Monday, October 31, 2011
Occupy the Silver Screen? 10 Films to Get You Ready to Occupy Wall Street.
Guy Fawkes mask, from V for Vendetta.
Photo Credit: Ben Fredericson at Flickr
The spirit of Occupy Wall Street is contagious, and may soon have its first large-scale appearance in pop culture: Christopher Nolan is filming The Dark Knight Rises, the third film in the Batman trilogy, in New York beginning October 29, and there is a rumor they'll be shooting down at Zuccotti Park. LA Times:
But using a real-life location like the Occupy Wall Street protests — particularly in the city nicknamed Gotham — would add an element of gritty authenticity to 'Rises." It also would fit with the franchise's preoccupation with themes of urban order and civil unrest, which "Dark Knight" explored at length.
It’s unclear how protesters would react if cameras for “The Dark Knight Rises” were nearby. A former independent-film director, Nolan wouldn’t seem to have much in common with Wall Street fat cats. But he is overseeing a $250-million production financed by one of the world's largest media conglomerates.
On the other hand, some demonstrators may find that the film accords with their mission. The casting call says that characters will inhabit "a city besieged by crime and corruption." That’s almost like a description you’d read on a, well, Occupy Wall Streeter's protest sign.
The financial crisis has already emerged as inspiration for films; with OWS potentially making it to the silver screen as early as 2012, what other movies may have predicted the movement's longevity and force? Here are 10 that have either direct or indirect influence on the current peoples' movement.
1. Margin Call
Okay, this one's a little cheater: I haven't seen it yet (it came out Friday). But by all accounts, the new film starring Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci and Demi Moore is uncanny in its release date. It is set at a large investment bank during the first 24 hours of a meltdown, very early in the financial crisis, when said bank realizes that its assets have about the same worth as the plastic dollar bills yuppies hand out to their toddlers. It is said to be morally ambiguous as a piece of art—while the deeds and realizations are of evil, apparently the character development brings in humanity you're not likely feeling for anybody in a Wall Street penthouse right now. But nuance is the best way to fully understand something, and ambiguity is, after all, the very reason Occupy Wall Street has thrived across so many types of people with so many different demands. I'll refrain from elaborating until I've gone to check it out, but suffice to say New York magazine's David Edelstein introduced his review of Margin Call with the kicker, "Movie night at Zuccotti Park!"
2. V for Vendetta
The Guy Fawkes masks adopted by members of hacker group Anonymous, and which populate the OWS protests, originate from V for Vendetta, a dystopian fantasy directed by James McTeigue, who had a hand in The Matrix as assistant director. Pedigree aside, V for Vendetta is widely considered to be a bad movie, but as eye candy and visual inspiration to protest goes, it's top-notch. (For a better go at the storyline, turn to the original comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, upon which the movie was based.) Besides, the concept is awesome: a Fawkes mask-wearing freedom fighter and an employee at a state broadcasting station unite against a fascist state that has taken over Great Britain, urging its citizens to rise up together on the fifth of November—the day the real Fawkes was foiled trying to blow up Westminster Palace in 1605. Despite being a horrible future dictatorship, though, Vendetta's Britain has a lot in common with our own situation, and imagines what life would be like if humanity's worst prejudices were taken to their worst logical ends. A comedian is executed for owning a copy of the Koran; a cure for a deadly virus is tested on political dissidents. It's just close enough to home to inspire preemptive protesting, before it gets that bad.
3. Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps
The first Wall Street, Oliver Stone's original meditation on the unchecked corporate greed rampant in 1980s financial culture, foreshadowed the 2008 crisis more than even conspiracy-hungry Stone could have predicted. (Without giving it away, let's just say the misdeeds of the main characters do not go unpunished.) For its sequel, Stone mined the 2008 crisis as the natural aftermath of gross deregulation of the Reagan era. With Wall Street's notorious greedmonster Gordon Gekko now a reformed, if broken, ex-con, the markets mastermind helps his future son-in-law save his green energy futures from junk bonds and garbage, anti-green buys. Or so we think! Though not as shrewd as the first Wall Street, Stone seems to be saying that even for the reformed, the draw of big money will leave anyone corrupt and willing to sacrifice their own blood. Of course, in another way Stone was doing what Margin Call purports to—give a level of humanity to the faceless Wall Street brokers who are easy to see as America's villains. But he also asks if hoarding is human nature, and whether bad people can actually change. As OWS might tell him: maybe not, but we can certainly change the system in which we're forced to operate.
4. La Chinoise
Jean-Luc Godard based his 1967 film about five young French revolutionaries on Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, but he was inspired by the discontent he saw transpiring around him, which eventually led to the 1968 civil unrest. Of course, the methods were quite opposite to the OWS tactics—in the film and the book, the characters were divided on whether to assassinate—but the ideologies are what's important. Godard was using the text to show the range of the New Left, and its interest in communism, which would eventually blow out into the largest general strike of all time. In that sense, it's not so much that La Chinoise was prescient but simply attuned to the culture, but it's an important touchstone for where we're at now with OWS—and it's a good record to try and break.
5. Gandhi
You want a massive nonviolent resistance movement? Gandhi will give you a nonviolent resistance movement. This 1982 Academy Award-winning film starring Ben Kingsley certainly paved the way for epic historical films raking in the Oscars. This one deserved it: a fairly faithful retelling of the life of Mohandas Gandhi and the movement he led to free India from the bloody rule of the British, and his later hopes to unite Pakistan and India, divided by religious strife in 1947. Watching the film, the huge crowds of joyous protesters swarming the streets are mimicked by the aerial views of Occupy Times Square and various Occupy movements across the world… and if you're feeling at all discouraged, it's these images and their inevitable, historical outcome that will bring back the heart. Like Indians of the early 20th century, we must make a movement that's too large to tell no.
6. The People vs. Larry Flynt
Based on the life of Hustler magazine publisher-cum-First Amendment crusader, part of this limited biopic involves watching Flynt's rise as a business mogul, and the nuances of his personal life, including the 1978 shooting that left him paralyzed. But as the title suggests, the meat of the film surrounds Flynt's vigorous defense of his First Amendment right to publish pornography, including several rousing speeches by both Flynt (played by Woody Harrelson, who is awesome) and his lawyer Alan Isaacman (equally awesome Edward Norton). It's a fascinating look at a now-strident activist who regularly makes the progressive pundit circuit—and Occupy Wall Street, where he has spoken against corporate bailouts at General Assemblies.
7. Milk
One of Sean Penn’s bravest roles as the San Francisco politician and gay rights hero, Milk was a compelling look at how what appears to be a small bit of activism can transform into world change. The film depicts Harvey Milk’s early activism, beginning with wheatpasted signs on the lampposts of the Castro, through mobilizing a crack team of ragtag campaigners who stand behind him until he finally wins a spot as a city supervisor–and one of the first-ever out gay politicians elected to public office in the United States. An unequivocal inspiration for change—as is Penn, whose on-the-ground activism is renowned and constant. As for Penn and OWS? He’s been down, of course, and told Piers Morgan that he is “prouder than ever to be an American” as a result of the actions.
8. Werckmeister Harmonies
This one’s for the artier (and more patient): a three-hour-long, abstract black-and-white picture by acclaimed Hungarian art director Bela Tarr, it’s a very intense allegory for the invasion of corporate behemoth (and/or political evil) into the natural world, and how it ultimately drives humankind to madness (at least, that’s one interpretation). Of course, the natural world is represented by a traveling whale carcass that eventually drives a provincial town to riots, but you get the idea. Film nerds only—difficult, but gorgeous. (For similar filmic revolution but slightly lighter fare, try Repentance, a surrealist critique of the Soviet Union that managed to make it through the Iron Wall from Georgia in 1984.)
9. Newsies
After the dark allegories, Newsies is a great change of pace. One of the kickiest, most inspiring pictures about union organizing, this Disney (!) film follows cash-strapped young newsboys in 1899, who revolt after publishing giants Pulitzer and Hearst raise the distribution prices of their papers. General strikes and powerful speeches are one thing. But when a young Christian Bale, as Cowboy Kelly, breaks out into song about being an orphan and dreaming about a better life? Waterworks. A reminder that the industrial revolution wouldn’t have worked without unions—and some new anthems, perhaps, to sing while you’re down at OWS.
10. Reds
The Warren Beatty-penned script tells the story of John Reed, the author and sociologist who chronicled the Russian Revolution in his 1920 book Ten Days That Shook the World. At the turn of the century, Reed moved to the ever-magnetic liberal enclave that was the West Village, New York City, where he became a labor activist inspired by the American Communist Party, setting the stage for his eventual move to Russia. He’s there when it all goes down, and it’s the spirit—if not so much the politics—of the revolution he seeks to capture. A worthy feeling to aspire to.
Honorable Mention: You still haven’t seen Inside Job yet? You won’t be finished watching last year’s crucial analysis of the crisis before you start writing slogans on posterboard and packing a Zuccotti-ready tent.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, New York Times and various other magazines and websites.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Rick Perry's Shady Connections to Extremist Right-Wing Pastors.
It wasn't the first time Perry shared a staged with a controversial religious figure. Perry has long cultivated ties to evangelical leaders who hold extreme views, including Rod Parsley, an Ohio megachurch pastor whose incendiary comments about Islam—he said it must be "destroyed"—forced Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to disavow Parsley's endorsement during the 2008 presidential race.
The relationship between Perry and Parsley began in 2005, when Perry held a special signing ceremony for two new measures of importance to religious conservatives: a law that required parental consent for teenage girls to obtain abortions, and a constitutional amendment, which was up for a vote that November, to ban gay marriage. Perry booked a Fort Worth Christian school for the occasion, and invited social conservative leaders—including Parsley—to attend the event.
About 600 Christian conservative activists showed up; the New York Times reported that the event "resembled a pep rally." The Perry re-election campaign sent an email blast to supporters urging them to "fill this location with pro-family Christian friends who can celebrate with us."
Parsley took the podium before Perry, sermonizing on the evils of homosexuality. "Only 1 percent of the homosexual population in America will die of old age," he explained. "The average life expectancy for a homosexual in the United States of America is 43 years of age. A lesbian can only expect to live to be 45 years of age. Homosexuals represent 2 percent of the population, yet today they're carrying 60 percent of the known cases of syphilis."
As the LGBT weekly Dallas Voice reported, those statistics didn't come out of thin air. They were plucked from a debunked report by the conservative Christian Family Policy Institute. (The report's author, Paul Cameron, had been kicked out of the American Psychological Association more than a decade earlier for his persistent distortion of research.)
With Perry looking on, Parsley warned that "we are not to sacrifice our children on the altar of sexual lust of a few," and that gay sex was a "veritable breeding ground of disease"; then he praised the governor for his tireless work battling the gay agenda.
Perry allowed Parsley's inflammatory remarks to pass without comment. When the Texas governor later came under criticism from church-state watchdog groups for appearing alongside Parsley and other controversial speakers, Perry and his aides claims these complaints were part of a liberal campaign to ban religion from the public square.
Later that year, in an effort to build momentum for his re-election bid, Perry-friendly Evangelical leaders—including popular pseudo-historian David Barton—convened a series of six forums between the governor and prominent pastors, called the Texas Restoration Project. The project was modeled after Restoration Ohio, a program devised in 2004 by Parsley and others to mobilize Christian voters for the presidential election. (That project contributed to George W. Bush's 2004 win in Ohio.)
During an impassioned address at a Restoration Project forum in August 2005, Parsley switched his focus from the gay agenda to Islam. "If you want to really get in trouble, read the largest chapter of the book and start quoting it," he said, referring to his 2005 bookSilent No More. "We tell you the truth. It's on Islam. It's called 'The Deception of Allah.'"
In his book, Parsley wrote that Christopher Columbus had sailed to the New World in part to combat the Islamic menace by exploring trade routes that bypassed Muslim-controlled areas, and that the United States had been founded to counter radical Islam. As he put it, "The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore."
(Parsley, like Jeffress, has taken shots at Mormonism. Referring to the church's view that black people were the offspring of the Devil, which was renounced in 1978, Parsley has said: "So when the Mormon missionaries come walking through your neighborhood, you can be as wise as a serpent and as harmless as a dove and say 'Get off my porch, you racist.'")
Parsley's anti-Islam rhetoric caused McCain to publicly repudiate the pastor in 2008, after the pair had appeared together at a campaign event. But Perry, did not weigh in on Parsley's anti-Islam comments or repudiate him.
Questioned about his controversial allies, Perry has employed a shrug-of-the-shoulders approach. "Just because you endorse me doesn't mean I endorse everything that you say or do," he told the Dallas Morning-News in July, ahead of his day-long prayer rally at an NFL stadium in Houston, where Perry shared the stage with controversial figures like John Hagee (who, like McKissic, pinned Hurricane Katrina on homosexuality). Similarly, when pressed on Jeffress' comments, he told George Stephanopolous, "I have a lot of people that endorse me but I don't endorse what they say or what they believe, for that matter. I can't control those individuals who go out and say something who may be for me in a race. This is about freedom of speech, freedom of religion. Our Founding Fathers were pretty wise in creating those rights."
Can Perry keep playing this game: associating with religious extremists and then sidestepping controversies about their remarks? Even as his campaign claimed it had nothing to do with Jeffress, David Lane, a top Texas evangelical leader tasked by the Perry team with drumming up social conservative support for the governor's presidential run, was privately praising Jeffress for his boldness, noting in an email obtained by the Daily Beastthat "juxtaposing traditional Christianity to the false god of Mormonism, is very important in the larger scheme of things."
With Jeffress, Perry seems to be sticking with a strategy that's never failed him. But this time, floundering in the polls and facing a Republican opponent willing to play hardball, it might just blow up in his face.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tim Murphy is an editorial intern at Mother Jones. This summer, he's zig-zagging the country with a friend, reporting little fragments of life in America along the way and "making sure everything's still where it should be." For a rundown of all his dispatches, visit his complete MoJo blog, "Road Trip for America's Future."
Worst Food Additive Ever? Production Destroys Rainforests / Enslaves Children.
On August 10, police and security for the massive palm oil corporation Wilmar International (of which Archer Daniels Midland owns a majority share) stormed a small, indigenous village on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. They came with bulldozers and guns, destroying up to 70 homes, evicting 82 families, and arresting 18 people. Then they blockaded the village, keeping the villagers in -- and journalists out. (Wilmar claims it has done no wrong.)
The village, Suku Anak Dalam, was home to an indigenous group that observes their own traditional system of land rights on their ancestral land and, thus, lacks official legal titles to the land. This is common among indigenous peoples around the world -- so common, in fact, that it is protected by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Indonesia, for the record, voted in favor of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Yet the government routinely sells indigenous peoples' ancestral land to corporations. Often the land sold is Indonesia's lowland rainforest, a biologically rich area home to endangered species like the orangutan, Asian elephant, Sumatran rhinoceros, Sumatran tiger, and the plant Rafflesia arnoldii, which produces the world's largest flower.
So why all this destruction? Chances are you'll find the answer in your pantry. Or your refrigerator, your bathroom, or even under your sink. The palm oil industry is one of the largest drivers of deforestation in Indonesia. Palm oil and palm kernel oil, almost unheard of a decade or two ago, are now unbelievably found in half of all packaged foods in the grocery store (as well as body care and cleaning supplies). These oils, traditional in West Africa, now come overwhelmingly from Indonesia and Malaysia. They cause jawdropping amounts of deforestation (and with it, carbon emissions) and human rights abuses.
"The recipe for palm oil expansion is cheap land, cheap labor, and a corrupt government, and unfortunately Indonesia fits that bill," says Ashley Schaeffer of Rainforest Action Network.
The African oil palm provides two different oils with different properties: palm oil and palm kernel oil. Palm oil is made from the fruit of the tree, and palm kernel oil comes from the seed, or "nut," inside the fruit. You can find it on ingredient lists under a number of names, including palmitate, palmate, sodium laureth sulphate, sodium lauryl sulphate, glyceryl stearate, or stearic acid. Palm oil even turns up in so-called "natural," "healthy," or even "cruelty-free" products, like Earth Balance (vegan margarine) or Newman-O's organic Oreo-like cookies. Palm oil is also used in "renewable" biofuels.
A hectare of land (2.47 acres) produces, on average, 3.7 metric tons of palm oil, 0.4 metric tons of palm kernel oil, and 0.6 tons of palm kernel cake. (Palm kernel cake is used as animal feed.) In 2009, Indonesia produced over 20.5 million metric tons, and Malaysia produced over 17.5 million metric tons. As of 2009, the U.S. was only the seventh largest importer of palm oil in the world, but as the second largest importer of palm kernel oil, it ranks third in the world as a driver of deforestation for palm oil plantations.
Indonesia has lost 46 percent of its forests since 1950, and the forests have recently disappeared at a rate of about 1.5 million hectares (an area larger than the state of Connecticut) per year. Of the 103.3 million hectares of remaining forests in 2000, only 88.2 million remained in 2009. At that time, an estimated 7.3 million hectares of oil palm plantations were already established, mostly on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Indonesia plans to continue the palm oil expansion, hoping to produce an additional 8.3 million metric tons by 2015 -- this means a 71 percent expansion in area devoted to palm oil in the coming years.
At stake are not only endangered species and human lives, but carbon emissions. One of the ecosystems at risk is Indonesia's peat swamps, where soil contains an astounding 65 percent organic matter. (Most soils contain only two to 10 percent organic matter.) Laurel Sutherlin of Rainforest Action Network describes the draining and often burning of these peat swamps as "a carbon bomb." Destruction of its peat swamps as well as its rainforests makes Indonesia the world's third largest carbon emitter after the U.S. and China.
Among the horror stories coming out of Southeast Asian palm oil plantations are accounts of child slave labor. Ferdi and Volario, ages 14 and 21, respectively, were each met by representatives of the Malaysian company Kuala Lampur Kepong in their North Sumatra villages. They were offered high-paying jobs with good working conditions, and they jumped at the opportunity. According to an account by Rainforest Action Network: "The two worked grueling hours each day spraying oil palm trees with toxic chemical fertilizers, without any protection to shield their hands, face or lungs. After work, Ferdi and Volario were forced inside the camp where they'd stay overnight under lock and key, guarded by security. If they had to use the bathroom, they'd do their best to hold it until morning or relieve themselves in plastic bags or shoes." They escaped after two months and were never paid for their work.
What is the industry doing about such horrific claims? It has established the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Kuala Lampur Kepong, Wilmar International, and Archer Daniels Midland are all members, and so are their customers, Cargill, Nestlé and Unilever, as well as environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International. But, according to Sutherlin, membership in RSPO means nothing -- other than that an organization paid its dues. "That's the first level of greenwash," says Sutherlin.
RSPO certifies some products and companies, and Sutherlin says that does have some meaning, but leaves major loopholes open. For example, there are no carbon or climate standards, and there have been problems with the implementation of social safeguards. "It's been a spotty record about their ability to enforce the standards for how people are treated and how communities are affected," notes Sutherlin. Yet, he says, RSPO is "the best game in town."
Rather than simply relying on RSPO's certification, Rainforest Action Network has focused its campaign on the U.S. agribusiness giant Cargill, which has a hand in fully 25 percent of palm oil on the global market. Rainforest Action Network is asking Cargill to sign on to a set of social and environmental safeguards and to provide public transparency on its palm oil operations. If Cargill cleans up its act, perhaps it will help put pressure on other major multinationals like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Nestlé, which also source palm oil from unethical suppliers like Wilmar International.
Journalists have also criticized environmental groups for "cozy relationships with corporate eco-nasties." The World Wildlife Fund has come under attack for its partnership with Wilmar, the corporation that attacked a Sumatran village. Its involvement in RSPO serves as a reminder of the accusations in a 2010 Nation article, which claimed that "many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying science-based environmentalism in return." (WWF says it received no payment from Wilmar in this particular case.)
The ugly issue of palm oil even touches the beloved American icon, the Girl Scout cookie. When Girl Scouts Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen began a project to save the orangutan for their Bronze Awards, they discovered the link between habitat loss and palm oil. Then they looked at a box of Girl Scout cookies and found palm oil on the list of ingredients. The two 11-year-olds -- who are now ages 15 and 16 -- began a campaign to get the Girl Scouts to remove palm oil from its cookies.
It took five years to get a response from the supposedly wholesome Girl Scouts USA (whose 2012 slogan is "Forever Green"). While the organization ignored its own members for several years, it was unable to ignore the coverage the girls received from Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and several major TV networks. Once the story was so well-covered by the media, Girl Scouts USA responded, promising it would try to move to a sustainable source of palm oil by 2015. In the meantime, it would continue buying palm oil that could have come from deforested lands or plantations that use child slave labor, but would also buy GreenPalm certificates, which fund a price premium that goes to producers following RSPO's best practice guidelines.
So what should consumers do? For the time being, avoiding products containing palm oil is probably your best bet. Since palm oil is so ubiquitous this will likely mean opting to buy fewer processed foods overall. Don't forget to check your beauty and cleaning products, too. In a handful of cases, such as Dr. Bronner's soaps, palm oil comes from fair trade, organic sources. But this is hardly the norm, and with the immense amount of palm oil used in the U.S., it's unlikely that sustainable sources could cover all of the current demand.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The village, Suku Anak Dalam, was home to an indigenous group that observes their own traditional system of land rights on their ancestral land and, thus, lacks official legal titles to the land. This is common among indigenous peoples around the world -- so common, in fact, that it is protected by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Indonesia, for the record, voted in favor of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Yet the government routinely sells indigenous peoples' ancestral land to corporations. Often the land sold is Indonesia's lowland rainforest, a biologically rich area home to endangered species like the orangutan, Asian elephant, Sumatran rhinoceros, Sumatran tiger, and the plant Rafflesia arnoldii, which produces the world's largest flower.
So why all this destruction? Chances are you'll find the answer in your pantry. Or your refrigerator, your bathroom, or even under your sink. The palm oil industry is one of the largest drivers of deforestation in Indonesia. Palm oil and palm kernel oil, almost unheard of a decade or two ago, are now unbelievably found in half of all packaged foods in the grocery store (as well as body care and cleaning supplies). These oils, traditional in West Africa, now come overwhelmingly from Indonesia and Malaysia. They cause jawdropping amounts of deforestation (and with it, carbon emissions) and human rights abuses.
"The recipe for palm oil expansion is cheap land, cheap labor, and a corrupt government, and unfortunately Indonesia fits that bill," says Ashley Schaeffer of Rainforest Action Network.
The African oil palm provides two different oils with different properties: palm oil and palm kernel oil. Palm oil is made from the fruit of the tree, and palm kernel oil comes from the seed, or "nut," inside the fruit. You can find it on ingredient lists under a number of names, including palmitate, palmate, sodium laureth sulphate, sodium lauryl sulphate, glyceryl stearate, or stearic acid. Palm oil even turns up in so-called "natural," "healthy," or even "cruelty-free" products, like Earth Balance (vegan margarine) or Newman-O's organic Oreo-like cookies. Palm oil is also used in "renewable" biofuels.
A hectare of land (2.47 acres) produces, on average, 3.7 metric tons of palm oil, 0.4 metric tons of palm kernel oil, and 0.6 tons of palm kernel cake. (Palm kernel cake is used as animal feed.) In 2009, Indonesia produced over 20.5 million metric tons, and Malaysia produced over 17.5 million metric tons. As of 2009, the U.S. was only the seventh largest importer of palm oil in the world, but as the second largest importer of palm kernel oil, it ranks third in the world as a driver of deforestation for palm oil plantations.
Indonesia has lost 46 percent of its forests since 1950, and the forests have recently disappeared at a rate of about 1.5 million hectares (an area larger than the state of Connecticut) per year. Of the 103.3 million hectares of remaining forests in 2000, only 88.2 million remained in 2009. At that time, an estimated 7.3 million hectares of oil palm plantations were already established, mostly on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Indonesia plans to continue the palm oil expansion, hoping to produce an additional 8.3 million metric tons by 2015 -- this means a 71 percent expansion in area devoted to palm oil in the coming years.
At stake are not only endangered species and human lives, but carbon emissions. One of the ecosystems at risk is Indonesia's peat swamps, where soil contains an astounding 65 percent organic matter. (Most soils contain only two to 10 percent organic matter.) Laurel Sutherlin of Rainforest Action Network describes the draining and often burning of these peat swamps as "a carbon bomb." Destruction of its peat swamps as well as its rainforests makes Indonesia the world's third largest carbon emitter after the U.S. and China.
Among the horror stories coming out of Southeast Asian palm oil plantations are accounts of child slave labor. Ferdi and Volario, ages 14 and 21, respectively, were each met by representatives of the Malaysian company Kuala Lampur Kepong in their North Sumatra villages. They were offered high-paying jobs with good working conditions, and they jumped at the opportunity. According to an account by Rainforest Action Network: "The two worked grueling hours each day spraying oil palm trees with toxic chemical fertilizers, without any protection to shield their hands, face or lungs. After work, Ferdi and Volario were forced inside the camp where they'd stay overnight under lock and key, guarded by security. If they had to use the bathroom, they'd do their best to hold it until morning or relieve themselves in plastic bags or shoes." They escaped after two months and were never paid for their work.
What is the industry doing about such horrific claims? It has established the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Kuala Lampur Kepong, Wilmar International, and Archer Daniels Midland are all members, and so are their customers, Cargill, Nestlé and Unilever, as well as environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International. But, according to Sutherlin, membership in RSPO means nothing -- other than that an organization paid its dues. "That's the first level of greenwash," says Sutherlin.
RSPO certifies some products and companies, and Sutherlin says that does have some meaning, but leaves major loopholes open. For example, there are no carbon or climate standards, and there have been problems with the implementation of social safeguards. "It's been a spotty record about their ability to enforce the standards for how people are treated and how communities are affected," notes Sutherlin. Yet, he says, RSPO is "the best game in town."
Rather than simply relying on RSPO's certification, Rainforest Action Network has focused its campaign on the U.S. agribusiness giant Cargill, which has a hand in fully 25 percent of palm oil on the global market. Rainforest Action Network is asking Cargill to sign on to a set of social and environmental safeguards and to provide public transparency on its palm oil operations. If Cargill cleans up its act, perhaps it will help put pressure on other major multinationals like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Nestlé, which also source palm oil from unethical suppliers like Wilmar International.
Journalists have also criticized environmental groups for "cozy relationships with corporate eco-nasties." The World Wildlife Fund has come under attack for its partnership with Wilmar, the corporation that attacked a Sumatran village. Its involvement in RSPO serves as a reminder of the accusations in a 2010 Nation article, which claimed that "many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying science-based environmentalism in return." (WWF says it received no payment from Wilmar in this particular case.)
The ugly issue of palm oil even touches the beloved American icon, the Girl Scout cookie. When Girl Scouts Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen began a project to save the orangutan for their Bronze Awards, they discovered the link between habitat loss and palm oil. Then they looked at a box of Girl Scout cookies and found palm oil on the list of ingredients. The two 11-year-olds -- who are now ages 15 and 16 -- began a campaign to get the Girl Scouts to remove palm oil from its cookies.
It took five years to get a response from the supposedly wholesome Girl Scouts USA (whose 2012 slogan is "Forever Green"). While the organization ignored its own members for several years, it was unable to ignore the coverage the girls received from Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and several major TV networks. Once the story was so well-covered by the media, Girl Scouts USA responded, promising it would try to move to a sustainable source of palm oil by 2015. In the meantime, it would continue buying palm oil that could have come from deforested lands or plantations that use child slave labor, but would also buy GreenPalm certificates, which fund a price premium that goes to producers following RSPO's best practice guidelines.
So what should consumers do? For the time being, avoiding products containing palm oil is probably your best bet. Since palm oil is so ubiquitous this will likely mean opting to buy fewer processed foods overall. Don't forget to check your beauty and cleaning products, too. In a handful of cases, such as Dr. Bronner's soaps, palm oil comes from fair trade, organic sources. But this is hardly the norm, and with the immense amount of palm oil used in the U.S., it's unlikely that sustainable sources could cover all of the current demand.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Call Your Mayor: Complete List of Numbers for Occupied Cities.
By Barbara Ehrenreich | Excerpted and sourced from AlterNet
We can’t all sleep outdoors in tents, but we CAN all provide a sturdy “second line” of support. When you learn that an occupation is threatened, please use this list to find the mayor’s phone number and tell him or her how you feel about cities that crush their most courageous citizens!
See the full article and long phone list here:
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/685116/call_your_mayor%3A_complete_list_of_numbers_for_occupied_cities/#paragraph2
10 ways to support the #occupy movement
Here are 10 recommendations from the YES! Magazine staff for ways to build the power and momentum of this movement. Only two of them involve sleeping outside:
1. Show up at the occupied space near you.
Use this link to find the Facebook page of an occupation near you. If you can, bring a tent or tarp and sleeping bag, and stay. Or just come for a few hours. Talk to people, participate in a General Assembly, hold a sign, help serve food. Learn about the new world being created in the occupied spaces.
2. Start your own occupation.
Use this Meetup site. Or call together friends, members of your faith group, school, or community group. Reach out to people from parts of your community you don’t normally work with. Unexpected alliances keep the movement from getting labeled as partisan or representing only some people.
3. Support those who are occupying.
Most sites need food, warm clothes, blankets, tarps, sleeping bags, communications gear, and money. Many need people to do loads of laundry, to help with medical care, to provide legal support, to serve food, and to spread the word. Some people call in pizza orders from nearby vendors. Support the folks at Liberty Square in New York here, or check in with your local occupiers to see what they need.
4. Speak out. Get into the debates and the teach-ins.
Many occupation sites have workshops and discussions on critical issues of our time. Get into the discussion. Bring your expertise and reading materials to share. YES! Magazine is offering free copies of the current New Livelihood issue to occupied sites (request them by emailing
JobsIssue@yesmagazine.org). Bring the discussions to other groups you are part of. Listen to perspectives you haven’t heard before. This process represents a critical, but under-reported side of the movement: People are shifting from being passive, frustrated observers of politics to active, powerful players. Instead of waiting for our leaders to do the right thing, people from all walks of life are becoming leaders. It makes us unstoppable.
5. Share your story.
Post how you’re part of the 99 percent on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or in print. Through this movement, people are discovering others who are also losing jobs and homes, who are overwhelmed by debt or working a dead-end job. Through this sharing, humiliation turns into compassion and self-respect. And it builds understanding of the sources and the impacts of our crisis: A Wall Street system that funnels wealth to the top 1 percent is leaving the rest of us behind. Community plus insight makes us powerful.
6. Be the media.
Show up with your video recorder, camera phone, or laptop and share the stories of the occupation. You can download a selection of posters donated by graphic designers and spread them around. Highlight the human dimension of the protests. It is harder for critics to disparage a movement when people see the faces of those involved.
7. Name the meaning of this moment.
What will make the world better for the 99 percent? How has the power of the 1 percent gotten in the way of your hopes and dreams? Make a sign, write a blog, update your Facebook page, or speak out on the issue that means the most to you. Include the phrase, “I am the 99 percent.”
8. Insist that public officials treat the occupations with respect.
The eviction of the Liberty Square occupation on Wall Street was averted by massive public resistance from those in the square and from others. Other occupations also need support. The 99 percent don’t have the money, political access, and media empires of the 1 percent; the occupations are one of the few ways we are building power. Ask your local officials to respect people's right to assembly.
9. Study and teach nonviolent techniques.
There are many examples of outside provocateurs who spark violent incidents that can discredit nonviolent movements such as this. The corporate media is hungry for violent images. (There’s already been an example of an admitted provocateur from the right-wing "American Spectator" who provoked pepper spraying at the National Air & Space Museum). Learn how to lovingly and firmly interrupt and contain violence, and teach what you know. Here are some resources.
10. Be resilient.
This movement is here for the long term. Some efforts may fade because of cold weather or harsh police responses. Others may self-destruct through faulty process or violent outbreaks. The movement may be idealistic, but it won’t be ideal. Don’t get disillusioned; the demand for a society that serves the 99 percent won’t go away. The movement may morph, but it has become unstoppable. Help it evolve.
The genie is out of the bottle. People will no longer accept the systematic transfer of wealth and power fromwe the people to the 1 percent. In this remarkable, leaderless movement, each one of the 99 percent who gets involved helps shape history.
1. Show up at the occupied space near you.
Use this link to find the Facebook page of an occupation near you. If you can, bring a tent or tarp and sleeping bag, and stay. Or just come for a few hours. Talk to people, participate in a General Assembly, hold a sign, help serve food. Learn about the new world being created in the occupied spaces.
2. Start your own occupation.
Use this Meetup site. Or call together friends, members of your faith group, school, or community group. Reach out to people from parts of your community you don’t normally work with. Unexpected alliances keep the movement from getting labeled as partisan or representing only some people.
3. Support those who are occupying.
Most sites need food, warm clothes, blankets, tarps, sleeping bags, communications gear, and money. Many need people to do loads of laundry, to help with medical care, to provide legal support, to serve food, and to spread the word. Some people call in pizza orders from nearby vendors. Support the folks at Liberty Square in New York here, or check in with your local occupiers to see what they need.
4. Speak out. Get into the debates and the teach-ins.
Many occupation sites have workshops and discussions on critical issues of our time. Get into the discussion. Bring your expertise and reading materials to share. YES! Magazine is offering free copies of the current New Livelihood issue to occupied sites (request them by emailing
JobsIssue@yesmagazine.org). Bring the discussions to other groups you are part of. Listen to perspectives you haven’t heard before. This process represents a critical, but under-reported side of the movement: People are shifting from being passive, frustrated observers of politics to active, powerful players. Instead of waiting for our leaders to do the right thing, people from all walks of life are becoming leaders. It makes us unstoppable.
5. Share your story.
Post how you’re part of the 99 percent on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or in print. Through this movement, people are discovering others who are also losing jobs and homes, who are overwhelmed by debt or working a dead-end job. Through this sharing, humiliation turns into compassion and self-respect. And it builds understanding of the sources and the impacts of our crisis: A Wall Street system that funnels wealth to the top 1 percent is leaving the rest of us behind. Community plus insight makes us powerful.
6. Be the media.
Show up with your video recorder, camera phone, or laptop and share the stories of the occupation. You can download a selection of posters donated by graphic designers and spread them around. Highlight the human dimension of the protests. It is harder for critics to disparage a movement when people see the faces of those involved.
7. Name the meaning of this moment.
What will make the world better for the 99 percent? How has the power of the 1 percent gotten in the way of your hopes and dreams? Make a sign, write a blog, update your Facebook page, or speak out on the issue that means the most to you. Include the phrase, “I am the 99 percent.”
8. Insist that public officials treat the occupations with respect.
The eviction of the Liberty Square occupation on Wall Street was averted by massive public resistance from those in the square and from others. Other occupations also need support. The 99 percent don’t have the money, political access, and media empires of the 1 percent; the occupations are one of the few ways we are building power. Ask your local officials to respect people's right to assembly.
9. Study and teach nonviolent techniques.
There are many examples of outside provocateurs who spark violent incidents that can discredit nonviolent movements such as this. The corporate media is hungry for violent images. (There’s already been an example of an admitted provocateur from the right-wing "American Spectator" who provoked pepper spraying at the National Air & Space Museum). Learn how to lovingly and firmly interrupt and contain violence, and teach what you know. Here are some resources.
10. Be resilient.
This movement is here for the long term. Some efforts may fade because of cold weather or harsh police responses. Others may self-destruct through faulty process or violent outbreaks. The movement may be idealistic, but it won’t be ideal. Don’t get disillusioned; the demand for a society that serves the 99 percent won’t go away. The movement may morph, but it has become unstoppable. Help it evolve.
The genie is out of the bottle. People will no longer accept the systematic transfer of wealth and power fromwe the people to the 1 percent. In this remarkable, leaderless movement, each one of the 99 percent who gets involved helps shape history.
Tea Party to Businesses: "Stop Hiring!"
Just when I think conservatives can't surprise me any more, they surprise me with another jaw-dropper. And, no, I'm not talking about the recent Republican debate — though that yielded some real stunners, both from the candidates and the studio audience.
I'm talking about the latest attempt by conservatives to (further) sabotage the economy and smother any hope of recovery. There have been a more than few. But this latest one takes the cake.
The tea party has a message for American businesses: "Stop hiring!"
It wasn't enough to demand that Democrats "Stop talking about jobs."
It wasn't enough to pen an unprecedented letter Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, demanding that the Federal Reserve basically let the economy fail and let America suffer, by keeping unemployment high and keeping the economy lousy through the 2012 election. (The tea party assault on the Fed failed, anyhow. The Fed ignored them.)
It wasn't enough to demand that President Obama park his "ugly bus" and stop promoting his jobs bill (on Republican turf, no less), and calling attention to Republicans' lack of a jobs plan.
Nope. None of that was good enough for the tea party. They had to go one better. And so the tea party made its boldest move to date. In an email to its members, Tea Party Nation sent a message to American businesses: "Stop Hiring." [Via DailyKos.]
Tea Party Nation sent to their members today a message from activist Melissa Brookstone urging businesspeople to not hire a single person to protest the Obama administrations supposed war against business and my country. Brookstone writes that business owners should stop hiring new employees in order to stand up to this new dictator, the global Progressive socialist movement, Hollywood, the media and Occupy Wall Street.
The entire message is worth a look. (In case Tea Party Nation is smart enough to send it down the memory hole, I've saved a screen capture.) But you can get this gist of it from this quote, if you'd rather not click through to the TPN site.
Resolved that: The Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Senate, in alliance with a global Progressive socialist movement, have participated in what appears to be a globalist socialist agenda of redistribution of wealth, and the waging of class warfare against our constitutional republic's heritage of individual rights, free market capitalism, and indeed our Constitution itself, with the ultimate goal of collapsing the U.S. economy and globalizing us into socialism.
Resolved that: President Obama has seized what amount to dictatorial powers to bypass our Congress, and that because the Congress is controlled by a Progressive socialist Senate that will not impeach one of their kind, they have allowed this and yielded what are rightfully congressional powers to this new dictator.
...Resolved that: Our President, the Democrats-Socialists, most of the media, and most of those from Hollywood, have now encouraged and supported "Occupy" demonstrations in our streets, which are now being perpetrated across the globe, and which are being populated by various marxists, socialists and even communists, and are protesting against business, private property ownership and capitalism, something I thought I'd never see in my country, in my lifetime.
I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped.I hereby declare that my job creation potential is now ceased.
The comments are even better. There's the one, likely from Michelle Bachmann fan, suggesting that a better alternative would be "If everyone agreed not to pay taxes," because "that would send the message loud and clear." That one also suggests sending "Rands 3 novels" to Washington "and force them to read them all." (Force? How? At gunpoint?) That one will run headlong into another commenter's suggestion that it would be better to "start a nationwide boycott of the federal government and all agencies and organizations supporting the marxist agenda..." So much for using the Postal Service to send those books to Washington. Or delivering them via government maintained roads, or airports inspected by government inspectors and airspace made safe by the Federal Avaiation Administration.
And that's just the first page of comments.
It's not enough that last week Republicans blocked the Senate from even talking about jobs. This week, the tea party is telling businesses to stop hiring — in other words, stop creating jobs — in a show of "solidarity."
This makes at least a couple of things crystal clear. First, it's now undeniably clear that Republicans are "hoping for failure" where the economy is concerned.
Second, Herman Cain may need to come up with a new line. After all, if you can't find a job, if no one will hire you, you may be justified in blaming the tea party for telling businesses not to hire anyone. Just saying.
By Terrance Heath | Sourced from Campaign for America's Future
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
We said run the country, not ruin it - House of Reps steers country toward rocks
Somewhere along the road from their home districts to their offices in Washington, D.C., our Congressional representatives got their wires crossed. The American public sent them forth with a mandate to run the country, but instead, they're ruining it.
By Sam Edmondson
http://earthjustice.org/blogs/sam-edmondson
Toward the end of September, the House passed the first piece of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-VA) Toxic Agenda: H.R. 2401, the so-called TRAIN Act—an absolute wreck of public policy. It ties to the tracks and threatens to run over two clean air standards that would prevent up to 51,000 premature deaths every year and generate $420 billion in annual economic benefits by cleaning up dirty coal plants.
Does America support Cantor's agenda? Do we want to board a crazy train bound for a future of dirty air, more disease and shorter lives? The answer, not surprisingly, is No. NO.
Recent polling shows that 75 percent of voters—including 62 percent of Cantor's party—think that the Environmental Protection Agency, not Congress, should make decisions about clean air standards. Large majorities are also against delaying (67 percent) or blocking (76 percent) the clean air standards that Cantor's TRAIN wreck is colliding with.
But the House is, nonetheless, rolling forward with its agenda to ruin-not-run the country. Full steam ahead. In early October, it voted to increase mercury pollution, premature death and disease by outright exempting cement kilns—the nation's second worst mercury polluter, behind only the power plants that the TRAIN Act already ran over—from the Clean Air Act. It is well-established that mercury exposure causes brain and developmental damage to fetuses, babies and young children. The bill, H.R. 2681, also changes current law to encourage kilns to burn tires, scrap plastics, used chemicals and other industrial garbage.
Alex Allred, a longtime ally of Earthjustice, lives near three cement kilns. In a guest blog at unEarthed, she wrote:
This is not an issue about the economy or industry or free enterprise. This is my life. This is the life of my children and my neighbors. This is our future. Please don't sell it out to the greedy interests of a dirty industry that should and could have cleaned up more than a decade ago.Earthjustice's Jim Pew, whose dogged litigation over the past decade brought about the strong clean air standards for cement kilns that the House voted to undo, said, "Does the House of Representatives think that not enough babies are being born with developmental damage due to mercury poisoning?"
Apparently not, because just last Thursday it voted to exempt industrial boilers and incinerators—the third largest source of mercury and other toxic air pollution—from the Clean Air Act. This bill, H.R. 2250, also encourages the burning of industrial garbage in uncontrolled, unmonitored facilities. For the neighbors of these facilities, the bill deprives them of finding out what wastes are being burned or what toxic pollutants are generated as a result.
Taken together, H.R. 2681 and H.R. 2250 will cause up to 9,000 premature deaths every year. If you're playing along at home, that's a total of up to 60,000 unnecessary, preventable deaths caused by air pollution every year thanks to the votes for Rep. Cantor's Toxic Agenda.
Outraged yet? Take a look at how your representative voted.
If these votes aren't being cast in the interest of the American public, whose interests are being served? Polluters, plain and simple. The operators of dirty industrial facilities don't want to pay for their pollution. They want us to do it—with higher medical bills, with reduced wages from missing work, with diminished quality of life. They claim it's about jobs, but peer-reviewed EPA studies and numerous independent analyses have shown over and over again that clean air protections are Good. For. The. Economy.
Sadly, there's more. On Friday, the House wanted to serve up one last favor to the polluters before heading out for a week-long recess. Literally just before dashing out of town, it voted to block the EPA from regulating toxic coal ash, despite the mounting evidence that arsenic, lead and other toxic metals from coal ash are contaminating groundwater at hundreds of sites across the country. Proponents of the bill again argue in economic terms, but a recent study from Tufts University found that federal regulations for coal ash could provide 28,000 new jobs every year.
These public health protections are priorities for Earthjustice. We have worked for years, decades in some cases, to secure protections against coal ash and strong clean air standards for the nation's dirtiest industries: coal-fired power plants, cement kilns, and industrial boilers and incinerators. Along the way, our supporters have sent emails, made phone calls, attended public hearings and contributed in many other ways. It's clear that the House of Representatives supports the Toxic Agenda to take away all of this hard work, and it's also clear that the American people do not.
Perhaps sensitive to this fact, the White House indicated it will veto 3-out-of-4 of these bills—while not issuing a veto threat, they declared themselves unequivocally opposed to the coal ash bill. That's good news, but Americans may have to count on the administration to follow through on their opposition and not cave to political pressure like they did on the badly needed ozone standards.
The fate of clean air standards and other public health protections in this country shouldn't be determined by political pressures, but it is. To ensure that they happen—an outcome the American people certainly wants—we the public have to maintain pressure to counter the deep pockets and sharp elbows of the polluter lobby. A real fight is emerging as these bills move to the Senate, and we'll be counting on your support to ensure that no part of Cantor's Toxic Agenda slips through. If their goal is to ruin the country, our goal should be to ruin their plans.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Lakoff: How Occupy Wall Street's Moral Vision Can Beat the Disastrous Conservative Worldview.
I was asked weeks ago by some in the Occupy Wall Street movement to make suggestions for how to frame the movement. I have hesitated so far, because I think the movement should be framing itself. It’s a general principle: Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends. I have so far hesitated to offer suggestions. But the movement appears to maturing and entering a critical time when small framing errors could have large negative consequences. So I thought it might be helpful to accept the invitation and start a discussion of how the movement might think about framing itself.
In politics, frames are part of competing moral systems that are used in political discourse and in charting political action. In short, framing is a moral enterprise: it says what the character of a movement is. All politics is moral. Political figures and movements always make policy recommendations claiming they are the right things to do. No political figure ever says, do what I say because it’s wrong! Or because it doesn’t matter! Some moral principles or other lie behind every political policy agenda.
Two Moral Framing Systems in Politics
Conservatives have figured out their moral basis and you see it on Wall Street: It includes: The primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is “deserving,” defined by success. And the highest principle is the primacy of this moral system itself, which goes beyond Wall Street and the economy to other arenas: family life, social life, religion, foreign policy, and especially government. Conservative “democracy” is seen as a system of governance and elections that fits this model.
Though OWS concerns go well beyond financial issues, your target is right: the application of these principles in Wall Street is central, since that is where the money comes from for elections, for media, and for right-wing policy-making institutions of all sorts on all issues.
The alternative view of democracy is progressive: Democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care, taking responsibility both for oneself and for one’s family, community, country, people in general, and the planet. The role of government is to protect and empower all citizens equally via The Public: public infrastructure, laws and enforcement, health, education, scientific research, protection, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, and on and on. Nobody makes it one their own. If you got wealthy, you depended on The Public, and you have a responsibility to contribute significantly to The Public so that others can benefit in the future. Moreover, the wealthy depend on those who work, and who deserve a fair return for their contribution to our national life. Corporations exist to make life better for most people. Their reason for existing is as public as it is private.
A disproportionate distribution of wealth robs most citizens of access to the resources controlled by the wealthy. Immense wealth is a thief. It takes resources from the rest of the population — the best places to live, the best food, the best educations, the best health facilities, access to the best in nature and culture, the best professionals, and on and on. Resources are limited, and great wealth greatly limits access to resources for most people.
It appears to me that OWS has a progressive moral vision and view of democracy, and that what it is protesting is the disastrous effects that have come from operating with a conservative moral, economic, and political worldview. I see OWS as primarily a moral movement, seeking economic and political changes to carry out that moral movement — whatever those particular changes might be.
A Moral Focus for Occupy Wall Street
I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific policy demands. If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed.
It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail.
We Love America. We’re Here to Fix It
I see OWS as a patriotic movement, based on a deep and abiding love of country — a patriotism that it is not just about the self-interests of individuals, but about what the country is and is to be. Do Americans care about other citizens, or mainly just about themselves? That’s what love of America is about. I therefore think it is important to be positive, to be clear about loving America, seeing it in need of fixing, and not just being willing to fix it, but being willing to take to the streets to fix it. A populist movement starts with the people seeing that they are all in the same boat and being ready to come together to fix the leaks.
Publicize the Public
Tell the truth about The Public, that nobody makes it purely on their own without The Public, that is, without public infrastructure, the justice system, health, education, scientific research, protections of all sorts, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, … That is a truth to be told day after day. It is an idea that must take hold in public discourse. It must go beyond what I and others have written about it and beyond what Elizabeth Warren has said in her famous video. The Public is not opposed to The Private. The Public is what makes The Private possible. And it is what makes freedom possible. Wall Street exists only through public support. It has a moral obligation to direct itself to public needs.
All OWS approaches to policy follow from such a moral focus. Here are a handful examples.
Democracy should be about the 99%
Money directs our politics. In a democracy, that must end. We need publicly supported elections, however that is to be arranged.
Strong Wages Make a Strong America
Middle-class wages have not gone up significantly in 30 years, and there is conservative pressure to lower them. But when most people get more money, they spend it and spur the economy, making the economy and the country stronger, as well as making their individual lives better. This truth needs to be central to public economic discourse.
Global Citizenship
America has been a moral beacon to the world. It can function as such only if it sets an example of what a nation should be.
Do we have to spend more on the military that all other nations combined? Do we really need hundreds of military bases abroad?
Nature
We are part of nature. Nature makes us, and all that we love, possible. Yet we are destroying Nature through global warming and other forms of ecological destruction, like fracking and deep-water drilling.
At a global scale, nature is systemic: its effects are neither local nor linear. Global warming is causing the ferocity of the monster storms, tornados, floods, blizzards, heat waves, and fires that have devastated huge areas of our country. The hotter the atmosphere, the more evaporated water and the more energy going into storms, tornados, and blizzards. Global warming cannot be shown to cause any particular storm, but when a storm system forms, global warming will ramp up the power of the storm and the amount of water it carries. In winter, evaporated water from the overly heated Pacific will go into the atmosphere, blow northeast over the arctic, and fall as record snows.
We depend on nature – on clean air, water, food, and a livable climate. And we find beauty and grandeur in nature, and a sense of awe that makes life worth living. A love of country requires a love of nature. And a fair and thriving economy requires the preservation of nature as we have known it.
Summary
OWS is a moral and patriotic movement. It sees Democracy as flowing from citizens caring about one another as well as themselves, and acting with both personal and social responsibility. Democratic governance is about The Public, and the liberty that The Public provides for a thriving Private Sphere. From such a democracy flows fairness, which is incompatible with a hugely disproportionate distribution of wealth. And from the sense of care implicit in such a democracy flows a commitment to the preservation of nature.
From what I have seen of most members of OWS, your individual concerns all flow from one moral focus.
Elections
The Tea Party solidified the power of the conservative worldview via elections. OWS will have no long-term effect unless it too brings its moral focus to the 2012 elections. Insist on supporting candidates that have your overall moral views, no matter what the local issues are.
A Warning
This movement could be destroyed by negativity, by calls for revenge, by chaos, or by having nothing positive to say. Be positive about all things and state the moral basis of all suggestions. Positive and moral in calling for debt relief. Positive and moral in upholding laws, as they apply to finances. Positive and moral in calling for fairness in acquiring needed revenue. Positive and moral in calling for clean elections. To be effective, your movement must be seen by all of the 99% as positive and moral. To get positive press, you must stress the positive and the moral.
Remember: The Tea Party sees itself as stressing only individual responsibility. The Occupation Movement is stressing both individual and social responsibility.
I believe, and I think you believe, that most Americans care about their fellow citizens as well as themselves. Let’s find out! Shout your moral and patriotic views out loud, regularly. Put them on your signs. Repeat them to the media. Tweet them. And tell everyone you know to do the same. You have to use your own language with your own framing and you have to repeat it over and over for the ideas to sink in.
Occupy elections: voter registration drives, town hall meetings, talk radio airtime, party organizations, nomination campaigns, election campaigns, and voting booths.
Above all: Frame yourselves before others frame you.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
George Lakoff is the author of Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate' (Chelsea Green). He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute.
Why the #Teaparty is doomed.
Political Animal
By Steve Benen
In a piece in the upcoming print edition of the Washington Monthly, Colin Woodard reports on Tea Partiers’ waning influence, but with a specific focus on geography. The editors’ summary of the story helps set the stage for an interesting piece:
And for more on the subject matter, Michael Lind and Ed Kilgore had an interesting debate recently about whether the Tea Party is or is not a fundamentally Southern phenomenon. Lind makes the case for Tea Partiers’ limited regional appeal, while Kilgore argues it has broader appeal. The Woodard piece largely points to a middle ground.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As 2010 drew to a close, the Tea Party looked like a truly national movement, racking up congressional seats and governor’s mansions not just in traditionally red states like South Carolina, but in the Northeast and Midwest as well.
And yet, twelve months later, the Tea Party’s power seems to be melting away in much of the country. Tea Party-supported governors in states like Maine and Wisconsin find themselves beset by controversy over their radical agendas and incredibly unpopular with voters. Meanwhile the broader movement, once deemed unstoppable, seems to be running out of gas.
As Colin Woodard explains in the upcoming November/December issue of the Washington Monthly, this was predictable. The Tea Party’s agenda and credo may have struck a brief chord nationwide, but they are only truly at home in certain regions of the country, like the Deep South, that have historic affinities for such politics. In other regions, the movement’s tenets are anathema to centuries-old social, political, and cultural traditions that few of us fully understand.
In his piece, Woodard illuminates a hidden political geography of America, dividing the country into 11 distinct regions whose radically different characters have always set the terms of national politics and always made extremist movements a tough sell. Understanding these regions, he argues, will be key if progressives want to form a winning coalition going forward.
Read Woodard’s story “A Geography Lesson for the Tea Party.”
And for more on the subject matter, Michael Lind and Ed Kilgore had an interesting debate recently about whether the Tea Party is or is not a fundamentally Southern phenomenon. Lind makes the case for Tea Partiers’ limited regional appeal, while Kilgore argues it has broader appeal. The Woodard piece largely points to a middle ground.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Monday, October 24, 2011
How Much Do Americans Really Know About Democracy? Turns Out We Could Learn a Few Things From Nature.
This post is adapted from LaConte's article in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of the international journal Green Horizon.
"Our capacity for democracy grows from our connection with nature. As we lose that connection, isolation, fear, and the need to control grow-and democracy inevitably deteriorates. It's easy to forget that a deep connection with nature provides the inspiration for genuine democratic thinking." -- Peter Senge in Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society.
In my book Life Rules I make the case that the prognosis for global or even national-level solutions for the syndrome of economic, environmental and political/social crises we presently face is poor. I take the recent debt-ceiling fiasco as further proof of the pudding. Variously inept, corrupt, craven, bought and paid for, ideologically intransigent, and ignorant of or unwilling to face hard realities, our leaders are evidently incapable of comprehending or coping with the complexity of the issues before them. They fail to see, or at least fail to say that they see, the connections between and among these crises. They exhibit an almost pathological inability or refusal to recognize the seriousness of consequences of the convergence of these crises: economic and ecological breakdown and worldwide chaos.
Tackling these crises, or at least seeming to, only one at a time is equivalent to treating AIDS-related cancers without treating the recurrent pneumonia and wasting disease that are also symptomatic of AIDS. Leaders of both major parties have chosen posturing and pandering as alternatives to governing and Greens haven't yet the numbers, leverage or heft to challenge them. For the major media, posturing and pandering are meat, potatoes, trifle and a raison d'etre. For the American people they're disastrous. Waiting for politicians and politics as we've known them to cure themselves of this life-threatening condition could prove fatal.
Taking to the streets as larger and larger numbers of Americans are, for a variety of causes ranging from climate change to oligarchy removal, is a start. It signals that a critical mass of Americans are not satisfied. But non-violent protests may meet with little else but dismissal at worst and minor concessions at best. Because, whatever else may be said of the present political "process" and the behaviors of the Powers in Washington, it's not democracy supposed to represent. Genuinely democratic praxis is nowhere to be found inside the beltway. Representative Eric Cantor's description of the Wall Street justice-and-democracy-starved occupiers as a "mob" is indicative of the present batch of Powers' perspective on the people.
It's not that democracy has failed us but our way of thinking about it that has. We might say of democracy what Gandhi said when asked what he thought of civilization: "It would be a very good idea."
What Democracy's Not
So far we've gotten the idea wrong. We are accustomed to thinking of democracy as a noun. "A democracy" is a physical place, a nation with borders defined on a map such that if we are born within those borders we are somehow born into democracy too.
Democracy is a kind of protective covering "under" which we live, such that it will take care of us and keep us from harm. We treat it as if it were a possession. "Having it," we are superior to those who don't. We think of it as a right. Aside from being born within a particular nation's borders and under the protection of that nation's government, police and military, we don't have to do anything to get democracy. In fact, we have very little to do with it. It's just ours, by right. Nonetheless, we go to great lengths to "keep it," including going to war for it or over it. And we've gotten into our minds and political discourse the notion that we ought to try to "give it" to others, as if it were a thing we could give like food or money or weapons.
But what if "democracy" is not a noun? What if, as Frances Moore Lappé and I have proposed in our books Democracy's Edge and Life Rules, it's more like a verb. What if it's not something we have but something we do, together; how we organize ourselves and relate to and behave with each other? And what if, as MIT management innovator Peter Senge suggests, we've been looking for democracy in the wrong places. What if Nature-Life as we know it -- rather than our own history -- provides "the inspiration for genuine democratic thinking"? And what if, as Hopi elders proposed some hundreds of years ago, what Life tells us is that we really are the one's we're waiting for.
Democracy all the Way Up ...
It has long been assumed that most animal societies are organized as we are with Powers and cowerers, doers and done to, top dogs and underdogs, alpha males and dominance everywhere you look. That view is changing.
Unless all members decide on the same action, some will be left behind and will forfeit the advantages of group living."And if too many are left behind the group would fall apart leaving the members in a state of chaos and confusion and at a survival disadvantage. Accordingly, "group decision-making is a commonplace occurrence in the lives of social animals."
In studies of red deer conducted with her colleague Tim Roper, Conradt found that when it comes to making decisions about moving on from a resting place, feeding ground or watering hole, it's not the sexually dominant alpha male or even a group of sexually-dominant males that make the decision when to go or even necessarily where. Life has taught red deer the hard way that even the most experienced, strong, clever alpha might decide to move the herd based on nothing more than a sudden urge or misinterpreted sign of danger, even though many members of the herd are still thirsty, tired or hungry.
Barring clear and present danger, members of red deer herds, gorilla bands, African buffalo herds and other close-knit animal societies vote their readiness to move by standing up and pointing themselves in the direction they want to go. When a significant majority have stood and/or pointed themselves in the chosen direction, the group moves on in the direction they've chosen together. In a statement that until recently the scientific community would have considered unorthodox or heretical, Roper and Conradt concluded that "democratic behavior is not unique to humans."
Anna Dornhaus of the University of Arizona and Nigel R. Franks at the University of Bristol in the UK have found that some varieties of bees and ants engage in information pooling and consensus decision making. "Democracy is not something that humanity invented," Dornhaus concludes.
Radio personality and author Thom Hartmann has written of this new understanding of animal behavior that "Without exception the natural state of group-living animals is to cooperate, not dominate. Democracy, it turns out, is hardwired into the DNA of species from ants to zebras. And it includes all of the hominids from the great apes to Homo sapiens."
... And all the Way Down
Examples of democratic activity can be found at levels as far down Life's food chain as microbes. "In recent years," Werner Krieglstein wrote in Green Horizon Magazine, "scientists have documented a remarkable sequence of behavior that might well be suited to serve as a metaphor if not as a lived example for how we human beings can and should behave in times of need...Scientists observed this single cell organism cooperating in a quite extraordinary fashion when the food supply was running short."
Facing a life threatening famine, hordes of single-celled amoeba called dictyostelium gather from every direction and every part of famine territory and turn themselves collectively into a new creature: slime mold. "They group together, forming a community, to achieve goals they could not achieve by themselves."
Microbiologist Mahlon Hoagland explains how this works: Recognizing pending catastrophe, "a single amoeba, apparently self-appointed, begins to emit a chemical signal. Near-by neighbors, irresistibly drawn to the signal 'ooze' over and attach themselves to the signaler. Each new member of the cluster amplifies the signal by releasing its own signal. More amoeba arrive." It's sort of like a grassroots flash mob at this point. "Then a startling transformation occurs: The aggregate shapes itself into a slug and begins to migrate to a new location, leaving a trail of slime behind it. As the slug moves the cells differentiate into three distinct types," each type taking up a task vital to the group's survival.
They form a creature that looks like a tiny futuristic floor lamp with a base, a post and a round, covered bulb. The base roots the slime mold in its new food-rich environment. The post raises the bulb high so that its equivalent of light will cover as large an area as possible. And what's the equivalent of light in this amoebic democracy analogy? Spores, like tiny eggs. Dispersed like photons in their new space when the bulb "turns on" and emits them, they become new single-celled amoebae. "And then the cycle begins anew." Individuals do their own thing until collective-democratic-action is required again to deal with another shared crisis.
Dog, Meet Dog
Dog-eat-dog is, after all, an anomaly. It is not the state of nature. Something closer to democracy is. Red in tooth and claw is a human projection based on incomplete and inaccurate science and biased observation. Carnivores for the most part turn on each other-the weakened, wasting, wounded or recently deceased-only when there's not enough else to eat. And that happens for the most part only when we or natural forces dramatically reduce their territory and/or sources of food. In other words when our activities and presence or natural cycles or cataclysms have caused Critical Mass. Think urban feral dogs and cats, gorillas when the mist has gone away with the forests, wolves when wildfire or volcanic eruption clears the landscape of herds and small prey. But even in desperate times, most other-than-human species continue to cooperate more like those amoeba than like rabid packs of dogs.
Why? Democracy is key to species survival.
We are about to learn that. If the protests in the American street bear down hard on the Wall Street occupiers intent that Americans work together to "create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone" rather than assuming any elected official or group of them will do these things for us, then we might gather to ourselves the courage and conviction necessary for a Second American revolution, this time not just to topple oligarchs but to declare independence from the Global Economic Order.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ellen LaConte's book is 'Life Rules: Why So Much Is Going Wrong Everywhere At Once and How Life Teaches Us To Fix It' (Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010). She will be guiding workshops at the Brave New Planet: Imagining Ecological Societies conference in Claremont CA, Oct. 27-29.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)