“Detroit embodies both the problem and potential for solutions,” says Maureen Taylor, USSF staff coordinator. “We believe the Social Forum process will stimulate some hope for the people of Detroit and help the people turn this city around.” Organizers expect 15,000 to 25,000 people  to arrive from around the country for the forum. And while the attention focused on Detroit may help turn the city around, Detroit’s bottom-up style of activism may also open up new ideas and possibilities for those visiting from around the country.

Detroit is known as the place where  thousands lost jobs when the automobile industry crashed well before the 2008 Wall Street collapse. White flight, expressways built through formerly vibrant African American neighborhoods, the outsourcing of manufacturing (and the failure of the Big Three to transition to eco-friendly cars or renewable energy technologies), along with the anger and violence that resulted from hopelessness and drugs have all played a part in Detroit’s demise. Solutions from city government have mirrored the lack of vision of corporate leadership. Neither the promotion of casino gambling nor the shiny new downtown towers have helped.

But in the neighborhoods, young media makers, owners of small businesses, former Black Panthers,  and a scrappy group of activists connected with the Boggs Center are setting a different direction for their city. They aren’t looking to corporations to bring in jobs-they have seen how those big projects suck up land and tax money only to leave town for lower wages or higher tax breaks some place else. And they aren't looking to the government for solutions. Many pinned high hopes on the election of Detroit's first African-American mayor, Coleman Young, in 1973 only to find he was taking the city in the same destructive direction as his predecessors.

For this group, protests are almost passé. They recognize that there are plenty of reasons to protest a massive, pollution-spewing incinerator, police brutality, and companies that are all too ready to cut off life-sustaining water and heat when someone gets behind on bills.

But these new 21st-century activists don't believe those who hold positions of power actually have the vision or capability to turn things around, no matter how much is demanded of them. Corporate and city establishment leaders belong to a dying epoch, they say. It's of limited use to make demands of a system that is on its way down.

Instead, these Detroiters are rebuilding their own future, creating the city they want to live in, and transforming themselves at the same time.

“Mayor Bing and corporate interests ... are top-down ‘leaders’ who can't see the grassroots Detroiters who are rebuilding, redefining and respiriting our city from the ground up," says Grace Boggs, who at 95 is a leading thinker and activist in Detroit. Grace, who has been a Detroit activist  for more than 50 years, will be among the speakers at the opening session of the USSF.

The examples of this bottom-up renewal can be seen around the city and will be highlighted on the first day of the social forum. Here are just a couple that I encountered in a couple of days in Detroit.

Feeding the hunger

Myrtle Thompson Curtis and Wayne Curtis took a small, empty plot of land, brought together friends, members of a nearby church, and other volunteers, and began the Feed'om Freedom Growers. Tomatoes, greens, strawberries, and other crops grow in raised beds and in rows. They also teach classes on healthy cooking, and a book club was started by young people who work in the garden.

“I went to my old neighborhood, and I had to cry,” Curtis told a group visiting his garden as part of a tour sponsored by the Allied Media Conference. “There's nothing there. Nothing at all. They were telling me about their friends, who were my friends growing up, who are no longer with us.”

Slowly, their new block is changing. Myrtle Curtis was encouraged when neighbors down the street came out when they saw a crowd of people getting off a bus and out of a caravan of cars to visit the garden. “We don't see our neighbors much,” she said. “This area is too scary to mingle. But they came out to participate, and that's what it's all about.”

Now Wayne and Myrtle are looking to expand to an empty lot across the street from the garden, and they'd like to use an abandoned house that borders on the lot as a community center.

“It’s a question of money and control and misuse of power,” Wayne Curtis told the group. “This is a problem we need to resolve like adults,” he said. “I was homeless, and I walked past a grocery store, and I was hungry, and that didn't make any sense to me. ... How can we get this land. How can we get seeds and bees so we can make honey. How can we have an economy so that people don't go hungry.”

There are over 800 community gardens, ranging from the small and precarious, to large entities like Earth Works that are increasingly able to bring fresh foods to Detroit's food deserts and give Detroiters opportunities for meaningful work and involvement in their communities.

Security in a militarized city

Like in many U.S. cities, the standoff between police and community members all too often turns deadly. Most recently, the city has been mourning the death of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones, who was killed last month in a drug raid gone wrong.

Ron Scott, a founder some decades ago of a Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party, heads up the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality. Scott believes the community must learn to resolve its own conflicts and must redefine relations with police.

“What cities like Detroit are facing is increasing militarization,” he told me. “Police agencies used to be public service agencies that were an extension of the community, not a suppression of the community.”

The community can take the lead in redefining the relationship. Eighty percent of the conflicts in the community are related to substance abuse and domestic violence, he said. “We can intervene by mediating disputes and also by creating independent economic entities.” For example, a group that had been in conflict with police took an abandoned lot, started a garden project, and renamed it Peace Park, he said. They use the lot to mediate disputes themselves, rather than calling in police.

“The most important thing we're doing is taking responsibility for making sure in cities like Detroit that we can reshape communities the way we want them. The people running this city and others are not blatantly evil. It's that many of them are not capable of dealing with the collapse of the economic system. What happened in the past is not gone, but it’s whimpering and dying.”

“We’re working to build something that is creative and new in the city,” he said. “This movement, unlike movements of the past, is not based on one sex, one race, one ideological frame,” Scott said. “It’s based on love and appreciation, and transformation of humanity.

Scott and others are working to create more of these peace zones and—as fellow activist, author, and former prison inmate Yusef Shakur says—to turn predators into protectors and put the neighbor back in the ‘hood.

Detroit as a Model

The attention of thousands of activists will be like a mirror, raising the awareness of Detroiters themselves of the powerful innovations that they are bringing into the world. But it may be that the social movements represented here will also find new models and strategies from these grassroots leaders.

“I can’t begin to tell you how much Detroit means symbolically worldwide and nationally,” Grace Boggs says. “Detroit was once the national and international symbol of the miracles of industrialization and then became the national and international symbol of devastation of deindustrialization. Now it is becoming the national and international symbol of a new way of living-of great transformation.”

Detroiters are creating new ways of caring for one another and caring for the Earth, she says.
The U.S. Social Forum may be like a fierce wind that picks up the seeds of these grassroots innovations and spreads them across the American landscape. “What's happening this week here in Detroit,” Grace says, “is the beginning of something new.”

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sarah is YES! Magazine's executive editor.

Interested? More on the US Social Forum in Detroit.

For nearly three decades, coal companies that practice mountaintop removal have been able to dump mining waste in valleys without a thorough permitting review—allowing them to effectively sidestep the Clean Water Act. Yesterday, in an important victory for Appalachian citizens and clean water advocates, the Army Corps of Engineers suspended its long-standing fast-track approval process (MWA Permit 21). Companies seeking to fill valleys will now have to seek "individual" permits for their projects, which will undergo greater scrutiny, including a public commenting process. Communities will now have a voice in the discussion of whether a valley fill permit should be approved in their backyard.

This positive step for Appalachian communities and waterways is the result of the growing movement to end mountaintop removal. The Army Corps received over 23,000 written comments on the proposal to suspend the NWP21 permits. Despite jeers, threats, and intimidation from coal industry supporters, brave citizens from impacted communities spoke up loud and clear during the public hearing process. These citizens, confident in their position that valleyfill permits should not be streamlined and deserve public comment, were unshakable. Here is a video showing the hearing in Charleston, WV:

Mountaintop removal is a form of strip mining that uses high-end explosives to literally blast off up to several hundred feet of a mountaintop. The resulting waste is most often shoved into adjacent valleys, burying headwater streams. These streams flow into rivers, providing drinking water for millions of Americans on the east coast. Meg Gaffney-Smith, Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers Regulatory Program stated that, due to “concerns with this particular type of mining technique, impacts to aquatic resources and water quality, and how well stream mitigation projects were performing....we believed it was best to suspend NW permit 21 in this region.”

Nationwide permits were created to regulate "activities that have only minimal impacts to the aquatic environment." As anybody directly impacted by mountaintop removal can tell you, burying streams has major impacts on aquatic life that reverberate through the entire ecosystem. Recent scientific studies have validated what local residents have been saying for years. Most recently, Margaret Palmer, in her blockbuster scientific study on the effects of mountaintop removal, stated, “The scientific evidence of the severe environmental and human impacts from mountaintop removal is strong and irrefutable. Its impacts are pervasive and long lasting and there is no evidence that any mitigation practices successfully reverse the damage it causes.”

Save the Fish, Save Ourselves
Why more water for wildlife means more water for people.

And while there is definite reason for celebration, the flip side is that the changes announced today are not codified into any rule or law. The Army Corps, at any time, can reverse this decision and reinstate the NWP21 process. If nothing else, the process will be reviewed once again when NWP 21 expires on March 18, 2012. Bills introduced into Congress would go a long way to stopping mountaintop removal altogether, a practice which has already destroyed over 500 mountains and buried and polluted over 2,000 miles of streams in the Appalachian region. Both the Clean Water Protection Act (H.R. 1310) in the House and the Appalachia Restoration Act (S 696) are seeking to end valley fills associated with mountaintop removal, and both bills are attracting an incredible number of cosponsors. Since the economics of most mountaintop removal mining depends on the use of valley fills, passing these bills would go a long way to curbing the practice.

Thanks to the hard work of Appalachian residents and their allies around the country, we're one step closer to ending mountaintop removal.

Sandra Diaz wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sandra is the director for development and communications at Appalachian Voices. You can find out more about the movement to end mountaintop removal at ilovemountains.org.

Interested?

What's Your Connection to Mountaintop Removal?
Search your zipcode to meet the communities and landscapes to which you're connected?

Last Mountain Standing
The last intact mountain in West Virginia's Coal River Valley is slated for mountaintop removal coal mining. Local residents have other ideas.

Photo by Alice Speri.

On June 4, 10,000 Haitians, most of them peasant farmers, marched for food sovereignty and an end to Monsanto's recent donation of seeds. The banner reads: "Defend food sovereignty in our country and the planet."

We’re putting together a national network, RENHASSA, to show what our alternatives are today. The whole peasant sector is coming together to tell everyone about the policies we want. Our mission is to advocate for Haiti to be sovereign with its food and to promote national production.

We’re mobilizing politically for the policies we want. We publish articles and do community radio programs about our positions. We’re also doing media campaigns and having meetings to educate people about growing for local and family consumption as much as possible, instead of buying food from other countries. People are starting to recognize and change their habits to just buy local goods.

But the state must exercise its responsibility toward its people. When we talk about reconstructing Haiti, we can’t just talk about houses. It’s got to be a whole plan. We have to talk about reconstructing land—about total reforestation.

First, we have to decentralize the Republic of Port-au-Prince, which got created during the U.S. occupation of 1915 to 1934. Services now exist only in the capital. People died during the earthquake for an identity card or a copy of a transcript, because they had to come to Port-au-Prince to get them. Services must be in all departments [akin to states]. All the people who are in the countryside have to have the resources to stay there.

Second—and this is the essential element—is the relaunching of agriculture in this country. We were almost self-sufficient until the 1980s. We have to fight and pressure the state so that it prioritizes agriculture. Otherwise, we’ll always have to depend on multinationals and non-governmental organizations for our food. The government has to take responsibility for that.

We’re not in favor just of food security, which is a neoliberal idea. With food security, as long as you eat, it’s good. But we only produce 43 percent of our food. 57 percent is imported. We need food sovereignty, which means that for everyone to eat, we produce it here at home. We could produce here at least 80 percent of what we eat.

You can’t speak of food sovereignty without speaking of family agriculture. We need that and we need indigenous seeds. We need for peasants to have their own land.

We have threats from multinationals, mainly to grow jatropha [whose seeds produce oil which can be used for biofuel]. The Jatropha Foundation is lobbying hard to start growing. Jatropha puts us at risk, because we don’t have enough land to be able to divert some toward biofuel. Haiti is only 27,760 square kilometers. Their plan would have us produce even less food, and would force peasants to be expropriated. Plus, they’d be using a lot of water, which could create an ecological disaster. It’s a death plan against the peasants.

We’re mobilizing people against growing biofuel. Last October, when the government was considering giving contracts to grow jatropha, we held a big march and sit-in; we gave a petition to parliament. We said, “No, Haiti’s land is for growing food.” We met with the minister of agriculture and the World Food Program.

We’re also mobilizing against GMO seeds, and we’ve just declared war against Monsanto. This battle has just begun.

Besides food sovereignty, our other main priority is integrated land reform. We can’t talk about food sovereignty if people don’t have land. They have to have land to be able to market—that’s the only way we can get away from food aid. Our plan is to take the land from the big landowners and give it to the peasants to work. And the food has to be organic, without any chemical fertilizers which destroy the land. We don’t use anything [unnatural in our cultivation process].

A Future for Agriculture, a Future for Haiti
Haiti's way forward is tied to food sovereignty and a renewed focus on local agriculture.

Food Rebellions: 7 Steps to Solving the Food Crisis
Resistance to the trade and “aid” policies that displace farmers and increase hunger.

Now even if people have a little handkerchief of land, they don’t have the technical support to let them plant. The state has to give us credit and technical support and help us store and manage water. Préval said he was doing "agrarian reform" in his first term. We called it agrarian demagoguery. He just gave out a few parcels, divided into very small plots, to his political clientele and political party—even to people who weren’t in Haiti. And his government didn’t offer any technical support.

That’s not what we need. The agrarian reform we want is for those who work the land to have the right to that land and all its infrastructure.

The cultural reality of Haiti is that peasants each want their own little piece of land to produce their own food. But there has to be cooperative land. Peasant organizations can create collectives to produce food for export and make money, but for that there has to be integrated land reform with technical support, credit, water, everything. We must have government support.

Right now, the government doesn’t even exist for us. It’s saying to the international community, “Here’s our country. Come take it.” They’ve given away the whole country, and now we have [U.N. Special Envoy Bill] Clinton, who is a tool of the big multinationals. So, on top of all our other fights, we have to fight to change the state.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She authored the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives, and is associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Interested?

• Read more from Beverly Bell's blog from Haiti
  

• Food for Everyone :: YES! Magazine's special issue asks how to grow a local food revolution.
  

When the students of Gunn High School in Palo Alto, Calif. heard that members of the Westboro Baptist Church—an extremist anti-Semite and anti-gay group known for blaming tragedies, including September 11 and the Virginia Tech shootings, on American tolerance for homosexuality—would be protesting outside their school, they did not sit quietly.

The church had announced that it would picket in front of Bay Area schools and Jewish institutions, holding its trademark signs (such as "God Hates You" and "God Hates Fags"). The students of Gunn High gathered to meet them, waving signs and singing songs in celebration of love and acceptance.

It's become common for communities to respond to the Westboro church's visits with counterprotests celebrating diversity and tolerance, which often dwarf the Westboro group and drown out their message.

Video courtesy of Not In Our Town.

Interested?

• This Time, Equal Rights For All :: On the path to ending workplace discrimination
• The Equality Ride :: LGBT road trip breaks through stereotypes

Alfonso de Jesus Garcia Perez is the general secretary of AMECA (Mexican Association for Cannabis Studies), one of Mexico’s leading drug-reform NGOs, created in 2000 by specialists and advocates. In this interview for YES! Magazine, he proposed alternative solutions to curb the wave of drug-trafficking violence (23,000 people killed since 2006, according to Senate estimates). Among other topics, Garcia Perez expressed his views on the new U.S. National Drug Control Strategy, an AMECA proposal to regulate marijuana, and challenges faced by activist groups and NGOs to openly debate drug issues amid one of the worst security and economic crises in recent Mexican history.

Erich Moncada: What factors contribute to the violence in Mexico?

Alfonso de Jesus Garcia Perez: I blame the Mexican and American armies for any group or armed band participating in organized crime. There is no other source of illegal weapons. Whenever there are weapons confiscations from criminal bands and we check their weaponry, if it is not American-made, it is foreign-made. We are immersed in NAFTA, and geopolitically, all the strategic control belongs to the intelligence services of the United States. This violence is caused by an illegal arms trade. Who is selling these weapons? There is always an American or a Mexican public servant involved.

Erich: What measures can civil society adopt to fight this phenomenon?

Alfonso: If we want to reduce violence, we need to apply some control measures over our armies, our public officials, and our police officers—both from Mexico and the United States. Citizen control is possible. There’s been a lot of buzz about the model of citizen supervision or accounting, in coordination with local and federal congresses, to evaluate and follow up on police and military activities. This is just one option. Another option is to stop attacking consumers, who are only used for extortion purposes and, at the same time, stimulate police corruption. If we reduce police corruption, violence will decrease. A crime-prevention strategy is also necessary. We need to educate our society to deal with our governments’ authoritarian behavior and the actions of organized crime.

Erich: What is your opinion of the Mexican government's strategy to fight drug-trafficking organizations?

Alfonso: It is outrageous that so many people have to die to prohibit marijuana usage. This is an utter failure. Prohibition has never been successful in reducing drug consumption. (Author’s note: Drug use in Mexico grew from 3.5 million in 2002 to 4.5 million people in 2008, according to the 2008 National Addiction Survey.)

There is no democracy, nor citizen participation, to control police and government. Therefore, corruption is rampant. If there is impunity, fighting crime is almost impossible. Corruption and impunity rates remain untouched.

Erich: What do you think about the 2010 National Drug Strategy presented by the White House? What strategies could the U.S. government put into practice to fight the drug problem at home and help Mexico at the same time?

Alfonso: It is progress to acknowledge that drug use is not going to be reduced by waging a war against consumers. It is a positive step forward, but more needs to be done. Why? Because American democracy protects personal decisions and freedom of choice. As long as consumers are not affecting other people’s rights or physical integrity, they should not be persecuted. We are preparing a request to the Mexican Senate to talk to our other two NAFTA partners (Canada and the U.S.) about opening the debate. We demand activists and consumers vent their points of view in a public tribunal. If representatives are willing to search for new solutions, we need to be heard. From the U.S. I expect an open debate, the disposition to adopt new scientific perspectives, and different ways to understand reality. We need to listen to each other with no prejudgments and disqualifications.

Erich: AMECA has attracted public opinion by proposing to regulate marijuana. What can you tell me about this initiative?

Alfonso: Cannabis prohibition is mandated by the Federal Health Code. It is not a criminal justice issue; the law never explains the reason or main argument behind prohibition. We propose cannabis be declassified from the harmful drugs schedule to regulate its consumption, and we want to set up an educational and health process instead of criminal prosecution. It is a human rights issue. First, we want to repeal criminalization policies. Police officers have nothing to do with consumers. Second, the state’s relationship with consumers could take the form of (drug) educators and health specialists—like psychologists or doctors—and provide a monitoring process of the user’s health and social integration. This must be voluntary, not compulsory. Most consumers are recreational. Supervising users is justified because our society is still uneducated. Consumers and members of our movement agree that this monitoring process should be done by an educational or health council.

Erich: Suppose your proposal is passed. What might be the immediate effects?

Advice for Obama from the Hemisphere
Latin American and Caribbean leaders share their recommendations for the U.S. relationship with the hemisphere.

Alfonso: First effect: Underage consumption will drop a great deal. Drug dealers or corrupt police officers—to me, they are pretty much the same—would no longer profit from this lucrative market. All their business is underground. They don’t care if they are selling drugs to a kid or a grown-up. Once cannabis is regulated, there will be no buyers or sellers willing to risk their freedoms to sell drugs to a kid. Another positive effect is harm reduction. Education and prevention policies will be viable because drug use will no longer be taboo. Consumers could come out in public without fearing police harassment. If, during the monitoring process, health consequences are discovered, a harm-reduction public policy can be implemented. This type of policy is impossible under the double standards of prohibition. Another benefit is a considerably lower level of violence and fewer dead people. But the greatest business is designer drugs, and that will require us to come up with solutions.

Erich: What is the biggest challenge facing reform?

Alfonso: I believe this or any other initiative on the subject may prosper if we are allowed to express our opinions. So far all the debates in Mexico have been conducted by the government…they have never allowed a bilateral debate. Whenever we organize events, festivals, or write a press release or a legislative request, our proposals have been ignored. We are never invited to Congress to participate in debates on these issues. When we arrive at Congress they never give us the chance to speak at the stand; censorship is exclusively imposed on the debate. But the day will come when they finally give us a space to challenge their views.

Erich: Some American citizens are horrified by the rampant violence in Mexico. What can they do to help us out?

Alfonso: It would be nice for them to be critical like us with our own government and armed forces. They must be conscious that the weapons used in Mexico are coming from their country. American citizens should be open to dissenting opinions and in favor of ending the global censorship. It is really important to raise our levels of information and conscience.

Erich: What comes next for AMECA?

Alfonso: We are going to reinforce our initiative with signatures. Another festival will take place on July 4th in Mexico City to celebrate citizen support for reform. Then there is our next stage: A referendum. It will be organized in Mexico City to raise 4,000 signatures to request an official ballot without depending on the politicians.

Erich Moncada conducted this interview for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Erich is a freelance journalist from northwestern Mexico, specialized in drug policy and politics.

Interested?
Reclaiming Corn and Culture :: NAFTA has displaced farmers and spurred migration. Time for co-ops and fair trade.

Speaking from the grass-covered rooftop of a parking garage, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp, announced that the university would stop using coal by the end of the decade. Universities, Thorp said in his May 4 address, “must lead the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy.”

North Carolina schools are, in fact, leading the way. Only eight miles down the road, Duke University reported in 2009 that it had reduced its coal consumption by 70 percent.

As part of the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal Campaign,” UNC Chapel Hill committed itself to carry out this plan and switch to other alternative energy sources.

Coal, one of the dirtiest energy sources, powers 50 percent of electricity generation in the U.S. Coal is also responsible for nearly 20 percent of all global greenhouse gases [1].

Recognizing the dangers of continued reliance on coal, the UNC chancellor organized an energy task force to research and propose energy alternatives. It includes students, faculty, community members, and the state director of the Sierra Club. Tim Toben, task force chairman, who spoke during the address, described the nine month process during which the group determined that 60 percent of campus emissions come from the nearby coal-fired cogeneration plant. Although Carolina’s cogeneration plant is one of the cleanest burning in the country, it still burns coal and “unless you set a deadline for ending coal usage, you’re not going to get to it,” Toben remarked.

Despite the plant's efficiency, a new alternative energy source, biomass, will be introduced into the boilers. Biomass consists of plant material or animal waste. There are two main sources, either growing plants specifically for energy use or plant waste. Biomass resources burn cleaner than coal, but raising corn or fast-growing forests still involves intensive agriculture.

The university will take its first steps beginning later this spring, adding dried wood pellets to the coal and gradually increasing the amount of woody biomass until coal is completely phased out. No later than 2015, and perhaps as early as 2012 the university plans to replace 20 percent of its coal with biomass [2].

Still to be determined is where the university will get its biomass. One difficulty with biomass is the transportation. Shipping raw biomass typically is not cost-effective over 50 miles [3]. Acknowledging both supply difficulties and the question of whether biomass will work in the existing boilers, Thorp said, “we can achieve our goal in ten years, by using the same kind of creativity and ingenuity that our great energy services staff has used in the past.”

Student representatives of UNC's "Beyond Coal Campaign" pose during Earth Action Day on April 10, 2010. Actions taken by students to rid the school of its coal use encouraged the university to pursue alternative energy sources.

Photo by E.M. Fields

The university is already receiving high marks for its efforts to become more sustainable. According to the College Sustainability Report Card, a service that scores colleges nationwide in categories such as green building, transportation, food and recycling, and endowment transparency, UNC Chapel Hill received an overall grade of A-.  Those universities receiving an A- or better earn the highest award of “College Sustainability Leader” given by the report card. Only 25 other institutions are recipients of the award.

Student activism on campus is largely responsible for both the high grade and recent efforts conducted by the university. Concerned students felt the university was not doing enough to achieve its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050 and lobbied for the administration to do more.

The commitment of the university to reduce its coal use has attracted national attention, including the support of James Hansen, climate change expert at NASA. 

Hansen sent a message to be read at the announcement of the 2020 goal, which promoted UNC Chapel Hill as “a model for how students and a university can work together with a civil constructive approach to ending our national addiction to coal.” Citing UNC’s “rational approach to problem solving,” Hansen said this model could be used to “somehow overcome the uncivil discourse that has infected current national politics.”

Kaitlin Bailey wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Kaitlin is an online editorial intern at YES!

Interested?

• The High Price of Cheap Coal: The West Virginia mine explosion serves as a reminder of the true price of so-called cheap coal 

• Read more from UNC's Climate Action Plan. 
• Want to know how your school ranks? Try the College Sustainability Report Card.

SOURCES:

1. http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-basics/coalfacts.cfm

2. http://uncnews.unc.edu/content/view/3603/1/

3. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/technology_and_impacts/energy_technologies/how-biomass-energy-works.html

A year and a half after the financial meltdown, Congress is about to conclude Round One of the fight over reining in Wall Street. Let’s hope they’re not planning to hang up their gloves.

The House and Senate are still working out the differences in their respective versions of the financial reform bills. It’s not too early, however, to say that while the legislation will make some positive differences in the lives of ordinary people and small businesses, it will not be enough.

If we’re to restore the financial sector to its original purpose of serving the real economy, there will need to be more battles to come.

First, though, here are some of the highlights:

• Consumer protection: A new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will crack down on predatory lenders and fraudsters and make sure credit card and mortgage documents are written in plain English.
• Mortgage reform: The Senate version bans kickbacks to loan officers who steer clients to higher-risk, higher-cost products. According to Bob Kuttner of the American Prospect, “had this been in force in 2006, there would have been no sub-prime crisis.”
• Derivatives reform: Although corporate lobbyists won some big loopholes, most derivatives trading will be brought out of the shadows and onto open exchanges. The hope is regulators will be able to better track and respond to the kind of out-of-control gambling that inflated the last financial market bubble. A Senate provision also forces the big banks to spin off some types of derivatives trading, but that’s expected to die in the House-Senate conference committee.
• Shareholder rights: Shareholders will get a “say on pay” on executive compensation. Although it’s a nonbinding vote, the embarrassment factor might discourage boards from approving particularly obscene pay packages. The bills also make it easier for investors to nominate candidates for corporate boards, giving them more power to hold directors accountable.

These are small, positive steps in the right direction, but they do not alter Wall Street’s basic business model. They will shine a brighter light on the financial sector and make some dangerous behavior less profitable. But big-time gamblers will still have too much power to run our economy like a casino.

That’s why we need to start planning for Round Two. Here are two key pieces of unfinished business:

• Breaking up the banks: The pending bills give government the power to seize and close down large failing firms that threaten the financial system, but they do nothing to limit bank size in the first place. As long as we have banks that are "too big too fail," taxpayers will always be on the hook for future bailouts.
• Taxing the speculators: There is growing momentum around the world behind proposals to place a tiny tax (not more than 0.25%) on trades of derivatives, stocks, and currencies, as a way to curb excessive short-term speculation and raise hundreds of billions of dollars that could go to green jobs, health care, and climate finance.

On May 17, more than a thousand people rallied in Washington, DC, calling for such a “financial speculation tax” as part of a broader financial reform agenda. Under a steady cold rain, protestors expressed the high level of anger over Wall Street’s continued excesses at a time when ordinary working families are still suffering from the crisis.

This Institute for Policy Studies video captures diverse perspectives on why financial speculation taxes are one piece of the solution:

The Washington rally was part of an international week of action to “Make Finance Pay,” with events in at least seven countries. Many chose a Robin Hood theme, to make the point that a financial speculation tax could generate massive revenues to fight poverty and other urgent needs.

British activists take part in the international "Make Fincance Pay" week of action.

Photo courtesy The Robin Hood Tax.

In London, for example, campaigners dressed as Robin Hood delivered giant mosaics of pictures of supporters to new members of Parliament. In Berlin, activists performed a stunt in front of the Brandenburg Gate, attacking a bankers’ carriage with big bags of money and redistributing it in smaller packets for the poor and the planet. In Ottawa, the Canadian campaign staged a tug-of-war in front of the Parliament building that pitted bankers against “the people” (plus one polar bear).

As we roll up our sleeves for the next battle, it’s important to remember that it took 1930s reformers seven years to enact the six landmark bills that helped stabilize the financial industry for many decades. Less than two years into this crisis, it’s time to join our allies around the world and build a long-term, creative campaign to transform the Wall Street economy.

Sarah Anderson wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sarah is the Global Economy Project Director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

Interested?

• Time to Tax Financial Speculation: Activists, celebrities, and business leaders are uniting behind a proposal that would discourage speculative gambling. 
• Fix the Economy, Not Wall Street: Would-be Wall Street regulators aren't asking the right question: How do we create a financial services sector that directs money where it is actually needed?

With passage of historic health care reform in Congress, it’s easy to conclude that the final curtain on the saga of fixing the United States health care system has now fallen. But as long and contentious as the struggle to achieve federal reform has been, the theater we’ve witnessed so far is only act one, scene one. In this drama, center stage for health care reform now moves quickly to the legislative chambers of 50 states and the District of Columbia.

For many years now, major reforms to expand health care coverage, increase access, and address insurance abuses have taken place in state governments, sometimes described as legislative “laboratories of innovation.”

With federal health care reform leaving many disappointed (and others falsely assuming that America’s health care problems are now healed), continuing innovation on the state level is a reminder that the nearly century-long effort to treat universal access to health care as a human right—rather than a cash cow for corporate interests—is far from over.

States Take Charge

Following the passage of federal reform, a number of states have taken proactive steps to prepare themselves to implement—or improve upon—the legislation. California is moving bills to establish the legislature’s intent to implement federal health care reform. An Illinois bill to create a bipartisan Health Care Justice Implementation Task Force, with a goal of monitoring the fairness of the federal health care reforms has passed both the House and Senate. Across the country, states as diverse as Maine, Texas, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Maryland, and Wisconsin have established commissions to examine their role in implementing federal reforms.

In Iowa, which already extends coverage to all children, a bipartisan bill to include an insurance exchange and expand the state's unofficial public option program to include adults with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level was signed into law in April.

Even more impressively, both New Mexico and Colorado recently enacted laws to ban the insurance industry’s practice of charging women higher premiums than men (as much as 20 percent higher) for the same coverage. The State of Maine is now the first state in the country with a law that puts an end to annual and lifetime caps on coverage.

A History of State Leadership

In 2010, the spotlight turns to how the new law of the land will be implemented. Much of that huge responsibility falls on the shoulders of states, but their role as catalysts for change is anything but new.

In the 1990s, the U.S. Congress struggled and failed in its attempt to pass a bill of rights for managed care patients. State leaders saw this vacuum of authority and took it upon themselves to make change: By 2001, no less than 46 states had found a way to pass these very popular reforms all on their own.

In 2006, Massachusetts paved the way for future reforms with the passage of a landmark law that sought to provide universal coverage for all residents; the Massachusetts model included an insurance exchange and individual mandates. That same year, the state of Vermont continued a long history of progressive reforms in health care with the creation of the Catamount Health Plan, which extended Medicaid coverage to residents with incomes up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level.

In 2009 alone—despite a deep economic recession and the imminent promise of national health care reform, either of which could have easily stalled state progress—41 states increased access to health insurance. Thirty passed private insurance laws that improved access, and 26 expanded eligibility for public programs. One 2009 highlight took place in Connecticut, where the state government enacted Sustinet, a comprehensive health care reform package with a goal of providing affordable health coverage to 98 percent of state residents by 2014.

While federal reform, in its final version, left much to be desired, many of its best aspects—including major expansions in coverage to the uninsured as well as regulations to end such insurance abuses as policy rescissions, premium increases, and exclusions due to pre-existing conditions—originated in state reforms.

State governments benefit from more flexibility, more direct awareness of the costs of health care, and less pressure from corporate interests than the federal government. As the show goes on, health care reform on the state level will continue to be a compelling force on the path toward true national reform.

Enzo Pastore wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Enzo is a health care policy specialist with the Progressive States Network.

In July of 2000, after living in China for nearly four years, I returned to the United States. When people asked me why I was returning to the U.S. to start again from scratch, I told them that I was returning because there was nowhere in the world like this country, a nation of immigrants that draws its strength from its diversity. Wherever I lived in the world, I was proud of being from the United States: A daughter of immigrants from Latin America who could stand with my fellow Americans while still celebrating the culture of my parents and their ancestors.

I do not live in Arizona, the home of a new law that makes it a crime to be without your immigration paperwork if police choose to question your citizenship status, and yet I feel its impact all these miles away. Now, for the first time in my life, there is a level of fear for me attached with being—and looking—Latina. A few times now I have returned home during the day after realizing that I didn't have my U.S. passport on me. Despite being a U.S. citizen, born in this country, I am fearful of having any issues if stopped. This is not the U.S. that I left China for.

I am multilingual. I have worked in countries all over the world. I have lived in seven states in the North, South, East, and West of this nation. I was born and bred in upstate New York and went to an Ivy League university. I am a published author, a public speaker, and have been a talking head on major news outlets. I have worked for a Fortune 100 company, a presidential campaign, an international nongovernmental organization, and am currently heading up a nonprofit. If I feel fear as a Latina daughter of immigrants, I can only imagine how my brothers and sisters who have not had the same privilege and opportunities feel.

Arizona’s new law (and the copycat laws that are springing up across the U.S.), Arizona's new policy of re-assigning of teachers who have accents, and the recent rejection of ethnic studies in public schools in both Arizona and Texas, are all signs that we are heading down a dangerous path. The erosion of human rights at the state level has national implications.

Already, we have slipped toward accepting hate crimes against Latinos in New York and Pennsylvania, the profiling of Latinos in Arizona and North Carolina, and possibly the next iteration of segregation in schools. We cannot be naive. We cannot forget our history as a nation. We have much to be proud of as Americans, but also much in our history to cause alarm: Japanese American internment camps, the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow.

My father came from Mexico to Fordham University to pursue his PhD in theology and philosophy.  He became a social worker in upstate New York. He spoke English with a very heavy accent, but his connection with the kids was powerful. I remember people stopping us as we walked down the street to tell him, "Mr. Esquivel, you changed my life."

At one point in his career, he almost lost his job as a social worker because some people said his accent was so thick that it made him ineffective. Then they surveyed the kids he worked with. They rated him amongst the highest-rated social workers in the school. Despite his heavy accent, he was connecting with them, contributing to their lives in a way that no one else was. Imagine if he had been taken out of that position (in which he served with commitment for over 30 years) because of his accent. How many kids’ lives would have remained untouched, unchanged?

His story is not unique.

As a nation, we are lucky to have men and women like my father. Our history is marked by millions of immigrants who have made powerful contributions to our society—from unsung heroes like my father to famous immigrants like Madeline Albright and Albert Einstein. We need to step forward bravely as a nation—as we have before in the days of the suffragists, the abolitionists, the civil rights movement. The struggles for human rights and civil rights are not new to us. As a nation and as a people, we continue to build toward the dream of what we can be.

Photo by auburnxc.

We must reflect on the words carved on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teaming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" We must remember what we learned from Cesar Chavez: “Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.” We must pay attention, as Abraham Lincoln urged us, to the better angels of our nature.

If history has taught us anything, it is that once human rights are eroded—once we allow ourselves to overlook the humanity of certain groups of people—we have stepped onto a slippery slope. If no one stands up to the injustice, the erosion of human rights continues. I often think of Martin Niemoeller's words in the aftermath of World War II:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

We are standing on the brink of a critical choice as a people—a moment when we as a nation will choose who we will be. There is still time, but we must stand together against the injustice that we are seeing.

Our Future as a Multiracial Society
Barack Obama’s election didn’t launch a post-racial era. But a racially just, inclusive, and even loving society is still possible, says a YES! Magazine panel of visionaries.

William O. Douglas, the former Supreme Court justice, cautioned us: "As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

Luckily, hundreds of thousands of people all over the country are on the watch. They've been finding creative ways to protest Arizona's new law and to stand in solidarity with those it targets.

But with polls showing that a majority of Americans support Arizona's law, we must go further. A majority of Americans once supported segregationist Jim Crow laws as well as the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans. Our responsibility to fight for civil rights hasn't ended, and will not end as long as we allow fear and hatred to tear us apart. We need to celebrate the immigrants among us as well as our national values of diversity and inclusion. We must have faith in the goodness of our people, and encourage each other to be the best we can be. We must be brave. Let us be the U.S. that so many have come to this shore to find.

Kety Esquivel wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Kety is the executive director of Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) and founder of CrossLeft.org. She directed Latino outreach for the Clark Presidential Campaign, worked as the new media manager for the National Council of La Raza, and has been a speaker at the Personal Democracy Forum, SXSW, Netroots Nation, and BlogHer.

Interested?

• The 21st Century Civil Rights Movement :: Arizona's new immigration law has awakened a sleeping giant.
• Progress Toward a Multiracial America :: Milestones on the way to an inclusive, just nation.

“A new earthquake” is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that American agribusiness giant Monsanto will be donating 60,000 sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn and vegetable seeds to Haiti—some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto’s seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation’s presence in Haiti on June 4, World Environment Day.

In an open letter sent May 14, Jean-Baptiste, both Executive Director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti “a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds…and on what is left of our environment in Haiti.”[1] Haitian social movements have been vocal in their opposition to imports of seeds and food from agribusinesses, which they say undermine local production and local seed stocks. They have expressed special concern about the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

For now, without a law regulating the use of GMOs in Haiti, the Ministry of Agriculture rejected any offer of genetically modified Roundup Ready seeds. In an email exchange, a Monsanto representative assured the Ministry of Agriculture that the seeds being donated are not genetically modified.

With that exclusion, the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture approved the donation (Elizabeth Vancil, Monsanto’s Director of Development Initiatives, called the news “a fabulous Easter gift” in an April email). [2] Monsanto is known for aggressively pushing seeds, particularly GMO seeds, in both the global North and South—including through highly restrictive technology agreements with farmers who are not always made fully aware of what they are signing. According to interviews by this writer with representatives of Mexican small farmer organizations, contracted farmers then find themselves forced to buy Monsanto seeds each year under conditions they find onerous and at costs they sometimes cannot afford.

The hybrid corn seeds Monsanto has donated to Haiti are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram. [3] Thiram belongs to a highly toxic class of chemicals called ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (EBDCs). Results of tests of EBDCs on mice and rats caused concern to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which then ordered a special review. The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. The EPA also ruled that pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, based on the assumption that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing. [4] Monsanto’s passing mention of thiram to Ministry of Agriculture officials in an email contained no explanation of the dangers, nor any offer of special clothing or training for those who will be farming with the toxic seeds.

The concern of Haitian social movements is not just about chemical dangers and the possibility of future GMO imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local seeds for local consumption—otherwise known as food sovereignty. Monsanto’s arrival in Haiti, they say, is a further threat to such a future.

“People in the U.S. need to help us produce, not give us food and seeds. They’re ruining our chance to support ourselves,” said farmer Jonas Deronzil of a peasant cooperative in the rural region of Verrettes. [5]

Monsanto’s history has long drawn ire from environmentalists, health advocates, and small farmers, going back to its production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. The Vietnamese government claims that 400,000 Vietnamese people were killed or disabled by Agent Orange, and 500,000 children were born with birth defects as a result of their exposure. [6]

Monsanto’s former motto, “Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible,” has been replaced by “Imagine.” Its web site claims it “help[s] farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful [and] produce healthier foods…while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment.” [7] But the corporation's record does not support these claims.

Cheap seeds sold by agribusiness giants, which are often genetically modified, have the unfortunate side-effect of toppling local food economies in places like Haiti.

Photo by Oculator.

Together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer, Monsanto controls more than half of the world’s seeds. [8] The company holds almost 650 seed patents—most of them for cotton, corn, and soy—and almost 30 percent of the share of all biotech research and development. Monsanto came to own such a vast supply by buying major seed companies to stifle competition, patenting genetic modifications to plant varieties, and suing small farmers. Monsanto is also one of the leading manufacturers of GMOs.

As of 2007, Monsanto had filed 112 lawsuits against U.S. farmers for alleged technology contract violations or GMO patents, involving 372 farmers and 49 small agricultural businesses in 27 different states. From these, Monsanto has won more than $21.5 million in judgments. The multinational appears to investigate 500 farmers a year, in estimates based on Monsanto’s own documents and media reports. [9]

“Farmers have been sued after their field was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else’s genetically engineered crop [or] when genetically engineered seed from a previous year’s crop has sprouted, or ‘volunteered,’ in fields planted with non-genetically engineered varieties the following year,” said Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson of the Center for Food Safety. [10]

In Colombia, Monsanto has received upwards of $25 million from the U.S. government for providing Roundup Ultra in the anti-drug fumigation efforts of Plan Colombia. Roundup Ultra is a highly concentrated version of Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide, with additional ingredients to increase its lethality. Colombian communities and human rights organizations have charged that the herbicide has destroyed food crops, water sources and protected areas, and has led to increased incidents of birth defects and cancers.

Vía Campesina, the world’s largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than 60 countries, has called Monsanto one of the “principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples.” [11] They claim that as Monsanto and other multinationals control an ever larger share of land and agriculture, they force small farmers out of their land and jobs. They also claim that the agribusiness giants contribute to climate change and other environmental disasters—an outgrowth of industrial agriculture. [12]

The Vía Campesina coalition launched a global campaign against Monsanto last October 16, on International World Food Day, with protests, land occupations, and hunger strikes in more than 20 countries. They carried out a second global day of action against Monsanto on April 17 of this year, in honor of Earth Day.

Food Rebellions: 7 Steps to Solving the Food Crisis
Resistance to the trade and “aid” policies that displace farmers and increase hunger.

Non-governmental organizations in the U.S. are challenging Monsanto’s practices, too. The Organic Consumers Association has spearheaded the campaign “Millions Against Monsanto,” calling on the company to stop intimidating small family farmers, stop marketing untested and unlabeled genetically engineered foods to consumers, and stop using billions of dollars of U.S. taypayers' money to subsidize GMO crops. [13]

The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge against Monsanto that has just made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety’s case on April 27. A decision on this first-ever Supreme Court case about GMOs is now pending. [14]

“Fighting hybrid and GMO seeds is critical to save our diversity and our agriculture,” Jean-Baptiste said in an interview in February. “We have the potential to make our lands produce enough to feed the whole population and even to export certain products. The policy we need for this to happen is food sovereignty, where the country has a right to define its own agricultural policies, to grow first for the family and then for local market, to grow healthy food in a way which respects the environment and Mother Earth.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Many thanks to Moira Birss for her assistance with research and writing.

Interested?

• More from Beverly Bell's blog
• A Future for Agriculture, A Future for Haiti :: Food sovereignty is the way forward in Haiti.

• New and Old Ideas for a Better Food System :: Why we need to restore seed diversity.
  

SOURCES:

1. Group email from Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, May 14, 2010.

2. Email from Elizabeth Vancil to Emmanuel Prophete, Director of Seeds at the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, and others; released by the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, date unavailable.

3. Ibid.

4. Extension Toxicology Network, Pesticide Information Project of the Cooperative Extension Offices of Cornell University, Michigan State University, Oregon State University, and University of California at Davis, http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/pyrethrins-ziram/thiram-ext.html

5. Jonas Deronzil’s comments are from an interview in April. He was not specifically discussing Monsanto.

6. MSNBC, January 23, 2004. “Study Finds Link Between Agent Orange, Cancer.” The Globe and Mail, June 12, 2008. “Last Ghost of the Vietnam War”

7. http://www.monsanto.com

8. La Vía Campesina, “La Vía Campesina carries out Global Day of Action against Monsanto”, Oct. 16, 2009, http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=797:peasants-worldwide-rise-up-against-monsanto-gmos&catid=49:stop-transnational-corporations&itemid=76

9. Center for Food Safety, “Monsanto vs. US Farmers,” Nov. 2007.

10. Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson, Center for Food Safety, “Monsanto vs. US Farmers,” 2005.

11. La Vía Campesina, October 16, 2009, Op. Cit.

12. La Vía Campesina, “La Vía Campesina Call to Action 17 April 2010 - Join the International Day of Peasant Struggle,” Feb. 23, 2010, [ http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=node/639 ]http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=node/639

13. Organic Consumers Association, “Taxpayers Forced to Fund Monsanto's Poisoning of Third World,” Finland, Minnesota, [ http://www.organicconsumers.org/ ]http://www.organicconsumers.org/

14. Center for Food Security, “Update: CFS Fighting Monsanto in the Supreme Court,” May 11, 2010, [ http://truefoodnow.org/?CFID=23809091&CFTOKEN=67921769 ]http://truefoodnow.org/?CFID=23809091&cftoken=67921769

Today, the International Day Against Homophobia, people around the globe are rallying in support of LGBT rights and acceptance. It is a day to acknowledge the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folk to love and live openly; to be safe, protected from violence and discrimination; to have access to quality health care and education; and to build families and legally marry. 

Here in the United States, this day also kicks off a week of actions urging Congress to pass H.R. 3017, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) of 2009. This bill would prohibit workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. A coalition of LGBT and ally organizations is calling for all supporters of equal rights to lobby their elected officials, raise awareness about ENDA, and help push Congress to enact basic employment protections for all.

Workplace discrimination

With no federal law prohibiting workplace discrimination, people in our country lose their jobs every day for being gay or transgender. Organizations working to pass ENDA have been collecting people’s stories of on-the-job discrimination: Thomas Bryant was fired in Indiana after he went to Human Resources to solicit help about a coworker haranguing him with homophobic epithets. And Brooke Waits lost her job in Texas the day after her boss opened her cell phone and saw a picture of Waits sharing a New Year’s kiss with her partner. 

The importance of enacting laws to protect transgender employees is highlighted in a 2009 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The study found that the rate of unemployment among transgender communities is twice that of the nation as a whole, which is especially debilitating in these economically challenging times. Additionally, a whopping 97 percent of the 6,450 respondents say they experience harassment or mistreatment on the job because of their gender identity.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Subsequent legislation has extended protections to guard against discrimination based on disability and age. If passed, ENDA would institute much needed basic protection for LGBT employees.

A federal fix?

Public opinion, and even corporate employment policy, has become much more inclusive than federal law in recent years. A 2007 Gallup poll showed that 89 percent of Americans believe gay people should have “equal rights in terms of job opportunities.” And as of September 2009, 87 percent of the Fortune 500 companies had implemented non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation. Protection for transgender employees, however, lags behind—just 41 percent of Fortune 500 companies include gender identity in their non-discrimination policies.
In the absence of federal policy, it has been left up to each state to decide how to approach protection for the LGBT workforce. In 1982, Wisconsin became the first state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation; Minnesota was the first to ban discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender identity, in 1993.

Several states have since adopted LGBT-inclusive employment policies. But being gay or transgender continues to be a job hazard: Workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation is currently legal in 29 states, while firing or harassing employees because of their gender identity is legal in 38 states.

Activists and lawmakers have been working to pass basic federal employment protection for LGBT folk for almost 40 years. The first version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was introduced in 1994 and has been introduced in all but one Congress since then.

This year, though, ENDA has a fighting chance. With ongoing organizing efforts from advocacy organizations, support from Democratic leadership, and 202 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, supporters are hopeful that ENDA could make it to President Obama’s desk during this session. As a supporter of ENDA, he would most assuredly sign it into law. Representative Barney Frank (D-MA), sponsor of the current version of ENDA and one of three openly gay members of Congress, set an optimistic tone in late April when he told supporters, “The Speaker has promised we will get this done fairly quickly.”

Since then, however, public predictions of a quick vote have stopped. And time is running short for this legislative session. Although a vote in the House of Representatives has been expected for weeks, none has yet been scheduled. ENDA is still under review by the House Education and Labor Committee.

“We’re pushing really hard to bring the bill to a vote,” said Lisa Mottet, Transgender Civil Rights Project Director for the Task Force. “Time is running out and we’re very concerned that if ENDA doesn’t become law this year, it will be another several years before it has a chance.”

Rights for all, not just some

The last time ENDA was up for a vote, in 2007, gender identity was dropped from the bill. Frank, also a bill sponsor at that time, removed transgender protections in an attempt to pass a watered-down version. Not only did this action leave many in the LGBT community feeling betrayed, it wasn’t successful. A non-inclusive version of ENDA passed through the House, but it died on the Senate floor.

Now, with conflicting reports on whether or not a whip count has been completed and whether or not there are enough votes to pass ENDA untarnished, rumors are flying that gender identity may be dropped from the bill again. Some members of Congress have been quoted saying that prohibiting gender identity discrimination “goes too far” and opponents of the bill are gearing up for a fight.

So far, at least publicly, the issue is non-negotiable. Frank continues to assert that gender identity will not be dropped again.

LGBT-rights organizers have been working hard in recent years to ensure transgender people are not excluded from ENDA again. When gender identity was removed in 2007, hundreds of organizations—national, state, and local—rallied together to advocate for an inclusive version of the bill. And those who signed the following letter became the first members of United ENDA, a coalition working to win workplace protection for the entire LGBT community:

The undersigned represent the vast and celebrated diversity of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in this country … We are united in a common cause: We ask you to keep working with us on an Employment Non-Discrimination Act that protects everyone in our community, and to oppose any substitute legislation that leaves some of us behind.

United ENDA now has over 400 member organizations, including local grassroots groups, labor coalitions, and national advocacy organizations. And the commitment to oppose legislation that “leaves some of us behind” has stayed strong over the past three years. The groups have been lobbying Congress, sharing stories that exemplify the discrimination LGBT workers face, phone banking, and working with local and supportive media outlets to raise awareness and increase pressure on Congress. United ENDA is even organizing the “I Want to Work!” campaign, calling on LGBT people to apply for jobs with their Congressional offices. Mottet, among others, is confident that these efforts are working. “We have the votes to keep gender identity in.”

This week—starting today with the International Day Against Homophobia and ending in celebration of Harvey Milk Day on Saturday—people around the world and across the country are gathering in support of equal rights. Not equal rights for some, but equal rights for all. 

Sara Knight wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sara is a YES! Magazine media and outreach intern.

Interested?
Equality Ride: An LGBT road trip breaks through stereotypes.

Today, I will join thousands of others in a creative protest on a street that most Americans don't know exists. It is "K Street" in Washington, and it is home to thousands of corporate lobbyists who get paid six figures to buy votes in Congress. K Street is Washington's counterpart to Wall Street, and powerful people on both streets have been working hard, in tandem, to preserve our casino economy, our plunder economy, and our military economy.

The rally, led by Jobs with Justice, National People's Action, the AFL-CIO, and SEIU, comes at a critical moment. The Senate is headed towards a vote on a financial reform bill to put some checks and balances on Wall Street. The K Street lobby firms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to gut the bill.

These are the same shady characters who pushed Congress to strip away the sensible financial regulations put in place after the crash of 1929, opening the door to the gambling insanity that caused the 2008 crash. Then they had the nerve to go back to Capitol Hill and demand trillions of taxpayer dollars to prop up the "too big too fail" banks. Today, pumped full of public money, these financial giants are now bigger than ever and handing out fat CEO paychecks.

With public anger at its height, this is the moment to shrink Wall Street and restore it to its proper role in serving the financial needs of small businesses and ordinary Americans. What we don't need is to "fix" Wall Street so that it can go back to business as usual. As David Korten puts it, policymakers need to be asking the fundamental question: "How do we create a financial services sector that directs money where it is needed: toward creating living wage jobs that provide essential goods and services for all Americans in ways consistent with a healthy environment?"

The pending financial reform bill would get us only partway towards this goal. And it's too early to tell how successful the K Street lobby will be in blocking or gutting even these modest reforms.

Fortunately, public anger does seem to be having some impact in countering Wall Street's limitless lobbying resources. Some amendments to curb Wall Street excess appear to be gaining ground, while others are being defeated.

Here are some highlights:

Financial Secrecy: Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders led the way on an amendment to force the Federal Reserve to reveal which banks received more than $2 trillion in emergency aid during the financial crisis (Sander's amendment passed 96-0). The legislation would also force most derivatives trading out of the shadows and onto open clearinghouses and exchanges.

Curbing the Casino: On the top of the K Street hit list is an amendment to force banks to spin off units that gamble in the dangerous derivatives that helped send the economy into a tailspin. And one of the great reforms of the Depression era is back on the table: the 1933 Glass-Steagall reform to separate banking functions between commercial and investment banking. Until its repeal in 1999, it helped stabilize the U.S. financial system and keep alive thousands of small banks. A transformed Wall Street would need to restore this sensible regulation.

Consumer protection: A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency would help protect ordinary Americans from the worst abuses of greedy financiers, including predatory lenders and fraudsters.

What's missing?

Once this round of financial reform is over, there will be much unfinished business if we are going to shut down the worst parts of Wall Street and transform the rest so that we can have a financial system that supports an economy centered around green, vibrant Main Streets. Two key battles to come:

Breaking up the banks: Last week, an amendment to limit bank size, led by fair trade champion Senator Sherrod Brown, was defeated. As long as we have banks that are "too big too fail," taxpayers will always have to face the prospect of funding future bailouts. One way that people are already working to undercut the power of the big banks is through a campaign launched by Arianna Huffington and others to "Move Your Money." Thousands have answered the call to transfer their personal funds from Wall Street banks to local banks.

Taxing the speculators: There is growing momentum in the United States and around the world behind proposals to place tiny taxes (not more than 0.25 percent) on trades of derivatives, stocks, and currencies. This "financial speculation tax" would both put a damper on speculation and raise hundreds of billions of dollars that could go to green jobs, health care, and climate finance. My organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, has joined with allies around the world to press this issue at the upcoming G-20 meeting next month in Canada.

I'm looking forward to joining with the throngs on K Street, carrying our signs with the slogans: "Tax Speculators: Shut down the Wall Street Casino." This is the struggle of our lifetimes and only by bringing the message to the streets can we rein in the corporations and banks that threaten our democracy and our well being.

John Cavanagh is the director of the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the co-author of 10 books and numerous articles on the global economy, including Development Redefined: How the Market Met Its Match (2008, Paradigm Publishers), written with Robin Broad.

Interested?

• Fix the Economy, Not Wall Street
  Would-be Wall Street regulators aren't asking the right question: How do we create a financial services sector that directs money where it is actually needed?
  

• Why This Crisis May Be Our Best Chance to Build a New Economy
  Wall Street is bankrupt. Instead of trying to save it, we can build a new economy that puts money and business in the service of people and the planet—not the other way around.
  

As a small girl, Enei Begaye knew to be quiet when visiting friends’ houses. Nearly everyone in the 4,900-person town of Kayenta, Arizona, part of the Navajo Nation, worked in the area’s coal mines, Black Mesa and Kayenta, which operated twenty-four hours a day. Begaye and her friends would play quietly so they wouldn’t disturb sleeping elders back from the night shift.

Most of the Kayenta’s population lived in trailers set up by Peabody Energy, the company that owned the mines. Coal companies are major employers throughout the Navajo Nation. In fact, more than half the Nation’s General Fund comes from revenue from coal mining. Nor is resource extraction limited to coal—oil and gas are also collected, together comprising over a quarter of the General Fund budget.

As an adult, Begaye questioned the coal mining that sustained her family and hometown. Apart from providing low wages and hazardous working conditions, coal mining has polluted the township and surrounding environment. The impact of strip mining has been documented since the late 1970s as eliminating existing vegetation, displacing or destroying wildlife and habitats, degrading air quality, altering current land use, and permanently changing the general landscape of the area mined.

The High Cost of Cheap Coal
Many people are recalculating the true price of coal and deciding it’s simply too high to pay.

Peabody used billions of gallons of water from local springs and aquifers to move slurry—a mix of coal and water—through a 273-mile pipeline from the mines to the power plant where it would be burned. By 2000, water reserves in the Black Mesa were in serious decline. The company proposed using water from the aquifer that provided drinking water to Flagstaff and the northwestern areas of the reservation.

Navajo and Hopi communities rose up in protest. Begaye testified in front of the California Public Utilities Commission during a meeting to decide the fate of the Mohave Generating Station, which is powered by the coal from the Black Mesa mine. “I testified that I didn’t want the mine open,” said Begaye.  “We’ve seen the leak in the pipeline, seen the devastation to the land, and the social injustice—the springs dry up because the coal mines are using the drinking water.” She joined the Black Mesa Water Coalition, a grassroots group working to protect Black Mesa’s water supply.

In 2005, the Navajo and Hopi tribal councils passed resolutions to end Peabody’s access to the aquifer. Without water, and facing a Clean Air Act lawsuit, the Black Mesa mine and the Mohave Generating Station ceased operations. Peabody is now seeking to reopen the Black Mesa mine under a different permit in order to supply coal to a different generating station.

But the curb on coal mining on Navajo lands was a bittersweet victory for many on the reservation, where nearly 50 percent of residents were unemployed in 2004 and many residents depended on the low wage jobs the mines provide. Begaye found it hard for many years to return home to Kayenta to face her friends’ parents who lost their jobs. Now, she and other organizers with the BMWC see their strategy for indigenous justice as two-pronged: rid the land of dirty coal mining and advocate for the just transition of Navajo and Hopi peoples to a sustainable and locally run economy that provides high quality green jobs and career pathways for indigenous youth and adults.

“We realized that we can’t always be part of always saying no," said Begaye. "We have to be part of a solution, to build jobs. If we’re going to transition out of the fossil fuels economy, we have to find a way to transition our employment choices. Not only for the miners, but for the future generations of Navajos.”

The Navajo economy and tribal economic development needed to be fundamentally redefined, in a scalable manner that would provide jobs for thousands of Navajo youth. “The Navajo Nation wasn’t ready to shut down the mines,” said Wahleah Johns, former BMWC codirector. “They didn’t have a plan in place to take care of the mine workers who would be out of jobs. They didn’t have a plan for a transition. So, we felt it was necessary to talk about a just transition plan, to help to really take care of our people. These same workers are in our families, and we didn’t want to leave them high and dry."

To make that vision a reality, BMWC joined with allies—including Tó Nizhóní Ání, the Apollo Alliance, and the Sierra Club—to create the Just Transition Coalition, a group whose goal is to wean the tribes’ economy, energy, and employment off fossil fuels. Their campaigns against coal, they realized, were only band-aids: They had to create a viable alternative to replace it.

Black Mesa Water Coalition and their allies spearheaded a green jobs campaign beginning in April 2008 to diversify the Navajo economy and create opportunities for employment in renewable energy for youth. In July 2009, the Navajo tribal government passed a green jobs act, establishing a Navajo Green Economy Commission and Fund, which can apply for federal and local funds to create green jobs as well as sponsor small-scale, green developments that will help to create jobs for Navajo youth and provide needed services to the community.

The grassroots organizers see the Navajo Green Jobs legislation as a revolutionary shift for their nation, which will fundamentally change their economy while democratizing tribal government. The youth and community groups will continue working until their broad vision becomes a reality.

Yvonne Liu wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Yvonne is a senior research associate at Applied Research Center and author of the just released “Translating Green Into Navajo: Alternatives to Coal Mining and The Campaign for a Navajo Green Economy,” part of ARC’s Green Equity Toolkit.

Interested?

• Trade Your Job
  The old apprenticeship model of learning by doing gets new life as people who’ve been left out of the job market train to meet the growing demand for green-collar workers.
  

Theories about the cause of the sudden dip range from a computerized trading glitch to intentional market manipulation by Goldman Sachs. Either way, the speculation has focused attention on the fact that high frequency trading—rapid automated buying and selling of shares based purely on computer algorithms in response to price movements—accounts for some 50 to 75 percent of stock market trades. These trades are totally unrelated to real world events or underlying asset values and their only purpose is to extract unearned gains and manipulate markets. They have nothing to do with investment as that term is commonly understood.

Agreement seems universal that, although worries about Greek debt may have contributed to the market fall on Thursday, the size and speed of the drop had nothing to do with the underlying value of the companies that experienced violently gyrating share prices.

This was the backdrop for yesterday's New York Times editorial "A Week in the Life of the Economy," which noted it is still unclear whether Congress will act to protect taxpayers from another Wall Street meltdown or give in to Wall Street bankers and their lobbyists. It then goes on to urge Congress to "pass broad legislation to boost employment through aid to states, extension of unemployment benefits, and programs targeted to "small-business lending, infrastructure projects, green technology and summer youth jobs."

There is an important nuance here that aligns with the argument in my blog "Fix the Economy, Not Wall Street." Strict regulation of Wall Street is essential to protect the integrity of the economy, but neither Wall Street regulation nor bailouts are going to get people working. Wall Street is only interested in extracting society's real wealth, not in contributing to its creation. Giving public handouts to Wall Street in the hope that some of it will flow into the creation of productive jobs is a sucker's folly.

On the other hand, government spending to put otherwise unemployed people to work producing beneficial goods and services makes great sense. It increases tax collection to reduce deficits, recapitalizes the local banking system from the bottom up to the extent that wages are deposited with local banks and credit unions, and need not be inflationary even though financed with government-created credit or borrowed interest-free directly from the Federal Reserve (because unlike Wall Street bailouts, properly spent stimulus money is simultaneously creating real value).

David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, president of the People-Centered Development Forum, and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). His books include Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World.

Interested?

• Read more from David Korten's blog.
• Why This Crisis May Be Our Best Chance
  Wall Street is bankrupt. Instead of trying to save it, we can build a new economy that puts money and business in the service of people and the planet—not the other way around.
  

For the first time since America first tested a nuclear weapon 65 years ago, the government has disclosed how many nuclear weapons are in our active stockpile. It is long overdue.

The good news is that this action enhances U.S. credibility as President Obama presses to reduce all nuclear arsenals and move towards their eventual elimination. “You can’t get anywhere towards disarmament unless you are going to be transparent about how many weapons you have,” Sharon Squassoni, a nuclear analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Associated Press.

The bad news is that we now know for certain that we have 5,113 hydrogen bombs ready to use. One alone can destroy a city. Why so many? And why was this secret in the first place?

Nuclear Secrets

Nuclear programs are profoundly undemocratic. No one voted on making or using the first bomb. Almost all information about the nuclear arsenal is secret, making it difficult for the public to have informed judgments or hold our leaders accountable.

Secrets were the name of the game during the Cold War, as both the United States and the Soviet Union kept the size of their arsenals hidden. Secrecy was justified, in part, by claims that it would keep the other side from being sure that they had enough nukes to take out all of the other country’s weapons first. Meanwhile, both countries competed blindly to finish first in an arms race.

We now know that the United States’ stockpile peaked at over 31,000 nuclear bombs in 1967. The Soviets also raced to build more bombs and, by 1987, we had over 68,000 nuclear weapons between us. Maybe part of the reason these numbers were secret at the time was to spare officials the embarrassment of explaining exactly why it was necessary to have enough weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times over.

Previous Disclosures

Most of the previous disclosures about nuclear stockpiles have been the result of treaties with Russia. Both sides verified the number of missiles they were destroying under the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. The START treaties required both countries to count and verify the total number of strategic nuclear weapons, as does the New START treaty now under consideration by the Senate.

This is the first time, however, the government has publicly declared the size of the current active stockpile. Analysts have estimated the size of the U.S. arsenal for years. Turns out, they were pretty accurate. 

Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Committee and Hans Kristensen at the Federation of American Scientists had estimated that the active stockpile was 5,100 weapons, just 13 shy of the actual. Kristensen says he and others have “long advocated disclosure and argued that keeping the size of the nuclear arsenal secret serves no real national security purpose in the post-Cold War era.” The U.S. still has more room for openness. Norris and Kristensen estimate there are an additional 4,200 weapons in storage awaiting dismantlement. There are hints that the government will release precise information on this “inactive” stockpile later this year.

A Gain for National Security

So, geek satisfaction aside, what’s to gain from finally revealing our nuclear numbers? A lot, it turns out.

A little openness in our nuclear numbers could go a long way in building confidence that the U.S. is in fact disarming. This in turn increases the willingness of other states to fulfill their obligation to prevent the spread of these weapons.

This is precisely the effort now underway at the United Nations as 189 nations gather to discuss how to strengthen the 40-year-old nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This pact is the central barrier to the spread of these weapons.

Ten years ago, the members to the NPT specifically agreed on increased transparency in nuclear arsenals and disarmament efforts as part of their thirteen practical steps toward complete nuclear disarmament. A decade later, the U.S. is now finally delivering on that pledge.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking before the United Nations at the start of the NPT review conference, said, "For those who doubt that the United States will do its part on disarmament, this is our record, these are our commitments. And they send a clear, unmistakable signal.”

She's right. This is a major step forward and an important part of efforts to restore U.S. credibility and legitimacy so badly damaged over the past ten years.

Joseph Cirincione and Benjamin Loehrke wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Joseph is the president of Ploughshares Fund and author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons. Benjamin is a research assistant at Ploughshares Fund and a graduate student at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

Interested?

• A World Without Nuclear Weapons
  Video: Joseph Cirincione says we are at a tipping point in the struggle for nuclear abolition.
• "No Nuclear Weapons"
  Sarah van Gelder interviews former Secretary of State George Shultz.