brochures.

The proposed regulations would only allow automatic enrollment of people who receive welfare benefits worth at least $50 a month on an ongoing basis for at least six months. Other than cash, the only welfare benefits that would qualify are subsidized employment, work supports such as transportation, and child care, Lipps said.

The proposed restrictions would eliminate food stamps for 3.1 million people at an average annual savings of $2.5 billion, according to Agriculture Department officials. A final regulation will be issued after a 60-day public comment period.

36 Million Recipients

As of April, 36 million Americans received food stamps, with an average monthly benefit of $121 per person, according to the Department of Agriculture. Enrollment has declined as the economy has improved and was down 2.5 million from a year earlier.

The federal government pays the cost of food stamp benefits. But states administer the program and determine eligibility of applicants, with the state and federal government splitting administrative costs.

Cutting back automatic enrollment would have a substantial impact, mostly hitting recipients who receive lower monthly benefits and disproportionately affecting working families with children trying to climb out of poverty, Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute said in testimony last month to a House Agriculture subcommittee.

“We particularly worry about food‐insecure households with kids and adolescents,” Waxman said. “Food insecure children have higher rates of fair and poor health, have higher rates of hospitalization, increased risk of asthma, and delays in cognitive developments.”

(Updates with proposed regulations released beginning with fifth paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Mike Dorning in Washington at mdorning@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, John Harney

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

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15,000 Americans Died So Republican Governors Could Stick It to Obama

Esquire

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire       July 22, 2019

 

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla - Getty ImagesEsquire

On June 28, 2012, the day that the Supreme Court upheld most of the Affordable Care Act, the sighs of relief were so loud that they drowned out one part of the Court’s decision that has come to haunt the lives of millions of poor people around the country, and that also has come to represent the fanatical refusal of Republican politicians, specifically Republican governors, to associate themselves with anything that had anything to do with President Barack Obama. In his opinion upholding the ACA, Roberts allowed individual governors to refuse to accept the Medicaid expansion in their states. In other words, just because it came from an Democratic president—and because it came from that Democratic president—these governors violated one of the fundamental tenets of state government that date back to the dawn of human greed: they refused FREE MONEY!

Now, in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, four scholars have illustrated the human price of this nonfeasance by Republican governors. According to the paper, somewhere around 15,000 Americans died between the years 2014 and 2017 as a result of states that turned down the FREE MONEY! available to them from the federal government through the provisions of the ACA.

 Our analysis shows that the ACA Medicaid expansions reduced mortality among this targeted group. Prior to the expansions, individuals in our sample residing in expansion and non-expansion states had very similar trends in both Medicaid coverage and mortality. At the time of the expansion, the trajectories of these two groups diverged significantly, with expansion state residents seeing increases in Medicaid coverage and decreases in the probability of being uninsured, and decreases in annual mortality rates. In the first year following the coverage expansion, the probability of mortality declined by about 0.09 percentage points, or 6.4 percent relative to the sample mean. The estimated impact of the expansions increases over time, suggesting that prolonged exposure to Medicaid results in increasing health improvements…

 Our analysis provides new evidence that Medicaid coverage reduces mortality rates among low-income adults. Our estimates suggest that approximately 15,600 deaths would have been averted had the ACA expansions been adopted nationwide as originally intended by the ACA.

Photo credit: Getty ImagesFurther, the study says that the most significant health benefits available to the people in states where the governors accepted the FREE MONEY! came in the ability of those people to schedule regular visits to general practitioners and to access preventative care. As the report’s conclusion says:

 There is robust evidence that Medicaid increases the use of health care, including types of care that are well-established as efficacious such as prescription drugs and screening and early detection of cancers that are responsive to treatment. Given this, it may seem obvious that Medicaid would improve objective measures of health. However, due to data constraints, this relationship has been difficult to demonstrate empirically, leading to widespread skepticism that Medicaid has any salutary effect on health whatsoever. Our paper overcomes documented data challenges by taking advantage of large- scare federal survey data that has been linked to administrative records on mortality. Using these data, we show that the Medicaid expansions substantially reduced mortality rates among those who stood to benefit the most.

The original intent of the ACA was to have the Medicaid expansion applied nationwide. Strict constructionist textualist John Roberts carved a huge loophole in the law and Republican governors threw themselves through it, dragging sick people behind them. Some of those people died because of what they did.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

New Video from Randy Rainbow “They’re just suckers for you”.

Randy Rainbow

July 22, 2019

***NEW VIDEO***

Got a jump start on big D’s 2020 campaign song. Apologies to the Jonas Bros. 👏🍭👏🍭👏

SUCKERS – Randy Rainbow Song Parody

***NEW VIDEO***Got a jump start on big D's 2020 campaign song. Apologies to the Jonas Bros. 👏🍭👏🍭👏

Posted by Randy Rainbow on Monday, July 22, 2019

Cutting through the Trump administration’s lies about the Mueller report.

NowThis Politic

July 22, 2019

Robert De Niro, Rob Reiner, Sophia Bush, Stephen King, Jonathan Van Ness, and more are cutting through the Trump administration’s lies about the Mueller report.

EXCLUSIVE: The Truth About Trump Collusion and Obstruction in the Mueller Report

Robert De Niro, Rob Reiner, Sophia Bush, Stephen King, Jonathan Van Ness, and more are cutting through the Trump administration’s lies about the Mueller report.

Posted by NowThis Politics on Monday, July 22, 2019

Hong Kong Riot Police fire tear gas at protesters

CNN posted an episode of CNN Replay. 

July 21, 2019

Hong Kong police have fired tear gas to disperse protesters, after thousands of people took to the city’s streets for the seventh consecutive weekend amid an ongoing political crisis.

CNN’s Matt Rivers says today’s march was peaceful — but some protesters threw projectiles and rushed the police after dark: cnn.it/32Fsk01

Riot police fire tear gas at Hong Kong protesters in seventh week of mass marches

Hong Kong police have fired tear gas to disperse protesters, after thousands of people took to the city's streets for the seventh consecutive weekend amid an ongoing political crisis.CNN's Matt Rivers says today's march was peaceful — but some protesters threw projectiles and rushed the police after dark: cnn.it/32Fsk01

Posted by CNN on Sunday, July 21, 2019

Oceans be dammed! To spite Dems, team Trump rakes in $200,000 in one weekend selling plastic straws

MarketWatch

Team Trump rakes in $200,000 in one weekend through the sale of plastic straws — buy a pack to ‘own the libs’

By Shawn Langlois, Social Media Editor              July 22, 2019

Getty Images

Politics aside, paper straws are lame.

The movement to ban the plastic version many of us have used our entire lives, while surely well-intentioned, took aim at a problem without offering a proper solution. Anybody who’s tried to suck a milk shake through one of those disintegrating wood-pulp-based tubes knows this all too well.

So Team Trump sensed an opportunity to “own the libs” and announced last week the sale of “Trump Straws,” an alternative to those “liberal paper straws.”

These straws have been a hit so far, according to Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, who celebrated the marketing coup with this tweet:

 

Interestingly, the Trump straws are promoted as BPA-free and recyclable:

A Sisterhood of Carpenters Builds Tiny Houses for the Homeless

Yes Magazine

For Women, by Women: A Sisterhood of Carpenters Builds Tiny Houses for the Homeless

A mostly female crew constructs a village of emergency shelters in north Seattle, and finds camaraderie along the way.
By Lornet Turnbull           from August 2018
tinyhouses_rowofhouses.jpg

For the volunteer tradeswomen who came together over several cold, wet weekends this spring to build a tiny-house village for homeless women in north Seattle, the ultimate reward wasn’t necessarily their finished handiwork.

Rather, it was the confidence and camaraderie the project inspired for many of the crew who, for the first time, worked on a construction site where they were not the only women.

Alice Lockridge, who spent a 30-year career training women to do physically demanding work, created the Women4Women initiative that brought them all together.

“These women go to work every day and are told they are not as good, they are taking some man’s job, and ‘Why are they there?’ Subtle and straight to their faces, every day for their entire careers,” Lockridge says.

With Women4Women, she says, “we made a place where they could come to work and share their skills and learn new skills in an environment that was free from all that.”

Whittier Heights Village is a community of 15 colorful tiny houses, each 100 square feet. In July, its new residents began moving in, many from the streets or from shelters around Seattle. The village also has a common building with a kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry.

Located on city-owned land, it is one of nine tiny-house villages in Seattle that serve as emergency shelters for the city’s homeless population. It is operated by the Low Income Housing Institute, which develops and operates housing for low-income and homeless people in Washington state. Each house costs about $2,500 to build, and the labor is mostly provided by volunteers.

Dozens ofwomen—and also some men—from across the state answered Lockridge’s initial call for volunteers. Not all were carpenters; there also were gardeners, plumbers and electricians, and artists. They included tradespeople with years of experience and folks who hadn’t picked up a hammer in years.

“People talked about how different it was from their regular crew in the real world where they worked. … We worked, learned, and taught,” Lockridge says.

It was a different scene from the male-dominated worksites many of them report to every day.

While the construction industry has a narrower gender pay gap than U.S. industries on average, Women4Women volunteer Linda Romanovitch said many women don’t see such work as viable career options.

In the construction trades, women represent about 10 percent of 10.3 million construction workers in the U.S.

Romanovitch, who spent 40 years in the construction trade, 32 of them as a supervisor and carpenter with the King County government, said that too often the only people being recruited into construction work are the brothers and sons of men who already have those jobs.

What’s more is that high school shop classes, which seldom attract girls in the first place, have been all but abandoned by most U.S. high schools, meaning students miss out on exploring those options.

“It’s called the other four-year degree,” Romanovitch says. “You get benefits and a pension. All these things I’m promoting as a union carpenter, but my great passion is to promote this as a viable career option for women. It’s still a man’s world in construction.”

Romanovitch had assembled about 15 women from Sisters in the Brotherhood, a group of women in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters union who support and mentor one another.

She regularly coordinates volunteer projects for the women carpenters—from building tiny houses to repairing the homes of seniors and the disabled.

Sisters groups exist in carpenter locals across the country. In some cases, it’s just one woman, Romanovitch says. In the construction trades, women represent about 10 percent of 10.3 million construction workers in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Sisters have been going into middle and high schools to talk to young girls about construction work, and also visiting inmates in a women’s prison.

“The millennials are going to carry the water,” Romanovitch says. “But first we need to recruit them.”

The Sisters also have been trying to chip away at some of the barriers that keep women out of the trade, including harassment, for which the industry is well-known. They have been working with their union brothers to try to create healthier worksites overall, and they encourage women to report problems when they arise, Romanovitch says.

“But it’s at a snail’s pace,” she says. “There’s still a lot of old-school shit you are battling, but at least it’s being talked about.”

Saskia Brown experiences that on the job daily.

“Every day I have to prove that I know what I’m talking about.”

She got into a carpentry apprenticeship program 11 years ago after high school, when a friend suggested she try it instead of going to college. She liked the work and the pay and stayed, working her way up the ladder, becoming a lead and then forewoman about two years ago.

In her regular job, Brown oversees other carpenters on many large projects, including hospitals and high-rise apartment buildings throughout the Puget Sound region.

But the challenges of being the only woman on a site—and a supervisor on top of that—are unrelenting, she says. “Every day I have to prove that I know what I’m talking about.”

There is a base level of disrespect, she says, and she’s always being questioned, not so much by the men she supervises, but by the men working in upper management, project managers, and other foremen. “A lot of times they don’t even know they are doing it. That’s just the way the world is, the way construction is,” Brown says.

It’s why working on the Whittier Heights project felt so good.

Brown had learned about it at a meeting she regularly hosts for women carpenter apprentices. And unlike in her day job, she said, the 30 or so church volunteers she supervised on that project did not question her judgment or credentials. “It was nice and laid-back,” Brown recalls.

“No pissing contests. Everyone there had a common goal. It was refreshing.”

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Lornet Turnbull wrote this article for Yes Magazine. Lornet is an editor for YES!, a Seattle-based freelance writer, and a regional anchor for the Washington Post.