Yes! Magazine

Armando Robles, left, and Melvin Macklin at their union offices. The two have been fighting to keep their factory open for the past four years. Photo by Amanda Rivkin.

Four years ago, as the recession took hold and layoffs around the country were approaching 500,000 a month, a group of workers in Chicago saved a factory and inspired a nation. Fired by their boss, they occupied instead of leaving. Fired by a second boss, they occupied and formed a worker’s cooperative. Now they are worker-owners of a load of equipment and they’re setting up a factory in a new location.

All they want to do is to get back to making and selling windows. It shouldn’t be this hard to keep good jobs in Chicago, but “A cooperative can be a way of surviving, of moving forward,” says Armando Robles, one of the workers.

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Robles was one of 250 workers fired in December 2008 without notice or severance by Republic Windows and Doors when the company announced it was closing its Chicago factory. The company said that it could no longer operate because it had lost its line of credit with Bank of America. The irony of the situation was clear. Bank of America had received billions in government bailouts to keep the economy working, and yet the Republic workers were being laid off without their entitled payments and benefits. Supported by their union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Robles and his fellow workers voted to resist. They occupied the plant for six days, winning back pay, severance, and time for a new company to take ownership. Generating thousands of articles and news reports about their fight, they encouraged a downcast nation, even an incoming U.S. president.

At a press conference during the factory occupation, then President-elect Barack Obama declared: “When it comes to the situation here in Chicago, with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned … I think they are absolutely right.”

The public relations potential, combined with the prospect of stimulus spending and a green economy boom, spurred Serious Energy of California to take over the former Republic plant in February 2009. Among the investors in the new business was Mesirow Financial, a Chicago-based firm, with close ties to (among others), then White House Chief of Staff (soon to be Chicago Mayor) Rahm Emanuel. With $15 million from Mesirow alone, Serious looked forward to landing substantial federal and city contracts.

Two years later, those contracts were yet to materialize. The ballyhooed green economy? Chicago’s grand green retrofitting scheme? They were nowhere in sight, and city and state spending was essentially on ice. By the end of 2009, only 20 of the Republic workers had been hired back. In February 2012, Serious announced it, too, was closing the Chicago factory and selling off the machines.

This time, Robles et al. only needed to occupy for a matter of hours before management agreed to a deal. Serious agreed to give the workers the first option to buy the plant’s equipment and 90 days to come up with a bid.

“It’s not just about profits,” he says—it’s about sustaining communities, keeping jobs in places where people need them.

“Republic walked away from our jobs. Serious walked away from our jobs, but we are not walking away from our jobs,” said Melvin Macklin, who had worked at the plant for more than a decade. In the time between the first layoff and the second, the workers and their families became aware of other options. As it happens, after appearing together with Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis on GRITtv, Robles and United Electrical field organizer Leah Fried sat down with The Working World, a nonprofit that has helped start and maintain worker cooperatives in Argentina and other parts of Latin America.

With help from The Working World and advice from colleagues in the co-op movement in the United States and abroad, on May 30, 2012, Robles, Macklin and 22 colleagues founded New Era Windows, LLC, a worker-run cooperative incorporated in Illinois to manufacture what they promise will be “quality, affordable windows.”

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Despite the initial agreement, it was not until last August, many months and some intense struggle later, that Serious finally agreed to let New Era buy the factory equipment. The struggle was partly political—Serious had to be pressured to keep its pledge to the workers—but it was largely financial. The new worker-owners decided that they would earn equal wages and have equal votes in decision-making. They also agreed to each contribute a fee of $1,000 to “buy in.” At 58, Macklin borrowed some of his buy-in from a nephew, but he says that the stretch to raise the money was worth it.

“It’s not just about profits,” he says—it’s about sustaining communities, keeping jobs in places where people need them. “There will be no big, fat-cat salaries, no CEOs, CFOs and COOs to pay, so our bottom line will be easier. We already know how to make the best windows. … We don’t know for sure it’ll be successful, but we didn’t know the occupation would be successful—I thought I was going to jail. Unless we step out and try, we’ll never know.”

The workers took the leap, but investors have been less inclined to follow. In spite of preparing a business plan and reaching out to social impact investors, the co-op has thus far been unable to attract venture capital. Even with the collateral of the equipment, the workers have been unable to win any loans. The $500,000 they were able to raise for the purchase came from a single source, The Working World.

“It’s awesome that they’ve done it—this is as grassroots as it gets,” says Brendan Martin, founder and director of The Working World. “But to reverse the rules of capital, you need capital. It’s not enough for workers to realize they have opportunity; resources also have to come to them.”

“There should be governmental help to keep factories open and allow the workers to try to keep their jobs,” says Robles. “When there is no government help, at least there should be social help, community help, anything. The loss to a community is overwhelming when a whole factory closes.”

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President Obama knew as much four years ago, at that Chicago press conference. The Chicago workers’ experience was reflective of a national situation, he said.
“When you have a financial system that is shaky, credit contracts. Businesses large and small start cutting back on their plants and equipment and their workforces. That’s why it’s so important for us to maintain a strong financial system. But it’s also important for us to make sure that the plans and programs that we design aren’t just targeted at maintaining the solvency of banks, but they are designed to get money out the doors and to help people on Main Street.”

You’d think that helping a minority-run green business in a high-unemployment community would be a smart way to help those celebrated “people on Main Street,” but so far, no money has come out of those doors. Absent a rational industrial policy from the government, and a smart new stimulus package, the New Era experiment is in the hands of the market. For almost a year, the workers have hung on, living off their severance, unemployment, and sweat. Their new factory’s almost set up; they hope to start selling early this year, and they’re looking for customers.

More information at newerawindows.com

Laura Flanders wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Laura is a former host of Air America, and founder and host of GRITtv. She is the author of Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, and Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians. She writes regularly for The Nation and the Guardian and appears as a regular guest on MSNBC.

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Jules Brookbank is one of the farmers for Our Harvest, the urban Cincinnati food-hub enterprise. Our Harvest provides food for a CSA business, plus three restaurants and three retail locations. Photo by Phil Didion.

“Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollow out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants,” said United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard in 2009. “We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

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Gerard was announcing a formal partnership between his 1.2-million-member union and Mondragon, a cluster of cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain.

Mondragon employs 83,000 workers in 256 companies. About half of those companies are cooperatives, and about a third of Mondragon’s employees are co-op members with an ownership stake in their workplace. Mondragon companies do everything from manufacturing industrial machine parts to making pressure cookers and home appliances to running a bank and a chain of supermarkets. With billions of euros in annual sales, Mondragon is the largest industrial conglomerate in the Basque region and the fifth-largest in Spain.

The cooperatives use workers’ cash investments as part of the capital needed to finance new projects, and worker-owner co-op members get to vote on strategy, management, and business planning. The highest-paid managers’ salaries are capped at six to eight times what the lowest-paid workers make—as opposed to the United States, where CEOs now make 380 times more than the average worker.

Building union co-ops

As manufacturing in the United States continues in free fall, the USW is working to bring the Mondragon cooperative model to the Rust Belt. It aims to use employee-run businesses to create new, middle-class jobs to replace union work that has gone overseas.

A March 2012 report from the USW, Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC), lays out a template for how “union co-ops” can function. “A union co-op is a unionized worker-owned cooperative in which worker-owners all own an equal share of the business and have an equal vote in overseeing the business,” the report states.

"While it may not rebuild labor's ranks ... this model might do something even more important: give working people a way to become true stewards of the economy."

But how do union co-ops differ from traditional worker-owned co-ops? The report explains that the key difference is that workers in a union co-op can appoint a management team (from within their own ranks or from outside the co-op) and then bargain collectively with management. The resulting collective bargaining agreements can set wage rates for all the co-op’s jobs, choose health care and other benefit packages, decide how workers will earn time off, and determine a process for grievances and arbitration of workplace disputes.

In addition to producing the union co-op template, the USW has worked to get pilot cooperatives started in the United States. The union has carefully examined the Evergreen Cooperatives, which were started in Cleveland in 2009 with a blend of foundation money, public funds, and private investment capital. Drawing from Mondragon’s principles of shared prosperity for workers and democratic governance, Evergreen launched a commercial laundry that now cleans more than four million pounds of laundry per year and employs 30 people. It also has plans for a solar installers’ cooperative and a greenhouse that grows high-end salad greens and herbs for the Cleveland Clinic, as well as universities and restaurants. The example was an important one for the USW’s pilot projects, suggesting a blueprint to keep jobs local, tie new businesses to existing city institutions, and give workers a voice in company operations.

OEOC Director Bill McIntyre worked with the Cleveland Foundation on crafting the organizational framework for the Evergreen Cooperatives. At a March 2012 press event at United Steelworkers headquarters, he observed that employee-owners more often kept their jobs during the recent economic meltdown. “Employee-owned companies,” he said, “have more stable, loyal, and experienced work forces, which translates into real cost savings, productivity, and quality advantages.”

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Reviving a Pittsburgh laundry

A group of unions, including the USW, is helping to launch the Pittsburgh Clean and Green Laundry Cooperative, a new industrial laundry. Several years ago, a local laundry closed, leaving more than 100 people without work. Together with the USW, the workers began exploring the idea of creating a cooperative to take over the business. The union has now completed a feasibility study for the business and is lining up commitments from clients such as local hospitals and clinics. A full laundry plant is scheduled to be up and running soon, thanks in part to the support of the Steel Valley Authority (SVA)—Pennsylvania’s publicly funded initiative for saving and creating industrial jobs—and other local foundations.

“Right now, several of the larger hospitals are sending their laundry out pretty far to get it done, so [going local] makes sense cost-wise, and it makes sense green-wise,” says Rob Witherell, the USW’s cooperative organizer and strategist.

“The intent is that the folks who worked at the previous laundry would be the first to join as worker-owners,” Witherell adds.

Under the union-cooperative model, the laundry’s employees would be able to join the union of their choice, and the jobs offered at the plant would provide a living wage, benefits, and a collective bargaining agreement. As worker-owners, the employees would also gain equity in the business.

“The way it works in Cleveland is the folks working at the laundry—if they’re to become owners—have their initial ownership investment financed by the company,” explains Witherell. “Fifty cents an hour is deducted from their wages for a period of three years, until they have met the requirements for ownership.”

Worker-owners vote on decisions about the management of the company. And, as in Mondragon, a share of profits is added to the ownership accounts, so that long-term workers can retire or leave the company having accrued a significant stake. “In Cleveland, they’ve done the math, and they’ve figured out that in eight years—if they meet their business targets, which they have so far—those folks will each have $65,000 in their ownership accounts,” Witherell says.

For the SVA, the model is one it hopes to spread further: It has announced a goal of establishing a technical assistance center and a revolving loan fund to help worker groups that want to use the Mondragon model.

Cooperative harvest in Cincinnati

In the past year, the USW has supported work to create the Cincinnati Union Cooperative Initiative (CUCI). CUCI has two projects in the pipeline: a railway manufacturing co-op and a cooperative for retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. A third project, already in operation, pairs commitment to food sustainability with a worker-ownership model in the Our Harvest cooperative.

Our Harvest is a “food hub” that will allow institutions in the metropolitan region—such as universities, hospitals, and hotels—to buy produce that is grown, harvested, and packaged by worker-owners. Currently, says CUCI President Kristen Barker, the nascent project has an incubator farm for training farmers and food production workers, with two apprentice farmers, a mentor farmer, and three part-time support staff.

The apprentices, who are cardholding members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), are learning farming and production methods from the mentor farmer and are running a community-supported agriculture (CSA) business from the incubator farm in the heart of Cincinnati. The CSA currently serves 60 residential customers, plus three restaurants and three retail locations.

Our Harvest grows its food on a 30-acre farm in an urban neighborhood. “It’s amazing that that exists,” says Barker.  “We’re interested in being on bus lines,” says Barker, pointing out that the co-op considers making jobs accessible by public transit to be part of a sustainable, fair approach to job creation.

In order to serve the large institutions Our Harvest hopes to make the mainstay of its operation, the farm has to expand. “We need to get to 1,000 acres’ worth of production,” Barker says. “To get up to 1,000 requires a ton of skill, and a lot of land.”

CUCI isn’t going it alone in the effort to expand Our Harvest. The Ohio State Cooperative Development Center is doing a study of how Our Harvest can scale up to the 1,000-acre mark. Efforts are under way to house an expanded apprenticeship program at a local community college. And Mondragon is working closely with CUCI to firm up Our Harvest’s structures and locate additional financing.

Co-op strengths and limitations

The “union co-op” model imports some of Mondragon’s structural innovations to the American economy: most importantly, it gives workers a say in the direction of the business as well as in their own pay and working conditions. It remains to be seen exactly how workers’ voices will be heard through the union co-ops’ collective bargaining processes, but it will likely have some of the flavor of worker empowerment already in effect at Mondragon.

Michael Peck, the North American delegate for Mondragon, describes the type of decisions employees make within Mondragon’s worker-owner structure: “They vote to lower their salary, they vote to raise their salary, they vote to make sacrifices, they vote to reward themselves if the situation calls,” he says. “They are totally involved, and it’s that kind of participation that produces a successful company that is attuned not only to the marketplace but to itself.”

For the U.S. labor movement, this point is a critical one. A cooperative model places union members firmly in the role of being innovators. It allows the labor movement not only to promote a positive vision of members realizing their best selves in the workplace, but also to provide the skills that will enable people to do that. Therefore, while it may not rebuild labor’s ranks with significant numbers of new union members, this model might do something even more important: Give working people a way to become true stewards of the economy.

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But union co-ops don’t address some difficult issues. For instance, they do not directly address the forces of global competition that have been undermining the U.S. manufacturing base. In particular, by adopting NAFTA-model “free trade” agreements, the United States has encouraged corporations to seek out competitive advantage in places with the lowest wages and fewest environmental regulations. At best, co-ops such as the Evergreen co-ops in Cleveland work around this problem by limiting themselves to making goods or providing services that cannot be offshored, like growing heirloom salad greens for local consumption.

When asked about how the model union co-ops might take on the offshoring issue, Peck acknowledged the difficulties, but he also expressed hope. “Now there’s a renewed interest in manufacturing as labor wages rise in developing countries,” he says. Moreover, he believes the recent economic crisis has also expanded public receptivity: “Even in the outer regions of the Midwest, where I spend a lot of time, people know that they’ve been victimized,” Peck says.

“Most people don’t want to be victimized again and they are interested in trying new models.”
“At Mondragon, we have a saying: ‘This is not paradise and we are not angels.’ I think that’s important, because there’s a tendency to gush up Mondragon as this perfect ideal in the sky, when it’s not perfect and it’s not in the sky. It’s in factories. it’s in valleys, it’s in making things. But our story has a happier ending because people feel engaged in the process and they see the equality of opportunity, which is missing in more vertical structures.”

Amy Dean wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Amy is a fellow of The Century Foundation and principal of ABD Ventures, LLC, a consulting firm that works to develop new organizing strategies for social change organizations. Dean is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. You can follow her on twitter @amybdean, or she can be reached via amybdean.com.

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Actor Mark Ruffalo is a New York State resident and anti-fracking activist.

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“Governor Cuomo: Imagine There’s No Fracking,” read a billboard on the Major Deegan Expressway into Manhattan last October. One of the motorists who saw it may well have been Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been under increasing pressure from New York state residents to ban the shale gas extraction method known as “fracking.” The billboard was the first action by Yoko Ono and her son Sean Lennon’s advocacy coalition Artists Against Fracking, which boasts nearly 200 famous members ranging from Salman Rushdie to Lady Gaga.

What spurred mother and son to organize artists like themselves was the threat to their Delaware County farm that sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation geologists estimate holds trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. “I have always felt lucky,” Lennon wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times, “to live on land [my father] loved dearly.” Sean Lennon’s father was, of course, the legendary musician and former Beatle John Lennon, not the first city resident to want a rural escape.

Sean Lennon’s education about fracking began with gas companies’ pitches at a local high school in spring 2012. “[They] were trying very hard to sell us,” he wrote, “on a plan to tear through our wilderness and make room for a new pipeline: infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing. Most of the residents at the meeting, many of them organic farmers, were openly defiant. The gas companies didn’t seem to care.” Lennon did his homework, and is now a well-informed opponent of fracking—like actors Mark Ruffalo, Debra Winger, Melissa Leo, and other public personalities who have lent star power to this critical environmental issue for the Empire State.

State writes its own guidelines

Concerns about the environmental and public health effects of high-volume horizontal gas drilling have kept a moratorium on fracking in New York since 2008. That’s the year the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), under then-Governor David Paterson, began to update permitting guidelines for this new technology through its Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement. In 2012, physicians, scientists, and medical groups appealed to Cuomo to do a comprehensive health impact assessment of fracking. Instead, the DEC commissioner asked the state health commissioner and a trio of out-of-state experts for advice. As of December 2012, their analysis of DEC guidelines was still under review.

Sandra Steingraber is an environmental biologist and well-known author who has written extensively on the health risks of toxic industrial practices. She’s a New York resident who has become a prominent opponent of fracking. When the DEC rejected the call for a health impact assessment and released its revised regulations for public comment, Steingraber urged opponents to flood the DEC with comments, demonstrate in Albany during Governor Cuomo’s annual State of the State address in January, and spread the word. “This is our moment,” she said, “to tell Governor Cuomo to lead the way to a renewable energy future.”

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A visit to Dimock

Like most successful actors, Mark Ruffalo could plant his family anywhere, but he fell in love with Sullivan County’s trout-rich streams and hemlock forests; they reminded him of Wisconsin, where he grew up. At first Ruffalo was enthusiastic about the gas extraction rumors he heard in Callicoon. But that changed in June 2010 when he visited Dimock, Pa., just across the state border. He made that trip with environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr. at the invitation of Ramsay Adams, founder and executive director of Catskill Mountainkeeper, a regional conservation group.

Adams introduced Kennedy and Ruffalo to Dimock residents who felt conned and sickened. “We inspected contaminated wells and heard residents’ complaints of feeling abandoned by companies leasing their land and by their elected officials,” recalls Ruffalo of his Dimock trip. “In fact, they were looking to Kennedy and me to save them.” By the end of that visit, Ruffalo’s view of fracking had done a 180-degree turn. “I think what you’re doing is terrific,” Ruffalo told Adams. “Let me know how I can help.”

To many of Mark Ruffalo’s neighbors in Callicoon, an offer of $5,000 an acre from the gas industry and the promise of future royalties is tempting. In fact, hundreds of homeowners in Sullivan and adjacent counties have already signed leases and confidentiality agreements. But not Adam Diehl and his family, who have committed to keeping their dairy farm going for the next generation. “We depend on good water,” explains Diehl, “for our cows, our crops, and our own health. Once you mess up your groundwater, you can’t fix it.” Asked about Ruffalo’s anti-fracking advocacy, he says, “Our little voices don’t carry very far. It’s good we have people like him.”

Fracking is exempt from the regulations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the risk of groundwater contamination is one of many reasons singer/ songwriter Natalie Merchant joined the opposition. “I met families from Dimock who had been victimized by Cabot Oil & Gas,” says the Stone Ridge, N.Y., resident. “It broke my heart to hear about their three-and-a-half-year struggle to get replacement water and compensation.”

“I am terrified what will happen to this state,” adds Merchant, “the state I was born in and have lived in for almost 50 years, if hydraulic fracturing begins here. It’s a Pandora’s box we don’t want to open.” The need to send Governor Cuomo a powerful message prompted Merchant to rally her musician and actor friends for a protest and concert at the state capital in Albany last May. “I’d never asked favors from anyone, but I spent three weeks on my knees, begging. Those entertainers who couldn’t participate—like David Byrne and Paul Simon—donated the rights to their songs.”

The result was a powerful call to ban fracking from a powerfully talented group—actors Ruffalo and Melissa Leo, scientist Steingraber, musicians John Sebastian, Joan Osborne, Dan Zanes, The Felice Brothers, Medeski Martin & Wood, Citizen Cope, and Toshi Reagon. Merchant’s collaborator and partner, Jon Bowermaster, directed the events, which were filmed by Alex Gibney. Dear Governor Cuomo documents a remarkable concert that ends with a directive for its audience: Call the governor!

“All those who participated in the concert are New Yorkers, as I am,” says Bowermaster, who is currently screening the film all over the state. “Natalie and I have people asking us what to
tell their neighbors who are considering leasing their lands, how to present the facts landmen [salesmen for oil and gas companies] won’t tell them. We send them a DVD of our film.” He’s encouraged by how New Yorkers have responded. “Typically New York’s Department of Conservation receives about 1,000 letters in response to a proposal; during the public comment period that ended January 11, it received over 200,000 letters plus tweets, Facebook comments, and emails.”

Actress Debra Winger, an executive producer of Gasland, has lived in Sullivan County for 22 years: “As soon as we can move on from this death grip that the oil and gas industry has on us ... we will be able to start putting our minds on a healthy, prosperous future without fossil fuel.” Photo by Lori van Buren for The Times Union.

Fracking on film

Increasingly, this fracking fight is being played out on the big screen, but it started with a very modest 2010 film called Gasland. Josh Fox’s family in Milanville, Pa., was weighing their options after being offered a gas extraction lease. Video camera in hand, Fox traveled to western states where the shale gas boom was underway and spoke with homeowners there. Gasland is the result, a home movie that became a media “blowout” (slang for a gas explosion) for the oil and gas industry.

Fox showed early footage of the film to actress Debra Winger, who has lived in Sullivan County for 22 years and raised her three sons there. She signed on as an executive producer and has become as outspoken as Ruffalo about protecting her family home and way of life. ”I know people see the economic benefits [of fracking] as a panacea, and they feel that my opinion is compromised by my success in the world,” said Winger. “But the public health problems that have plagued this practice make it impossible for me to see it as the answer to our county’s or our state’s woes. As soon as we can move on from this death grip that the oil and gas industry has on us ... we will be able to start putting our minds on a healthy, prosperous future without fossil fuel.”

Working to promote the economic benefits of shale gas drilling in a state where farmers and small business owners are struggling to survive, supporters of the energy industry dismiss celebrity activists as meddlers or outsiders. New York Senate Deputy Majority Leader Tom Libous, for example, was cheered at a rally in Albany on October 16, 2012, when he attacked them. “Stay in Hollywood,” he said. “We don’t want to hear it here.”

The rally was organized and paid for by Landowner Advocates of New York, a front group tied to the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Libous already knows how lucrative a gas industry alliance can be: $190,700 of the contributions to his 2012 re-election came from fracking-related sources, according to Common Cause.

“Big Names Aren’t Helping Our Small Towns” was the banner headline of an ad campaign by the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York last August. At rallies to encourage Cuomo to lift the fracking moratorium, the group passed out postcards of Ruffalo, Winger, and Fox with the message: “Reading from a script doesn’t make you a scientist or geologist.”

Frack Action’s John Armstrong looks at it another way: “These celebrities are our neighbors; they have every right to take a stand on this issue.”

Dr. Kathleen Nolan with Catskill Mountainkeeper argues that recruiting celebrity activists is justified. “The energy industry has had opportunities again and again to roll out its agenda for New York state,” says Nolan. “We are simply asking for equal time to present the case against fracking, and it’s important for those who have a media presence to lend their support. ... When you’re fighting Goliath, you want David to have as much ammunition as possible.”

Some of that ammunition comes in the form of the $15-million feature film Promised Land, based on a story by Dave Eggers, directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Matt Damon, John Krasinski, Frances McDormand, and Hal Holbrook. In Promised Land, Damon plays an energy company salesman who comes to question his role promoting hydraulic fracking to farmers in a small Pennsylvania town. Producer Chris Moore says one of the movie’s themes is self-government: “We have a right as a community— whatever the community is, whether it’s a group of neighbors, whether it’s a town, whether it’s a county, whether it’s a state, whether it’s a city, whether it’s
a country—we have the right to decide what we’re going to do. And that is a right that only has value if we exercise it. If we actually do it.”

Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant and based on a story by Dave Eggers, stars Matt Damon, John Krasinski, Frances McDormand, and Hal Holbrook. The movie, which was filmed in Pittsburgh, highlights issues related to fracking. Photo by Scott Green.

So far 41 New York towns have used local zoning ordinances to ban fracking, fearing the scale of industrialization would destroy their communities.

Against all odds, New Yorkers continue to hold off fracking in their state. The media appeal of movie stars is helping, as are the persuasive skills of the filmmakers, musicians, and storytellers. But what drives celebrities to take part is clearly not fame or money. It’s the same motivation as that of their friends and neighbors—quality of life. The assurance that their water is safe to drink, their air safe to breathe, their soil safe to grow vegetables. That their rural community won’t become a brownfield.

A Feel-Good Movie About Fracking?
Chris Moore, who co-produced “Good Will Hunting,” has a new film starring Matt Damon as a corporate salesman trying to open up a small town to fracking. Here, YES! publisher Fran Korten gets Moore’s take on the ideas behind the film.

On January 11, the final day of the DEC’s public comment period, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon appeared at a rally at the state capital in Albany where 204,000 public comments against fracking were delivered. A decision is expected from the state by the end of February.

Will New York’s governor decide to open southern New York to fracking, continue the moratorium, or make New York the second U.S. state with a ban on horizontal drilling?

“Time is on the side of those of us who oppose fracking, because, as time goes by, it looks more and more like it’s the wrong thing to do,” says Steingraber. Filmmaker Bowermaster describes the contest in more dramatic terms. “It’s like the ultimate thriller,” he says. “No one knows how it will end.”

 

Lisa Mullenneaux wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Lisa is a journalist based in Manhattan and Woodstock, N.Y. Her books and articles are described at lisamullenneaux.com.

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Wind River Valley in Yellowstone National Park is a wildlife corridor used by bighorn sheep. Photo copyright Jill Pangman.

For black bears, Florida’s State Road 46 is one of the deadliest motorways in the United States. It winds east-west for some 50 miles, skirting Seminole State Forest, one of the state's key bear habitats. Since the year 2000, more than 100 bears have been killed each year in collisions on Florida roads like this one, and for the last two decades around 80 percent of total bear deaths in the state came as a result of such accidents.

These deaths are a tragic outcome of what conservation biologists call “fragmentation,” which occurs when a species’ habitat is cut into small pieces by human infrastructure like roads and developments. Fragmented populations are vulnerable to threats including starvation, genetic isolation, and local extinction. If a fragmented population of bears can’t follow seasonally available food, and can’t deepen their gene pool with new mates, their chances of long-term survival are slim.

Conservationists now have an unexpected set of collaborators: the employees of state and federal transportation agencies.

Luckily, bears that want to cross State Road 46 are better off today, because it now features an underpass designed specifically with their needs in mind. Passageways like this one are elements of wildlife corridors, interlinked parcels of protected land that connect fragmented habitats. They helped to hasten the removal of the black bear from Florida’s endangered species list in 2012.

For more than 20 years, wildlife corridors have been among the strategies conservationists used to make sure all sorts of animals were able to move around in search of food, mates, and territory. But today, climate change is forcing these specialists to change the way wildlife corridors are designed. As warming accelerates, animals and plants are starting to change the way they travel, generally moving north or to higher elevations in search of the cooler temperatures they’re used to.

Will our roads and buildings stand in the way of this exodus? New partnerships and tools suggest that we’re at least doing our best to make sure they don’t.

New policies make an old enemy into a friend

The first piece of good news is that conservationists are no longer working alone. Legislation has given them a new and unexpected set of collaborators: the employees of state and federal transportation agencies. These are the same people who, as designers of roads and bridges, used to be the chief agents of fragmentation. But a few key pieces of law seem to have suddenly changed that.

In 2001, federal legislation created a State Wildlife Grant, which set aside money to help protect animal species that were rare, endangered, or whose numbers were simply unknown. Four years later, the passage of the 2005 Transportation Bill required planners seeking federal funding for roads and public transportation to consult with their local wildlife agencies early in the planning process. The bill put wildlife managers in partnership with transportation workers for the first time.

Different species have different requirements, so the goal is to find the habitat where the different species’ preferences overlap.

A third piece of legislation came in 2008, with the founding of the Western Governors’ Wildlife Council. Created to coordinate conservation efforts across 19 states as well as three U.S.-administered Pacific islands, the council works to identify crucial habitats and to insure that conservation is incorporated into every type of development. The council features a special initiative on wildlife corridors that makes sure that the designs make sense across state lines.

These three projects put biologists and planners on the same team in a way that made conservation a lot easier to do.

A black bear crosses a busy road in Alberta, Canada. Photo by KegRiver.

“It's amazing that this one sentence in a thousand-page document [the Transportation Bill of 2005] changed the way [transportation planners] did business,” said Dr. Paul Beier of Northern Arizona University, one of the leading experts on wildlife corridors.

But finding accord between conservation and urban planning can be a tricky business, said Kelly McAllister, wildlife biologist at the Washington State Department of Transportation. “In Washington, finding a species with a fixed migration route is almost unheard of,” he said. “You start mapping out areas of suitable habitat across a broad landscape, looking for connectivity between heavily developed areas and agricultural areas. Before you know it, the entire state becomes suitable habitat.”

“The metaphor we like to use is ‘conserve the stage, instead of the actors.’”

The challenge, said McAllister, is giving wildlife managers sufficiently protected, well-defined tracts of land to work with. Different species have different requirements, so the goal is to find the habitat where the different species’ preferences overlap.

It’s often difficult, McAllister said, for scientists to come to an agreement with the Department of Transportation, which is the largest land developer in the state. “But we’re definitely working together on this,” he says.

Beier calls it nothing less than a transformation of the role of transportation agencies, “which until then had been the biggest agents of fragmentation.” After the 2005 Transportation Bill, “suddenly they became part of the solution.”

New tools, new challenges

Another way that conservationists have responded to the new complexity brought on by climate change is by developing and using new tools, including GIS (global information system) mapping software. With GIS-based programs, specialists can zero in on specific aspects of a topographical map by identifying desired features—such as elevation, light, and soil type—and tuning out the rest.

Out of this way of seeing comes the idea of “land facets,” which are discrete parcels of land that offer specific and relatively permanent types of habitat to wildlife. For instance, “high-elevation north-facing slopes with rocky soils” is a land facet, one favored by bighorn sheep. “Low-elevation flats with thick soils” is another, which pronghorn antelope prefer. The aim is to define wildlife corridors based on long-lasting geographical features, aspects of the landscape that aren’t liable to change with rising temperatures.

As warming accelerates, animals and plants are starting to change the way they travel. Will our roads and buildings stand in the way of this exodus?

“A hundred years from now, a stand of ponderosa pine might become a stand of juniper as things heat up,” said Jeff Jenness, a developer of the GIS-based software that conservationists and planners use to identify land facets. “But the hill under those trees will largely remain the same. By identifying land facets, we can sort of predict this change and maintain an environment that supports a number of species.”

Land facets tend to harbor predictable assemblages of species, so creating a corridor that includes different kinds of facets should provide animals with the geographic diversity they need to survive, Jenness said.

“The metaphor we like to use is ‘conserve the stage, instead of the actors,’” adds Beier. “Or, if you like sports, ‘conserve the field, instead of the players.’”

While older methods concentrated on the specific needs of so-called “focal species”—threatened or endangered species singled out for conservation—approaches based on land facets seek to support a broad swath of organisms by focusing first on the land.

As climate change raises sea levels, changes temperatures, and increases the likelihood of catastrophes like droughts and storms, some species will almost inevitably be lost. At the same time, conservation biologists are doing their best to make sure that plants and animals can find safe passage to cooler climates. With any luck, these living things will be around to join us as we adapt to a changing climate.

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This article was written for TomDispatch, where it originally appeared.

Photo by Powerhouse Museum Collection.

In 1968, the Phillip Morris Company launched a memorable campaign to sell Virginia Slims, a new brand of cigarettes targeting women, itself a new phenomenon. It had a brand-new slogan: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The company plastered it on billboards nationwide and put it in TV ads that featured women of the early twentieth century being punished for smoking. In all their advertising, smoking was equated with a set of traits meant to capture the essence of women in a new era of equality—independence, slimness, glamour, and liberation.

Yes, we’ve come a long way, but without achieving full access to legal abortion, comprehensive childcare, or equal pay.

As it happened, the only equality this campaign ended up supporting involved lung cancer. Today, women and men die at similar rates from that disease.

Still, women have come a long way since the mid-twentieth century, and it’s worth considering just how far—and just how far we have to go.

Once Upon a Time

These days it may be hard for some to believe, but before the women’s movement burst on the scene in the late 1960s, newspapers published ads for jobs on different pages, segregated by gender. Employers legally paid women less than men for the same work. Some bars refused to serve women and all banks denied married women credit or loans, a practice which didn’t change until 1974. Some states even excluded women from jury duty.

Radio producers considered women’s voices too abrasive to be on the air and television executives believed that women didn’t have sufficient credibility to anchor the news. Few women ran big corporations or universities, or worked as firefighters and police officers. None sat on the Supreme Court, installed electrical equipment, climbed telephone poles, or owned construction companies. All hurricanes had female names, due to the widely held view that women brought chaos and destruction to society.

As late as 1970, Dr. Edgar Berman, a consultant to presidents and to Medicare, proclaimed on television that women were too tortured by hormonal disturbances to assume the presidency. Few people ran into women professors, doctors, or lawyers. Everyone addressed a woman as either Miss or Mrs, depending on her marital status, and if a woman needed an abortion, legal nowhere in America, she risked her life searching among quacks in back alleys for a competent and compassionate doctor.

The public generally believed that rape victims had probably “asked for it,” most women felt too ashamed to report rape, and no language existed to make sense of what we now call domestic violence, sexual harassment, marital rape, or date rape. One simple phrase seemed to sum up the hidden injuries women suffered in silence: “That’s life.”

On August 27, 1970, in response to such injustice, 50,000 women marched down New York’s Fifth Avenue, announcing the birth of a new movement. They demanded three rights: legal abortion, universal child care, and equal pay. These were preconditions for women’s equality with men at home and in the workplace. Astonishingly, they didn’t include the ending of violence against women among their demands—though the experience and fear of male violence was widespread—because women still suffered these crimes in silence.

Those three demands, and the fourth one that couldn’t yet be articulated, have yet to be met.

The Hidden Injuries of Sex

As the women’s movement grew, women activists did, however, begin to “name” their grievances. Once named, they could be identified, debated, and—with a growing feminist political voice—turned into policy or used to change the law.

No one is shocked in 2013 when a woman enters an operating room or a lecture hall.

It turned out that there were plenty of hidden injuries, which women activists discovered and publicized through consciousness-raising groups, pamphlets, and books. Rape, once a subject of great shame, became redefined as a physical assault that had little to do with lust. Date rape, for which there was plenty of experience but no name, opened up a national conversation about what constituted consensual sex. Few people had ever heard the words “marital rape.” (“If you can’t rape your wife,” California Senator Bob Wilson allegedly said, “then who can you rape?”) In this way, a new conversation began about the right of wives to have consensual sex and the nature of power relations within marriage.

From the very beginning, the mainstream media and the public labeled women activists as “lesbians.” Why else would they complain about male behavior? Provoked by constant efforts to “tarnish” all feminists as lesbians, activists chose to embrace the label, rather than exclude lesbians from the movement. In the process, they also began to write about and then discuss compulsory heterosexuality. Together with a burgeoning men’s gay movement, feminist lesbians and gay men formed the Gay Liberation Front in the 1969. Soon, lesbian feminists created an all-women’s group called the Lavender Menace.

The birth control pill and the sexual liberation movement of the mid-1960s gave women new freedoms. Grasping the limitations of such changes without abortion being legalized, feminists soon joined the medical abortion rights campaign of that era. Determined to repeal laws against abortion, in New York they testified before the state legislature and passed out copies of a “model abortion bill”: a blank piece of paper. Through “public speak-outs,” they openly discussed their own illegal abortions and explained why they had made such choices. In Chicago and San Francisco, activists created clandestine organizations to help women seek qualified doctors. Some feminists even learned how to perform abortions for those who could not find a competent doctor.

Then, in 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its famous Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion and ignited the abortion wars that still rage today. You could even say that this is where the culture wars of the coming decades really began, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

What had feminists started? In essence, they had begun to redefine one “custom” after another as crimes. For instance, one of the greatest hidden injuries suffered by women in those years was the predatory sexual behavior of male bosses. In 1975, a group of women at Cornell University coined the term sexual harassment. Previously, some women had called it “sexual blackmail,” but when legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon used the new phrase in the title of her 1979 book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women, both feminists and judges began using it in litigation against predatory bosses. After Anita Hill’s accusations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991, the phrase became a household term. In that same year, Congress added amendments to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, accepting the feminist argument that sexual harassment violated a woman’s right to earn a living and work in a non-hostile atmosphere.

If the naming of sexual harassment changed the workplace, the reframing of wife-beating as domestic violence turned a custom into a felonious crime. At the same time, feminists spread a network of battered women’s shelters across the nation, offering havens from marital violence and possible death.

A Half-Century to Go

If the women’s movement often surprised and sometimes blindsided men, it also radically expanded America’s democratic promise of equality. Women are now everywhere. No one is shocked in 2013 when a woman enters an operating room or a lecture hall. More than half the undergraduates at most universities are women.

Hurricanes now bear both male and female names.

Now, if your boss drives you crazy with sexual advances, you can report him for sexual harassment and sue him in court. If your husband beats you, he can be charged with a felony and, in most urban areas, you can escape to a battered women’s shelter. Women like Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo!, and Ruchi Sanghvi, head of operations at Dropbox, are some of the most powerful players in the new technology universe. Three women have served as secretary of state and one as national security advisor. Three women sit on the Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton almost became the first woman president and may still achieve that goal. Major magazines and newspapers have women executive editors and managing editors—even The New York Times, which waited until 1986 before reluctantly putting "Ms" in front of women’s names on its pages. Hurricanes now bear male and female names. Women in the U.S. military fight alongside men. They work as firefighters and police detectives, and when a female plumber shows up to fix an overflowing toilet, most people don’t panic.

Because so much has changed, many people, including young women, believe that the longest revolution is over, that we should stop complaining, be proud of our successes, and go home. Consider for a moment, though, the three demands made in 1970, and the fourth one that couldn’t even be articulated.

As anyone who’s been awake for the last decade knows, despite Roe v. Wade, women can’t access abortion providers in many parts of the country. States have passed laws requiring pregnant women to watch ultrasound “pictures” of their “babies,” and forced them to endure 24- or 48-hour waiting periods so that they can “rethink” their abortion decisions. In May 2012, Utah established the longest waiting period in the nation: 72 hours. In that year, in fact, anti-abortion legislatures managed to pass 43 new laws that, in one way or another, restricted abortion.

This isn’t about glass ceilings. What concerns me are all the women glued to the sticky floor of dead-end jobs that provide no benefits and no health insurance.

In big cities, finding an abortion provider is often not difficult—unless of course you are poor (because the government won’t pay for abortions). Women in rural areas have, however, been hit particularly hard. They have to travel long distances, pay to stay in hotels while they “rethink,” and then, and only then, can they make the choice that was promised in 1973. So yes, women still have the right to legal abortion, but less and less access to abortion providers.

And what about child care? In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Childcare Act (CCA), providing national day care to women who needed it. (Such a law wouldn’t have a chance today.) President Richard Nixon vetoed it that December. Using Cold War rhetoric, he argued that the legislation would harm the family and turn American women into their Soviet counterparts—that is, working drudges. His veto was also payback to his religious supporters in the South who opposed women working outside the home, and so using child care. It set childcare legislation back until, well, this very moment.

Ask any young working mother about the nightmare of finding day care for her infant or a space in a preschool for her child. Child care, as feminists recognized, was a major precondition for women entering the labor force on an equal footing with men. Instead of comprehensive child care, however, this country chose the more acceptable American way of dealing with problems, namely, that everyone find an individual solution. If you’re wealthy, you pay for a live-in nanny. If you’re middle class, you hire someone to arrive every day, ready to take care of your young children. Or you luck out and find a place in a good preschool—or a not-so-good one.

As an activist and historian, I’m still shocked that women activists (myself included) didn’t add violence against women to those three demands back in 1970.

If you’re poor, you rely on a series of exhausted and generous grandparents, unemployed husbands, over-worked sisters, and goodhearted neighbors. Unlike every nation in Europe, we have no guaranteed preschool or after-school childcare, despite our endless political platitudes about how much we cherish our children. And sadly, childcare has remained off the national political agenda since 1971. It was never even mentioned during the 2012 presidential debates.

And let’s not forget women’s wages. In 1970, women earned, on average, 59 percent of men’s wages. More than four decades later, the figure is 77 percent. When a university recently invited me to give a keynote address at a conference, they asked what fee I expected. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. The best advice I got—from my husband—was: “Just tell them to give you 77 percent of whatever they’re paying the male keynote speaker.” That response resulted in a generous honorarium.

But what about all the women—widowed, divorced, or single—who can’t draw on a second income from a man? How can we claim we’ve reached the 1970 equal pay demand when 70 percent of the nation’s poor are women and children? This isn’t about glass ceilings. What concerns me are all the women glued to the sticky floor of dead-end jobs that provide no benefits and no health insurance, women who, at the end of each month, have to decide whether to pay the electricity bill or feed their children.

As an activist and historian, I’m still shocked that women activists (myself included) didn’t add violence against women to those three demands back in 1970. Fear of male violence was such a normal part of our lives that it didn’t occur to us to highlight it—not until feminists began, during the 1970s, to publicize the wife-beating that took place behind closed doors and to reveal how many women were raped by strangers, the men they dated, or even their husbands.

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Nor did we see how any laws could end it. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in a powerful essay recently, one in five women will be raped during her lifetime and gang rape is pandemic around the world. There are now laws against rape and violence toward women. There is even a U.N. international resolution on the subject. In 1993, the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna declared that violence against girls and women violated their human rights. After much debate, member nations ratified the resolution and dared to begin calling supposedly time-honored “customs”—wife beating, honor killings, dowry deaths, genital mutilation—what they really are: brutal and gruesome crimes. Now, the nations of the world had a new moral compass for judging one another’s cultures. In this instance, the demands made by global feminists trumped cultural relativism, at least when it involved violence against women.

Still, little enough has changed. Such violence continues to keep women from walking in public spaces. Rape, as feminists have always argued, is a form of social control, meant to make women invisible and shut them in their homes, out of public sight. That’s why activists created “take back the night” protests in the late 1970s. They sought to reclaim the right to public space without fear of rape.

The daytime brutal rape and killing of a 23-year-old in India last December prompted the first international protest around violence against women. Maybe that will raise the consciousness of some men. But it’s hard to feel optimistic when you realize how many rapes are still regularly being committed globally.

So, yes, we’ve come a long way, but without achieving full access to legal abortion, comprehensive childcare, or equal pay—those three demands from so many decades ago. Nor have we won the right to enjoy public space without fearing violence, rape, or worse.

I always knew this was the longest revolution, one that would take a century or more to unfold. It’s upended most of our lives, and significantly improved so many of them. Nothing will ever be the same. Yet there’s still such a long way to go. I doubt I’ll see full gender equality in my lifetime.

Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California at Davis and a Scholar in Residence at U.C. Berkeley. She is the author, most recently, of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. She is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine and is a monthly contributor to OpenDemocracy.net in England. Her op-eds, commentary and articles can be found on the website www.ruthrosen.org.

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Spc. Monte Walker, a dental lab technician, trims a dental model. Photo by Herald Post.

The sequester, a set of massive budget cuts required by the ongoing debt ceiling deal, will slash billions from Medicare, education, and other programs that benefit our society’s neediest if it goes through. That's bad news if you care about those people. But there's also something to like about it: the largest share of the cuts would come from the military.

What would it look like if we created a national program to train laid-off employees of the military for work in other industries?

Many of us have been calling for such cuts for decades, and we should celebrate the possibility of finally getting what we’ve been asking for—even if it comes as the result of Republican demands for austerity. But we should also stand with those who will lose their jobs as a result of defense-budget cuts.

One of the best ways to do that is to demand that those who are laid off receive training that prepares them for future employment. What would it look like if we created a national program to train laid-off employees of the military and its contractors for work in other industries? Such a project would require us do more than offer vague promises about a comeback in Detroit, and offer a plan based around an industry that’s truly positioned to grow.

The good news is many who work for the military and its contractors have advanced technical skills. By transitioning them into another kind of work, we could stake out a place for ourselves in areas where we’re falling behind, like sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and public transportation.

What's more, we could also avoid some of pitfalls of the past.

How deindustrialization helped create modern poverty

History shows that, without effective retraining, workers often remain unemployed or underemployed for a long time when their sectors take a hit.

Sometimes the effects of layoffs are felt for generations, as in the case of deindustrialization. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the number of employees in manufacturing rose steadily, bringing union jobs and middle-class prosperity to places like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. Unlike jobs in most other sectors, these positions were open to workers diverse in race, education, and class. One in four African-Americans had a manufacturing job in 1979. By 2008, that number was down to one in 10, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research .

1979 was also the year with the most manufacturing jobs overall: about 23 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number has declined ever since, dropping to about 14 million in 2012. The decline starts much earlier, however, if you look at manufacturing jobs as a percentage of total employment, in which case the peak came in 1953. Again, it’s downhill after that—although recent growth among smaller manufacturers is a bright spot.

The roughly 9 million jobs lost in this sector played a major role in the creation of modern poverty. Sociologist William Julius Wilson has written that deindustrialization was a key factor in the impoverishment of blacks in northern cities. The National Coalition for the Homeless lists among the leading causes of homelessness “eroding work opportunities,” such as deindustrialization. Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, who worked for decades among drug dealers and heroin addicts on the streets of San Francisco and New York City, has described the trade in illegal drugs as a sort of DIY employment program for deindustrialization’s urban victims.

What could a smoother transition look like?

Perhaps we could have spared ourselves some of this suffering if our government—which actively encouraged deindustrialization through its so-called “free trade” policies—had taken steps to help manufacturing workers get into other kinds of work, such as the building and repairing of infrastructure, or the creation of public transportation.

Let’s not pretend that people laid off from the military will easily transition into other kinds of employment without  help.

Any sector of the economy that had a need for medium-skilled workers and was predicted to grow instead of shrink could have been considered. Perhaps, in the course of seeking projects big enough to provide so many jobs, the political will could have been found for long-needed projects such as a high-speed passenger train system.

The benefit to the economy and happiness of our society could have been significant. Millions of families would have spared the trauma and disruption of unemployment. Whole cities and regions could have been spared at least a portion of their long decline. Without a class of semi-permanent unemployed people concentrated in cities, many of our most serious social problems—including homelessness, addiction, and the enormous prison population—would likely be less severe.

This history doesn’t mean we should call any less strongly for cuts to the military budget. As Miriam Pemberton of Foreign Policy in Focus has pointed out, using very conservative numbers, we spend as much on defense as the next 14 countries put together. This benefits weapons manufacturers, takes money away from education and health care, and often results in innocent people being hurt and killed.

We’d all be better off if we could begin transitioning a portion of those who depend on the military for their income into fields like renewable energy, public transportation, and education, where we desperately need to make strides.

On the other hand, let’s not pretend that people laid off from the military will easily transition into other kinds of employment without help. There are a number of fields that must grow as climate change continues to accelerate. With proper training, former employees of the military and its contractors could have their choice of work, in fields that would make the country more prosperous, peaceful, and competitive.

What we need to do now is open the door and invite them in.

James Trimarco is web editor at YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Follow him on Twitter at @JamesTrimarco.

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Spc. Monte Walker, a dental lab technician, trims a dental model. Photo by Herald Post.

The sequester, a set of massive budget cuts required by the ongoing debt ceiling deal, will slash billions from Medicare, education, and other programs that benefit our society’s neediest if it goes through. That's bad news if you care about those people. But there's also something to like about it: the largest share of the cuts would come from the military.

What would it look like if we created a national program to train laid-off employees of the military for work in other industries?

Many of us have been calling for such cuts for decades, and we should celebrate the possibility of finally getting what we’ve been asking for—even if it comes as the result of Republican demands for austerity. But we should also stand with those who will lose their jobs as a result of defense-budget cuts.

One of the best ways to do that is to demand that those who are laid off receive training that prepares them for future employment. What would it look like if we created a national program to train laid-off employees of the military and its contractors for work in other industries? Such a project would require us do more than offer vague promises about a comeback in Detroit, and offer a plan based around an industry that’s truly positioned to grow.

The good news is many who work for the military and its contractors have advanced technical skills. By transitioning them into another kind of work, we could stake out a place for ourselves in areas where we’re falling behind, like sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and public transportation.

What's more, we could also avoid some of pitfalls of the past.

How deindustrialization helped create modern poverty

History shows that, without effective retraining, workers often remain unemployed or underemployed for a long time when their sectors take a hit.

Sometimes the effects of layoffs are felt for generations, as in the case of deindustrialization. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the number of employees in manufacturing rose steadily, bringing union jobs and middle-class prosperity to places like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. Unlike jobs in most other sectors, these positions were open to workers diverse in race, education, and class. One in four African-Americans had a manufacturing job in 1979. By 2008, that number was down to one in 10, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research .

1979 was also the year with the most manufacturing jobs overall: about 23 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number has declined ever since, dropping to about 14 million in 2012. The decline starts much earlier, however, if you look at manufacturing jobs as a percentage of total employment, in which case the peak came in 1953. Again, it’s downhill after that—although recent growth among smaller manufacturers is a bright spot.

The roughly 9 million jobs lost in this sector played a major role in the creation of modern poverty. Sociologist William Julius Wilson has written that deindustrialization was a key factor in the impoverishment of blacks in northern cities. The National Coalition for the Homeless lists among the leading causes of homelessness “eroding work opportunities,” such as deindustrialization. Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, who worked for decades among drug dealers and heroin addicts on the streets of San Francisco and New York City, has described the trade in illegal drugs as a sort of DIY employment program for deindustrialization’s urban victims.

What could a smoother transition look like?

Perhaps we could have spared ourselves some of this suffering if our government—which actively encouraged deindustrialization through its so-called “free trade” policies—had taken steps to help manufacturing workers get into other kinds of work, such as the building and repairing of infrastructure, or the creation of public transportation.

Let’s not pretend that people laid off from the military will easily transition into other kinds of employment without  help.

Any sector of the economy that had a need for medium-skilled workers and was predicted to grow instead of shrink could have been considered. Perhaps, in the course of seeking projects big enough to provide so many jobs, the political will could have been found for long-needed projects such as a high-speed passenger train system.

The benefit to the economy and happiness of our society could have been significant. Millions of families would have spared the trauma and disruption of unemployment. Whole cities and regions could have been spared at least a portion of their long decline. Without a class of semi-permanent unemployed people concentrated in cities, many of our most serious social problems—including homelessness, addiction, and the enormous prison population—would likely be less severe.

This history doesn’t mean we should call any less strongly for cuts to the military budget. As Miriam Pemberton of Foreign Policy in Focus has pointed out, using very conservative numbers, we spend as much on defense as the next 14 countries put together. This benefits weapons manufacturers, takes money away from education and health care, and often results in innocent people being hurt and killed.

We’d all be better off if we could begin transitioning a portion of those who depend on the military for their income into fields like renewable energy, public transportation, and education, where we desperately need to make strides.

On the other hand, let’s not pretend that people laid off from the military will easily transition into other kinds of employment without help. There are a number of fields that must grow as climate change continues to accelerate. With proper training, former employees of the military and its contractors could have their choice of work, in fields that would make the country more prosperous, peaceful, and competitive.

What we need to do now is open the door and invite them in.

James Trimarco is web editor at YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Follow him on Twitter at @JamesTrimarco.

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The YES! National Student Writing Competition is an opportunity for middle school through university students to write for a real audience—not just you, the teacher—and the chance to be published by an award-winning magazine.

Each quarter, students are invited to read and write an essay on a selected YES! Magazine article. We divide contestants into four categories: middle school, high school, university, and Powerful Voice (for authors whose essays are powerful and passionate). Winning essays in each category are published on the YES! Magazine website and in our online education newsletter.

Read recent featured essays here.

 

Spring 2013 National Student Writing Competition:

Photo by Roman Gridin for Wikimedia Commons

This spring, students will read and respond to the YES! article, “A Month Without Monsanto,” by April Dávila. April's story is about the confidence she developed from knowing what she is eating. After April learned of the possible health effects related to eating genetically modified corn from Monsanto, she had an insatiable need to know more. She wondered where exactly Monsanto corn existed in her family's diet, and where her food came from. Genetically modified organisms, commonly referred to as “GMOs,” are organisms in which the genetic material or DNA has been altered in a way that doesn't occur naturally.

 

Prompt: Your students should write an essay of up to 700 words answering the questions: April Davila discovered that around 70 percent of processed foods on American supermarket shelves contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Does this concern you? What matters most to you about the food you eat?

The deadline for registration is April 27. Essays must be submitted no later than May 18, 2013.

 

How does it work?

• Complete the competition registration form (see link at bottom of page)
• Students read and respond to the YES! article in up to 700 words.
• Submit up to three essays per class period, along with student release forms.

• For each of the following categories, YES! staff (and possibly the author of the article) will select one essay that we feel is well-written, compelling, and captures the spirit of the article:
• Grades 6-8
• Grades 9-12
• College/university
• Powerful Voice (for an author whose essay is uniquely powerful or thought-provoking)
  

• The selected essays will be featured on the YES! Magazine website and in our online education newsletter, reaching thousands of YES! readers, including over 26,000 teachers.
• Teachers who submit essays will be entered into a drawing to win a complete set of 23 YES! posters for their classroom, valued at $66.  See what you could win here!

 

Common Core State Standards:

This writing competition meets several Common Core State Standards for grades 6-12, including W.9-10.3 and W.9-10.4 for Writing, and RI.9-10.1 and RI.9-10.2 for Reading: Informational Text *

*This standard applies to other grade levels. “9-10” is used as an example.

 

Who is eligible?

• You must be a classroom teacher—homeschool cooperatives and resource centers included—for your students to participate.

• Student writers should be in grades 6-8, grades 9-12, college/university, or adult continuing education, and should reside in the United States.

What are the essay requirements?

• Respond to the article and writing prompt provided by YES!
• Provide an original essay title
• Reference the article
• No more than 700 words
• Must be original, unpublished work
• Teachers must read and submit their students' essays. Remember, the limit is three essays per class period! Please take time to read your students' essays to ensure they have met essay requirements, including correct grammar. Unfortunately, we cannot accept essays sent independently by students.

In addition, we are evaluating essays for:

• Grammar
• Organization
• Strong style and personal voice. We encourage writers to include personal examples and insights.
• Originality and clarity of content and ideas
  
  

How do I submit the three best essays from my class?

• You must be registered for the competition by April 27, 2013.
• E-mail your three best student essays as word-processed document attachments (preferably Word and nor as a pdf or scanned document, please) to writingcompetition@yesmagazine.org no later than May 18, 2013.
• Include a scanned, completed student release form with each submitted essay.

 

Questions? Please email writingcompetition@yesmagazine.org, and thank you for joining us!

 

Get Started Here:

Registration Form

Student Release Form

Evaluation Rubric

Photo by Adarsh Upadhyay.

With traditional governance in Washington grinding to a halt and with election campaigns often shutting out alternative perspectives, a growing number of Americans resent the constraints of our dominant two-choice, two-party voting system. It contributes directly to political gamesmanship inside the Beltway, reinforces the power of political insiders and restricts the impact of independent candidates and voters because voters are discouraged from backing their preferred candidates when not seen as “viable.”

So where can we turn for answers? Surprisingly, part of the answer lies in Hollywood.

Starting with the 2009 Best Picture, the Academy of Motion Pictures and the Producers Guild of America have been using a better voting method: ranked choice voting (RCV, which is also called “instant runoff voting” and “preferential voting”). It builds on the choice voting rules used since the1930s to choose nominees in nearly all categories. As a result, nearly all Academy voters help play a role in selecting the winners.

In 2009, the Academy decided to nominate more than the typical five movies for Best Picture. But with up to ten movies on the final ballot, it wanted to make sure the final winner was representative of majority opinion among Academy voters: with a simple plurality vote, a less popular movie could win with as little as 12 percent support.

Enter ranked choice voting. You can see how RCV works in FairVote Minnesota’s short video (below) that explains how the system works with a true “change” election. (It’s a nifty educational tool for the use of RCV in the mayoral elections in Minneapolis and St. Paul this fall.)

Here's how it works:

In the Best Picture election, Academy voters didn’t vote for just one movie. They gained the power to rank the nine nominated movies from their favorite to least favorite in order of preference, from one to nine. Those rankings were tallied according to an “American Idol” kind of algorithm. Every voter had one vote, and their ballot never counted for more than one movie at a time. But their rankings allowed them to help elect a backup choice if their first choice couldn’t win.

With a field of nine strong movies that all had strong advocates, Argo almost certainly was not the first choice of more than half the voters. As a result, lower rankings were used in a series of “instant runoffs.”

A movie will need to do well enough in first choices to stay in the running, but also keep building support as weaker movies are eliminated.

In each round of counting, the movie with the fewest votes was eliminated, and that movie’s backers had their votes added to the totals of their next ranked choice. These instant runoffs continued until Argo won with a majority of the vote against the remaining movies. You can see how it might have gone with this round-by-round example from The Washington Post, which created a fun online tool allowing you to rank the movies, then showed the results.

RCV ensures that the Best Picture Oscar won’t go to a movie that might lead in first choices, but which most voters see as undeserving. Instead, a movie will need to do well enough in first choices to stay in the running, but also keep building support as weaker movies are eliminated. The winning movie will be more likely to be the consensus choice.

What Oscar Can Teach Us About Choosing Leaders

Oscar elections are headline-grabbing, but what’s even more exciting is the prospect of similar changes in the way we choose our elected leaders. There, RCV can have a truly transformational impact, upholding majority rule and encouraging fair consideration of third parties by addressing the spoiler problem (famously illustrated by Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, which helped tip the race away from Al Gore).

RCV has been used to elect Australia’s house of representatives for nearly a century.

RCV is still a winner-take-all voting system. As a result, it doesn’t represent political minorities as a fair voting system of proportional representation (for that reform, see our fair voting plans). But RCV allows longshot candidates to make their case—and to demonstrate their real levels of support—without results being skewed by fears of spoiling elections.

RCV is a proven system, and has been used to elect Australia’s House of Representatives for nearly a century. In 2007, Australian House races had an average of seven candidates, including small parties like the Greens running in every district. With RCV, no one complained about “spoilers.” Instead, the Greens have increased their vote, gaining more influence in the electoral process, and with fair voting rules for the Senate, turning that increased vote share into seats.

60 colleges and universities now elect student leaders with RCV.

Here in the United States, cities electing mayors with RCV include St. Paul and Minneapolis in Minnesota; Oakland, San Francisco, and two other California cities; Maine’s largest city, Portland; and a few other cities in Maryland, North Carolina, and Colorado. Voters in Memphis, Sarasota, and Santa Fe have approved it on the ballot and are awaiting implementation. Some 60 colleges and universities now elect student leaders with RCV, as do many large associations like the American Political Science Association.

It’s only a matter of time before we see a statewide win for RCV.  One particularly strong state effort is in Maine, where eight of the past ten gubernatorial races were won with less than half the vote. With Democrats finishing third in the 2010 governor’s race and 2012 Senate race, a major party is getting a taste of the“ spoiler” epithet so often hurled at minor parties. New legislation to adopt RCV for governor and other state offices is backed by dozens of state legislators from across the spectrum.

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Such advances will help us get over perhaps the biggest hurdle faced by advocates: current voting machines not making it easy to implement RCV. Fortunately, the newest paper-based systems are starting to add readiness to use RCV as an option. Once that’s the norm, jurisdictions can debate RCV without uncertainty about how to implement it.

Of course, RCV is not the only election reform that’s necessary; other ideas for fairer elections are also generating energy and excitement. Efforts to overturn Citizens United have breathed new life into campaign finance reform drives, the filibuster rule in the Senate looks increasingly vulnerable, universal voter registration is gaining growing support, and the National Popular Vote plan for president continues its state-by-state progress toward effectively sidelining the Electoral College.

Change breeds change, and we believe the 2010s promise to be a decade of reform. In this case, Hollywood is setting an example we all can follow.

Rob Richie wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Rob is the executive director of FairVote, a nonprofit organization that researches and advocates election reforms that increase voter turnout, accountable governance, and fair representation.

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Behind the Kitchen Door by Saru Jayaraman.

You are celebrating your birthday at your favorite restaurant and you’ve just ordered a tasty, locally grown organic meal.  You savor the food, while feeling good that you are contributing to a better world.  What could be better?

Well, for starters: the conditions of the people serving and busing your table.

Most don’t make a living wage.  Indeed, most of your servers work for the same minimum wage they’ve gotten for 22 years: $2.13 an hour.  That’s right: no increase for a generation.  Therefore, most workers have no choice but to work if they’re sick because nine out of ten don’t receive paid sick leave.  Yes, if you are reading this now because you’re sick at home, you may well have caught your disease from a sick restaurant employee who had no choice but to work.

There is a new chilling-yet-ultimately-hopeful book that tells the story of the millions who toil to serve us in restaurants: Behind the Kitchen Door.   It is hopeful because its dynamo author, Saru Jayaraman, and dozens of courageous restaurant workers created a group that is fighting for their rights: the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC).

The book opens on September 11, 2001, when 73 workers were killed as the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center crashed to earth. Another 250 men and women who were employed by Windows on the World were suddenly without jobs.

ROC was birthed by Saru and several of the former Windows workers.  ROC’s other co-director, Fekkak Mamdouh, is a former waiter with a sparkle in his eye.  Fekkah was a union leader of the Windows workers. The Windows owner promised his former workers who survived 9-11 that he would hire them back, but failed to do so when he opened a new restaurant uptown.  After a creative protest by the former workers, the owner recanted and offered most of the Windows workers jobs.  A New York Times story gave publicity to the victory and countless other restaurant workers came calling at ROC’s door for help.

The demand for ROC’s services is almost endless since there are more than 10 million restaurant workers in the United States, and since this work embraces 7 of the 11 poorest paid job categories in the nation.  So with help from allies, workers began to organize to help one another.  Within a few years, ROC was spreading to other cities.  Today, there are 26 chapters in 23 states, with over 10,000 members.

Their goals are eminently winnable: increase the minimum wage overall, and increase the  minimum wage for workers who get tips.  President Obama finally endorsed an increase in the minimum wage in his State of the Union address.  Two great champions of workers’ rights, Congressman George Miller and Senator Tom Harkin, followed suit with a joint effort to raise the minimum wage to $10.10/hour, up from its current level of $7.25.  The Miller and Harkin bill would raise the tipped workers’ minimum wage to 70 percent of the overall minimum wage. In a separate bill, Congresswoman Donna Edwards, herself a former restaurant worker, has introduced a WAGES Act that would raise the minimum tipped wage.

ROC is also pressing for restaurants to grant their workers paid sick leave.  Indeed, ROC has helped win legislation for paid sick leave in several cities. They’re working against wage theft and sexual harassment on the job—both all too common in this sector. ROC is also in the middle of the fight for comprehensive immigration reform that has a real chance of being passed into law by the U.S. Congress this year.

Restaurant workers in the United States are part of a much larger chain of tens of millions of workers across the globe who plant, harvest, process, cook, and serve the food that we eat.  But most of the workers along this chain are invisible to us, the final consumers.

The invisible people start with those who grow and pick the fruits and vegetables on typically large farms.  Groups like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee have won contracts in Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina for workers harvesting cucumbers and tomatoes.  Unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers work to bring justice to the meat and other processing plants.

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Up and down the food chain, the Slow Food movement has advanced notions of “just food” and admonishes eaters to “vote with their forks” in helping advance healthy food and just work conditions. ROC also works with restaurants like Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., that are embracing higher wages and paid sick leave, and ROC regularly updates a diners’ guide to help us all make smart choices on where we eat, and how we can help their struggle.  It even gives tips on what to say to restaurant managers as you leave a particularly nice meal. ROC also encourages you to visit The Welcome Table for more creative ideas on how you can help.

Beyond the food chain, ROC is part of a larger United Workers Congress that is linking their fight to groups like Jobs with Justice and the National Domestic Workers Alliance that are working with nannies, caregivers, taxi drivers, and others who are denied basic worker rights.

We owe Saru and Fekkah and ROC members a debt of gratitude for opening the kitchen door for the rest of us, and giving us an opportunity to build solidarity with those who make our lives more joyful.

John Cavanagh and Robin Broad wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

Robin is a Professor of International Development at American University in Washington, D.C. and has worked as an international economist in the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Congress. John is director of the Institute for Policy Studies, and is co-chair (with David Korten) of the New Economy Working Group. They are co-authors of three books and numerous articles on the global economy, and have been traveling the country and the world for their project Local Dreams: Finding Rootedness in the Age of Vulnerability.

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"In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice. Edited by Lewis V. Baldwin and published by Beacon Press.

In the statement, “Racism and the World House,” Martin Luther King, Jr. provided perhaps his most sophisticated analysis of racism as a global phenomenon, with a special focus on both its tragic impact on people of color and its threat to human welfare and survival as a whole. King’s essential point was that “the world house” at its best could never be sustained on a foundation of personal and institutionalized racism. His image of “the world house” provides a model for new kinds of reflection around issues of race even today.

The world in which King lived and traveled embodied many of the same problems that exist today in the area of race relations. Most disturbing are the lingering, antiquated ideas about race and ethnicity, and the personal and institutionalized racism that continues to fragment the social and political landscape on a national and global scale. The phenomenon of racialized others still defines our world on so many levels, as evidenced in recent times by the rise of hate groups, hate crimes, and politically motivated patterns of racial profiling in the United States.

These new color-line issues must be taken seriously and addressed properly if people are to forge new paths toward an authentically multi-racial and multi-ethnic world. There is a need to revisit so much of what King said about race and how freedom-loving people might best dismantle the structures of racism, while also advancing values that solidify rather than fragment our common humanity. King’s legacy of ideas and activism can serve as a resource for a radical critique of how race is viewed and institutionalized worldwide today. The documents in part II of "In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice expose us to the moral force of his words and suggest the need for a reconsideration of his meaningfulness for our times.

— Lewis V. Baldwin

From Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? By Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)

Among the moral imperatives of our time, we are challenged to work all over the world with unshakable determination to wipe out the last vestiges of racism. As early as 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied that “the problem of the twentieth century will be the problem of the color line.” Now as we stand two-thirds into this exciting period of history, we know full well that racism is still that hound of hell which dogs the tracks of our civilization.

Racism can well be that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on Western civilization.

Racism is no mere American phenomenon. Its vicious grasp knows no geographical boundaries. In fact, racism and its perennial ally—economic exploitation—provide the key to understanding most of the international complications of this generation.

The classic example of organized and institutionalized racism is the Union of South Africa. Its national policy and practice are the incarnation of the doctrine of white supremacy in the midst of a population which is overwhelmingly black. But the tragedy of South Africa is not simply in its own policy; it is the fact that the racist government of South Africa is virtually made possible by the economic policies of the United States and Great Britain, two countries which profess to be the moral bastions of our Western world.

In country after country we see white men building empires on the sweat and suffering of colored people. Portugal continues its practices of slave labor and subjugation in Angola; the Ian Smith government in Rhodesia continues to enjoy the support of British-based industry and private capital, despite the stated opposition of British government policy. Even in the case of the little country of South West Africa we find the powerful nations of the world incapable of taking a moral position against South Africa, though the smaller country is under the trusteeship of the United Nations. Its policies are controlled by South Africa and its manpower is lured into the mines under slave-labor conditions.

The Bible and the annals of history are replete with tragic stories of one brother robbing another of his birthright and thereby insuring generations of strife and enmity.

During the Kennedy administration there was some awareness of the problems that breed in the racist and exploitative conditions throughout the colored world, and a temporary concern emerged to free the United States from its complicity, though the effort was only on a diplomatic level. Through our ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, there emerged the beginnings of an intelligent approach to the colored peoples of the world. However, there remained little or no attempt to deal with the economic aspects of racist exploitation. We have been notoriously silent about the more than $700 million of American capital which props up the system of apartheid, not to mention the billions of dollars in trade and the military alliances which are maintained under the pretext of fighting Communism in Africa.

Nothing provides the Communists with a better climate for expansion and infiltration than the continued alliance of our nation with racism and exploitation throughout the world. And if we are not diligent in our determination to root out the last vestiges of racism in our dealings with the rest of the world, we may soon see the sins of our fathers visited upon ours and succeeding generations. For the conditions which are so classically represented in Africa are present also in Asia and in our own backyard in Latin America.

Everywhere in Latin America, one finds a tremendous resentment of the United States, and that resentment is always strongest among the poorer and darker peoples of the continent. The life and destiny of Latin America are in the hands of United States corporations. The decisions affecting the lives of South Americans are ostensibly made by their government, but there are almost no legitimate democracies alive in the whole continent. The other governments are dominated by huge and exploitative cartels that rob Latin America of her resources while turning over a small rebate to a few members of a corrupt aristocracy, which in turn invests not in its own country for its own people’s welfare but in the banks of Switzerland and the playgrounds of the world.

Here we see racism in its more sophisticated form: neocolonialism. The Bible and the annals of history are replete with tragic stories of one brother robbing another of his birthright and thereby insuring generations of strife and enmity. We can hardly escape such a judgment in Latin America, any more than we have been able to escape the harvest of hate sown in Vietnam by a century of French exploitation.

Either they share in the blessings of the world or they organize to break down and overthrow those structures or governments which stand in the way of their goals.

There is the convenient temptation to attribute the current turmoil and bitterness throughout the world to the presence of a Communist conspiracy to undermine Europe and America, but the potential explosiveness of our world situation is much more attributable to disillusionment with the promises of Christianity and technology.

The revolutionary leaders of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have virtually all received their education in the capitals of the West. Their earliest training often occurred in Christian missionary schools. Here their sense of dignity was established and they learned that all men were sons of God. In recent years their countries have been invaded by automobiles, Coca-Cola and Hollywood, so that even remote villages have become aware of the wonders and blessings available to God’s white children.

Once the aspirations and appetites of the world have been whetted by the marvels of Western technology and the self-image of a people awakened by religion, one cannot hope to keep people locked out of the earthly kingdom of wealth, health, and happiness. Either they share in the blessings of the world or they organize to break down and overthrow those structures or governments which stand in the way of their goals.

Former generations could not conceive of such luxury, but their children now take this vision and demand that it become a reality. And when they look around and see that the only people who do not share in the abundance of Western technology are colored people, it is an almost inescapable conclusion that their condition and their exploitation are somehow related to their color and the racism of the white Western world.

This is a treacherous foundation for a world house. Racism can well be that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on Western civilization. Arnold Toynbee has said that some twenty-six civilizations have risen upon the face of the earth. Almost all of them have descended into the junk heaps of destruction. The decline and fall of these civilizations, according to Toynbee, was not caused by external invasions but by internal decay. They failed to respond creatively to the challenges impinging upon them. If Western civilization does not now respond constructively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.

This text is an excerpt from "In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice, published by Beacon Press.

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This article is copyright Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

Mallory White of Equal Exchange near Boston tests coffee roast level. Photos by Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young, Shift Change.

Shift Change is a timely documentary about the growing cooperative movement. In the last two years, Truthout has posted many articles on the efforts to achieve economic democracy through worker ownership. Shift Change offers an energizing look at the workings of the giant cooperative model, Mondragon, in Basque, Spain. The film also covers strong U.S.-based worker-owned enterprises that prove the investor Wall Street model of business is not necessary to a successful company.

You can order Shift Change from Bullfrog Films by clicking here.

Mark Karlin: You and your documentary partner, Melissa Young, have completed more than 20 documentaries covering progressive issues, like the threat to unions, the dangers of biotechnology ill-applied, international grassroots environmental activism, and more. What, at this time, brought you to the topic of cooperatives as featured in Shift Change?

Mark Dworkin: In our documentary work together we look at political and social issues not only to rehash what is wrong, but also to offer realistic ideas about what might be done about it. In 2002 we were in Argentina at the height of their economic crisis, and in hundreds of workplaces which had closed, workers took over the company, went back to work, and made a go of it. These examples made quite an impression on us, and we featured their stories in two films: Argentina—Hope in Hard Times and Argentina Turning Around. In 2010 at the U.S. Social Forum, a friend suggested it was time for a new film about Mondragon—and that we ought to make it, since our Argentina films show we understand the potential for worker co-ops, and we have a lot of experience filming in Spanish-speaking countries. He was able to help us find start-up money, and we went for it. We quickly realized we should include the stories of several co-ops in the U.S., so our audience would not get the mistaken idea that worker co-ops cannot succeed here.

Mark Karlin: A good chunk of Shift Change explores the mother of all cooperatives, Mondragon, in Basque Spain. Can you explain the history and current structure of Mondragon, as well as its size?

Mark Dworkin: The Mondragon cooperatives began in the difficult years following the Spanish Civil War. Spain had a dictator who had a grudge against Basque country, because the Basques had opposed his violent rise to power. Left to themselves to rebuild from the war and create a viable economic future, people in Basque country were willing to try something new. Inspired by a visionary priest, they started a technical school that emphasized Christian principles of cooperation. Five graduates of that school who went on to get engineering degrees, set up the first industrial cooperative, soon followed by others, always with an eye to the future development of their region. Now, more than a half-century later, there are 85,000 workers in 120 independent cooperatives, working together for the common good. They do $25 billion worth of business a year. They have their own bank and one of Spain's largest supermarket chains. They make appliances, machine tools, computer equipment, and compete successfully in the global economy.

Mark Karlin: Spain is one of the southern European Community countries struggling with unemployment. How does Mondragon strategically deal with a global economic downturn in terms of unemployment at the cooperative?

Making washing machines at Fagor Home Appliances, part of the Mondragon network of businesses in Spain. Photo by Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young, Shift Change.

Mark Dworkin: One of the challenges faced by all cooperative business is that they have to survive in the larger economic system, over which they have little control. Nonetheless, cooperatives in Mondragon and in the U.S. are faring better in the current crisis than other, similar sized businesses. When sales and profits are down, they don't just close the doors. People take a hard look and try to figure out what they can do to make things better. Generally some of the co-ops are doing better than others, depending on the industry in which they operate. So each year Mondragon co-ops that are profitable pay into a "rainy day fund," and co-ops that are going through hard times are able to withdraw funds to help them out. In co-ops where business is slow, the members can often find temporary work in co-ops that are doing better. And since workers own and manage the company, they may agree to reduce their pay on a temporary basis until business picks up again. That way nobody has to lose their job.

Mark Karlin: Tell us a bit about the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland. How would Evergreen play out as a model for other cities?

Evergreen Cooperative Laundry worker owners fold and sort. Photos by Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young, Shift Change.

Mark Dworkin: The Evergreen Cooperatives take much of their inspiration from Mondragon. They are a wonderful example of business, labor, local government and civic foundations working together to re-develop their region. Rather than offer large sums of government and foundation money to private companies to move to Cleveland—only to have them move somewhere else a few years later - they decided to use those funds to start new businesses, based in the inner city, which are owned and managed by their employees. And they made strategic partnerships with major local institutions, such as Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic to buy the products and services that these cooperative businesses would offer. Many other cities are sending delegations to Cleveland to study the Evergreen model with an eye to adopting the idea—though in each case the best products and services will depend on the needs of each city and the resources it can leverage. Local anchor institution partners would depend on local conditions, but the idea of business, labor, community, and government working together for the common good can take hold anywhere.

Mark Karlin: The United Steel Workers (USW) launched a relationship with Mondragon not too long ago. How is that working out? Has anything come of it at this point? Does the USW plan to challenge the traditional capitalist management and profit model?

Mark Dworkin: The USW/Mondragon collaboration has a number of pilot ventures just getting off the ground in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And other unions are interested too. It is a relatively new idea for organized labor to begin building businesses, and they have a lot of people watching, so they are taking care to make their first ventures a shining success. Unlike in the Mondragon Cooperatives, which are not unionized, the worker owners of these new union co-ops will be union members. And while the companies will be professionally managed, the managers will be under democratic supervision by the workers, where the union helps represent the needs and desires of the rank and file. Like Mondragon, these companies will emphasize not just short-term profit but also long-term job creation and sustainability.

Mark Karlin: Cynics argue that American workers have been conditioned to the managerial profit-making system and are resistant to the cooperative concept. How do your respond to that perception?

When we go to work, most people in the U.S. have to check their democracy at the door

Mark Dworkin: I agree that we learn from an early age to navigate hierarchical social structures, and we have lots of practice competing, though little practice cooperating. So we have a lot to learn in order to make cooperatives a success. But I think many people are willing to make the effort. We have participatory instincts that are stifled in the dominant economy. I remember one friend who lit up when I told him that in worker cooperatives, people are encouraged to put forward their ideas about how to make the company better. That's sure different, he said; everywhere I have ever worked you're best off if you keep your head down and your mouth shut. So I wouldn't say that workers are resistant to cooperation, but rather our cooperative instincts are suppressed and trained out of us. To help overcome this, all of the co-ops we visited place a high priority on initial training and ongoing leadership development of their members.

Mark Karlin: Truthout has been excerpting Gar Alperovitz's book, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy . How are cooperatives representative of economic models of democracy?

Mark Dworkin: Gar Alperovitz and The Democracy Collaborative that he helped to found are key designers of the Evergreen Cooperatives, and I have enormous respect for Gar's thinking and his work. One thing that the Democracy Collaborative talks about is how we are proud to live in a democracy, yet when we go to work, most people in the U.S. have to check their democracy at the door. Cooperative companies are run democratically in terms of their day-to-day operations, and economic democracy in their home region is enhanced, because strategic decisions with long-term consequences for the region are made democratically by people who live and work there, and share a commitment to future sustainability.

Mark Karlin: Do you see evidence that the cooperative movement is gaining momentum in the United States?

Mark Dworkin: Cooperatives are taking off, especially in the last few years when economic conditions have been desperate and more people have been willing to think outside of the box. But it doesn't mean they will all succeed. Such change doesn't happen overnight. New cooperatives like other new businesses need a sound business strategy and plan, and they need the commitment and capital to keep going for the first few years as the business gets off the ground. But with the enthusiasm we have seen, we are optimistic. We've even heard reports that after viewing Shift Change people decided to try to form new co-ops or convert existing businesses to cooperatives.

The Cooperative Way to a Stronger Economy
Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. They come in many forms, and are more common than you might imagine.

Mark Karlin: How does democracy in the workplace, through worker ownership, have an impact on political democracy?

Mark Dworkin: Millions of people have become disenchanted with our political democracy because they don't see how to get involved constructively and it is so hard to get things done. But when given the experience of running a business democratically, people develop their ideas and abilities and feel energized. We've heard numerous stories of co-op worker/owners gaining confidence in their thinking and becoming more involved in social movements and civic affairs. Worker cooperatives are living laboratories of democracy, and democracy is contagious—it cannot help but spill over from the job to life outside of work.

Mark Karlin: You and Melissa Young also completed a documentary, We Are Not Ghosts, on the community-based effort to revitalize Detroit. Do you see hope for the development of cooperatives in a city such as Detroit, left in ruins by the flight of manufacturing jobs?

Mark Dworkin: The grassroots efforts we profile in Detroit involve a lot of community-based cooperation. For the most part it has not yet taken a business form, although Ghosts does visit a very successful bakery that has helped revitalize a run-down neighborhood and a small bicycle repair shop that is a worker co-op. Detroiters are rethinking what a post-industrial city should be like, grounding their efforts in neighborhoods and addressing immediate needs—such as growing food in empty lots, creating spoken word and visual art, organizing neighborhood efforts to reduce violence. So in We Are Not Ghosts we were more interested in the content of what is happening in Detroit—in spite of reports from the major media that focus on shuttered factories, abandoned houses and white flight—rather than its organizational form: non-profit, small business or co-op business. Having said that, the spirit of cooperation is strong.

People remaining in Detroit love their city and are committed to working hard and helping it to survive. As Detroit spoken-word poet Jessica Care Moore says in the film, "Somebody's got to tell them. We are not ghosts! We are in this city, and we are alive!"

Mark Dworkin and his partner Melissa Young founded Moving Images. They have produced and directed more than 20 progressive social documentaries. Many of these programs have aired across North America on PBS, and they are widely distributed to schools, libraries, and community organizations.

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Fred Kirschenmann stands in a field. Photo by Connie Faulk.

Farmer and philosopher Fred Kirschenmann has made it his life’s work to weave sustainability and resilience into the ever-changing agricultural landscape.

A world-renowned leader in sustainable agriculture and professor of religion and philosophy at Iowa State University, Kirschenmann is no stranger to practicing what he preaches. His 2,600-acre farmstead in North Dakota serves as a model for what’s possible on a mid-sized organic farm, showcasing the results of diverse crop rotation paired with soil remediation, and all of it done without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers.

Kirschenmann decided to convert his farm to a wholly organic operation in 1976, after being introduced to the concept in the 1960s by one of his students. Crop yields sank initially, but five years of trial and error restored productivity and eventually boosted it. Today, he grows seven different grain crops—including winter rye, millet, and hard red spring wheat—on two-thirds of the land, while on the rest cattle graze on native prairie. The farm has been featured in such publications as National Geographic, BusinessWeek, Audubon, the LA Times, and Gourmet magazine.

As the Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, Kirschenmann travels across the country and the world to spread new ideas about land ethics, soil health, and biodiversity in agriculture. He is also an author, and the president of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York.

YES! Magazine caught up with Dr. Kirschenmann on Bainbridge Island and asked him about some of modern agriculture’s most vexing problems and the solutions he’s developed over his many years in the field (no pun intended).

Peter Pearsall: You’ve been called an “agri-intellectual” by Mother Jones writer Tom Philpott. What does that phrase mean to you?

Fred Kirschenmann: I think what Tom means by that is that I have put together a kind of vision for the food and agriculture system based on my own experience as a farmer, and my own efforts to anticipate the kinds of challenges we’re going to see in the future.

Peter: How has sustainable agriculture changed over the last 20 years?

Fred: For a long time, I think, there’s been two views on sustainable agriculture. In the first one, the aim is to increase or intensify what we’ve done in the past. There is some effort to reduce the negative impacts of conventional agriculture—such as reducing chemical inputs, soil erosion, and negative effects on water quality—but there is still the goal of maximizing production for short-term economic returns. That particular view looks at it like, “We’ve been so successful in increasing the yields of our crops and we’ve saved the lives of billions of people. Therefore we’re going to use the new technology to keep doing that, and intensify it even more.”

This older view says that the basic system of conventional agriculture was OK, but we needed to reduce our soil erosion, we needed to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals, we needed to improve our water quality. So we had to “green up” the system to make it sustainable.

"Simply intensifying agriculture in one part of the world to feed the rest of the world is not going to solve the problem."

More recently—and I include myself in this school of thought—we’re recognizing that we’re going to have some significant challenges in the future, where we’re not going to have the resources to sustain the agriculture of the past. So we’re going to have to fundamentally redesign it. Our agriculture system in the past was based on cheap energy, it depended on surplus available fresh water, and it depended on a stable climate. None of those things are going to be there in the future.

So those of us who are thinking about the future are thinking about it more in terms of resilience.

Peter: What does resilience mean to the sustainable farmer?

Fred: There’s a new professional society called the Resilience Alliance, which informs the kind of direction we’re taking as sustainable farmers. Now, again, the older version of sustainable agriculture—and you see this a lot still in the literature—asks, “How do we optimize the system?” Well, from the resilience perspective, optimization is the wrong way to go. To optimize something, you specialize it even more, because you want to get the maximum benefit from it. That’s the opposite direction from the one we need to go in.

If you want to make your farm resilient for the future, you have to think about it in two ways. First, there’s “specific resilience”: I look at my farm in North Dakota and say, “OK, in North Dakota now, and in the future, we’re likely to have a more unstable climate and to see the end of cheap energy. So how should I redesign my farm, so it can be resilient under those specific new circumstances?”

Then there’s “general resilience,” which none of us can predict. We think about what’s the larger global impact of climate change, and how we can begin to think about building more diversity and more redundancy into the system, so that we have more flexibility to respond to whatever comes along.

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Peter: Tom Philpott at Mother Jones has outlined three challenges for the sustainable food movement. I’d like you to comment briefly on each of them. First is soil fertility. How can we maintain soil fertility on a larger scale without synthetically produced fertilizers?

Fred: We have to start designing for soil health now, so that the soil becomes essentially self-renewing, self-regulating. One of the primary strategies that farmers are using now is a diversity of cover crops, which regenerates the biological activity in the soil.

"We have to diversify the food system if we’re going to diversify agriculture."

One farmer is quoted as saying that before he started managing for soil health, his soil had the capacity to absorb only a half inch of rainfall per hour before it would start running off. After he had restored his soil with these new ways of soil management, it was capable of storing eight inches of rain per hour.

The good news here is that while a lot of our traditional soil scientists are not yet talking much about soil health, we now have [farm equipment manufacturer] John Deere’s Furrow magazine, which has devoted a whole issue to soil health! Every single article is about soil health and about what farmers and soil scientists are doing to restore soil to health. For John Deere to take a lead on this in their magazine, when many of our land-grant universities still aren’t paying attention, is to me quite remarkable.

Peter: And how long does this remediation of the soil take?

Fred: It depends on what shape your soil is in to begin with, but generally it’ll be around three to five years before you see significant differences. But if you think about it, if your soil has gone from absorbing a half-inch of rainfall in an hour to eight inches of rainfall, then that means your soil has the capacity to absorb and retain more moisture, so it’s more resilient in drought circumstances. It also means you have less runoff and less erosion, and you also have less leaching, less nitrogen going down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. So there are enormous benefits from this.

Peter: The second challenge that Philpott lays out is labor: Sustainable farming requires “more hands on the ground,” as he puts it. So how do you see the U.S. getting more workers in the fields, working for fair wages?

Fred: For me, that’s about labor in the larger sense. It’s about the number of farmers, not just the number of farm workers. Every five years, the USDA has an agriculture census, and they report the difference between the previous five years and the new data. So between 2002 and 2007, according to the census, we had an increase from 2.1 million to 2.2 million farmers.

"We have to do everything we can to enable this new generation of young people to actually become farmers."

Now, the problem with that is the definition the USDA is using to define a farm. When you think about 2.2 million farmers, the public thinks, “Well, that means 2.2 million people have a farmstead and are running a farm.” And that’s not at all the case. The definition the USDA is still using is one established in 1947. According to that definition, a farm is any place that produces $1,000 in gross [agricultural] sales, or would have produced $1,000 in gross sales had it maximized its full production capacity.

Mike Duffy at Iowa State University has been complaining about this definition for a long time because it’s not communicating to the public what’s actually happening to our farm population. When that report came out in 2007, there was only one journalist that picked up on the real issue, and it was because she had talked to Mike Duffy. That was Lisa Hamilton. She wrote an op-ed in the Prairie Writer’s Circle back then. According to Duffy’s statistics, as of 2007, 75 percent of our total agriculture sales were produced by just 192,442 farms. Thirty percent of our farmers were over age 65, and only 6 percent were under age 35.

Now, when you push those kinds of data, you can’t go very far into the future before you run into a big human capital problem. Where are the farmers going to come from, particularly as we face these new challenges with climate change, and so on? So that’s an issue we have to address.

The good-news side of this is that we have this new generation of young people across the country who want to farm—they’re in that late teens to early thirties age group. I’m connected with the Stone Barns Center out in New York now, and we have a young farmer program out there. These young people are amazing. They are very smart, they know the challenges they’re going to face, they know it’s going to be hard work, but they’re passionate about raising food for people. They’re not interested in doing corn and beans; they want to have that connection with the people they raised the food for. That’s an incredible gift of human capital that we have now.

The challenge is that they need access to land, they need access to affordable capital to invest in the resources they need to be farmers, and they need the kind of markets where they can get returns from farming so they can pay off their investment and have a decent life. That’s all they’re asking for. And those are all things we can address. We can address some of them in public policy. Increasingly, we’re finding that we can address them through community relationships—the CSAs are one way in which that is being done.

"I think the market infrastructure is going to start changing when the current market system no longer works."

But this is something that we must address, because, as [author] Richard Heinberg has projected, by the year 2040, [the United States is] going to need 40 to 50 million people to produce our food in one way or another. So we get 75 percent of our total agriculture sales from less than a quarter of a million farmers, and we need to get to 40 to 50 million. That’s a pretty big jump. So we have to do everything we can to enable this new generation of young people to actually become farmers and begin to fill that void.

The other bit of good news is the emergence of urban agriculture, where this new generation is not looking for a thousand acres, they’re looking for four or five acres, you know, to grow a lot of vegetables to be a part of that food source for local farmer’s markets and regional food systems. Also, there’s the whole concept of “food hubs” or “food sheds,” where you have these regional communities of food citizens. There’s a program called Food Commons—they’ve got two communities, one in Fresno and one in Atlanta, Ga., that want to become prototypes and show how this can be done on a local level.

So there’s a lot of good things happening, but we don’t have a lot of time. If Heinberg is correct—and I don’t know if he is—we’ve only got 50 years to so to make this transition.

Peter: Philpott’s third challenge is access: In an economy built on long-term wage stagnation, how can we move toward making sustainably grown food accessible to everyone?

Fred: That’s a great question. There have been four reports that have come out of the U.N. the last five years: “Agriculture at the Crossroads,” “Agroecology and the Right to Food,” “Save and Grow,” and “Toward the Future We Walk.” All four are basically saying the same thing, and that is that simply intensifying agriculture in one part of the world to feed the rest of the world is not going to solve the problem.

What we have to do is work with people, especially small-holder farmers and women, in their own communities and give them the information that they need to develop self-sustaining agro-ecological systems. I don’t want to be self-promoting here, but I wrote a column for The Leopold Center that goes into this. Another article, an amazing article in YES! by Frances Moore-Lappé about women in India, is a perfect example of the kind of thing the U.N. reports were talking about.

It’s that “right to food” approach. You’re not saying, “Well, gee, we’ve got hungry people over there—we have to figure out how to feed them,” which continues to make them dependent. We have to figure out a way to give them the resources they need to feed themselves and empower them.

Peter: You’ve written much on the idea that a multitude of organisms is essential to healthy soil, and to producing good food in a sustainable way. How can modern farms incorporate more biodiversity?

Fred: Matt Leibman, a weed ecologist at Iowa State University, has done research over nine years comparing a typical two-crop rotation in Iowa—usually corn and soybeans, or sometimes continuous corn—and that system supported with synthetic inputs. So that’s four acres in this eight-acre research plot. He compared that two-crop rotation with a three-crop rotation—corn and beans with a small grain and red clover, with a lot of livestock manure—and then a four-crop rotation, which is corn and beans, a small grain, and alfalfa, followed by a second year of alfalfa. He has demonstrated that in the three- and four-crop rotation, you can reduce pesticide use by almost 90 percent, your fertilizer use by almost 90 percent, and the return to land that farmers get for each unit of labor is actually slightly higher than in the two-crop rotation.

So this raises an interesting question: Why wouldn’t farmers make this transition, if it has so many benefits? The answer is that the market infrastructure doesn’t support that kind of diversity. That’s a big problem. You know, you go to a farmer in Iowa—and I’ve done this—and say, “You’ve got all these benefits, why wouldn’t you do this?” And the first thing the farmers say is, “What the hell am I going to do with the alfalfa? I can’t take it to the local elevator and sell it.” So the farmers are under pressure to produce as much corn and soybeans as possible, and that’s what they’re going to do.

"There’s a lot of good things happening, but we don’t have a lot of time."

I’m not terribly optimistic that simply demonstrating how this is a better way to do it is going to change things. I think the market infrastructure is going to start changing when the current market system no longer works.

A good example is this: Given the drought that we’ve had in the Midwest, ranchers have had to sell some of their breeding stock because they didn’t have enough hay and pasture to keep the animals. That means there are now fewer calves coming into the marketplace, so the feedlots that have been receiving those calves aren’t getting enough to sustain their economic situation. That shows you just one example of how vulnerable this highly specialized food system that we have is.

As energy costs go up, I think we’re going to see these systems break down, and then we’re going to look for these alternatives that Leibman has been researching. We know the kinds of benefits we get from healthy soil and the resilience that goes with it. But you’re not going to see huge numbers of farmers adopting this until the other system doesn’t work for them, or for the market. We have to diversify the food system if we’re going to diversify agriculture.

Peter: What is most exciting to you about sustainable agriculture today? Any promising trends or ideas cropping up?

Fred: The culture that currently drives our agriculture and food system is the same culture that drives the rest of our industrial economy. It emphasizes maximum efficient production over the short term. So whether you’re manufacturing automobiles or computers or food, that’s what you do. And how do you do that? You specialize and increase efficiency. You simplify your management, so that it becomes more efficient, and you go for economies of scale.

The problem with that is it only works if you’ve got all of those resources to maintain that maximum-efficiency production. It creates a very brittle system, because, you know, in Iowa now, for example, 92 percent of our cultivated land is just two crops: corn and soybeans. So you need a climate that’s consistently favoring corn and soybeans, you need cheap energy, and so on. When all of that starts to disappear, it becomes a vulnerable system. It doesn’t adapt well to change.

I think we’re still in the early stages of moving in the right direction for sustainable agriculture. I think it’s fair to say that the majority of people engaged in it are still looking at it in terms of making the current system a little less bad. But what we have to do is to move beyond that.

What I am enthusiastic about is that we now have the Resilience Alliance group, the Ecological Economic Society—these are the early efforts that are starting to bubble up. I think that as we start to meet more and more of the actual day-to-day challenges in real life, we’ll be looking more and more to those resources, and how we can expand and adapt them to our actual enterprises.

Peter Pearsall wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Peter is an online reporting intern at YES! and a freelance science writer.

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Protesters disrupt an NRA press conference as NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre proposes a program to add or reinforce armed guards at the nation's schools one week after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The shooting, which claimed the lives of 26 adults and children, has sparked heated national protests and citizen action, including divestment from companies that produce assault weapons. Photo by Jay Mallin Photos.

Immediately after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December, managers for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) began divesting from companies that make and sell assault weapons.

CalSTRS, the retirement system for more than 800,000 California teachers, is the nation’s second-largest public pension fund. It has about $750 million invested with the private equity company Cerberus Capital Management. Cerberus owns the Freedom Group, which makes the Bushmaster M4A3 semi-automatic rifle used at Sandy Hook. When media reports began drawing attention to the origins of that weapon, investment staff at CalSTRS decided the fund could not support the Freedom Group.

California Treasurer Bill Lockyer called Cerberus managers to inform them of the CalSTRS decision. Within hours, the company announced that it would sell the Freedom Group, explaining in a press release that the decision “allows us to meet our obligations to the investors ... without being drawn into the national [gun control] debate.”

It is illegal to purchase or possess assault weapons, including semi-automatic rifles, in California. High-capacity ammunition magazines, like the one used last summer in the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., are also banned.

Lockyer wants both CalSTRS and CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, to divest from companies that make or sell firearms that are illegal in California, according to Tom Dresslar, spokesman for the State Treasurer’s office.

“The Treasurer hopes that other public pensions will follow California’s lead,” Dresslar said. “This is obviously not just a California issue. It’s a national issue.”

The California Teachers’ Association, the teachers’ union, supports divestment. Union Legislative Advocate Jennifer Baker told the CalSTRS investment committee: “We do not want CalSTRS investments to be in conflict with our shared values of protecting human life, particularly those that our members serve, our children.”

Christopher Francis wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Christopher is a YES! intern.

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Are they "feeding the world"? Are we asking the right questions? Photo by USDA.

Sooner or later the question comes up, whether it is between two friends sharing a pot of stew made from local grassfed beef and their garden harvest, livestock farmers gathered on a pasture walk, neighbors working together to tend a flock of backyard chickens, or organic vegetable producers discussing yields at a conference.

“But can we feed the world this way?”

As we try to move humanity away from dominant power regimes and thoughtless extraction of the earth’s resources, toward a way of life that honors the earth and all of her creatures, I think this is the most maddening question we can be asking ourselves.

Nevertheless, we’ve all been conditioned to reflexively turn to this question as we challenge our methods and consider new paths toward sustainability.

The local producer’s job was to support the family, the community, and his or her bioregion–not the world.

However, 75 or 100 years ago, such a question would never have entered into our dialogue. To ask a local farmer or homesteader how his or her production methods were going to feed the world would have been absurd. The local producer’s job was to support the family, the community, and his or her bioregion–not the world.

But following World War II, with the onset of the “Green Revolution,” feeding the world became a national mantra. It was a ubiquitous “good” that handily justified the discovery that the petrochemicals used in warfare could find postwar applications if dumped on our food supply.

“Feeding the world” consoled farmers as they incurred mountains of debt to afford the fossil-fuel-intensive machinery and expansive acreage that would enable them to crank out tons of food for which they would garner increasingly lower prices. “Feeding the world” was the elixir offered as our grandparents attempted to adjust their palates to a food supply that was suddenly tasteless as local food disappeared from the market. “Feeding the world” was the slogan tossed about as rural people the world over surrendered ties to the land, moved to cities, and trusted that the food system would take care of itself. “Feeding the world” was the background tune playing in the bank, on the car radio of the seed salesman, in the office of the accountant as farmers were counseled to “get big or get out,” to expand their production and change their growing practices to participate in a global food supply, rather than a regional one. “Feeding the world” was the motto that let Americans turn their heads and not notice the polluted waters, the increasing severity of floods, soil loss, or the fact that the little farm next door had suddenly disappeared.

There is no such thing as a universally applicable production practice nor a universally acceptable diet.

But those petrochemicals and farming practices that feed the world are washing away our topsoil and leaving what remains nutritionally deficient. Ironically, the goal to feed the world has led to a form of agriculture that has made it increasingly difficult for the people of the world to feed themselves. And the fact that fossil fuels are not quite as abundant as they once were, nor as cheap, means that even if we could generate yields of global proportions in perpetuity, we wouldn’t be able to deliver the goods in any cost-effective manner.

Can the local, sustainable food movement in the United States feed the world? Hell, no. Nor can the industrial agricultural paradigm. No one can feed the world. One country cannot do it, nor can any specific model of production. The earth must be allowed to reclaim its natural productivity. That’s why we need local and regional food systems, designed to work harmoniously with local ecosystems. While certain ecological lessons may apply, it would be absurd to think what works for us here in upstate New York for producing food is going to necessarily work in Africa. Heck, many of the methods that work on farms 10 miles from our house won’t work on our steep hillside farm. There is no such thing as a universally applicable production practice nor a universally acceptable diet.

Rather than asking farmers if the methods they use can feed the world, we should ask ourselves, “Do my choices help the world to feed itself?”

This is not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about global starvation. But if enabling everybody to have access to good, nutritious food is really our goal, we need to look deeper than crop yields and feed conversion ratios. In addition to the complicated politics involved, we need to examine our individual actions.

How are our daily habits impacting humanity’s access to a nutritious food supply? Our daily sustenance should not require that other people in the world go without nourishment. Our daily sustenance should not demand excessive fossil fuels for growing, processing, and transporting the food to our tables. Beyond that, our consumption habits ideally should not be requiring people in foreign lands to destroy their own access to clean water and fertile soils for the sake of dying our clothing, building our electronics, or making our children’s toys.

Feeding the world starts with individual accountability. It needs to be considered in every home, in every business. But the question must be reframed. Rather than asking farmers if the methods they use can feed the world, we need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, “Do my choices help enable the world to feed itself?” If the answer is no, then it is time to make different choices.

There is not one of us who is blameless when the question is reframed (myself included). But it is not solely up to the farmers to feed the world. It is up to each and every one of us to strive to live a life of personal accountability that will enable this earth to heal, and enable this world to feed itself.

And, just as no single agricultural practice will be universally applicable, nor will any single life path. There are many routes to a healed planet. What matters is that we keep asking ourselves to be accountable, and that we keep making the changes that are direly needed.

Thus, I leave you with one question: What can you do today that will enable the world to feed itself?

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Shannon is the author ofRadical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, The Grassfed Gourmetand The Farmer and the Grill. Her newest book is Long Way on a Little: An Earth Lover's Companion for Enjoying Meat, Pinching Pennies and Living Deliciously. She is the host of Grassfedcooking.com and RadicalHomemakers.com. Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.

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This infographic is excerpted from How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine.

Interested?

• The Cooperative Way to a Stronger Economy
  Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. They come in many forms, and are more common than you might imagine.
• The Economy: Under New Ownership
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For more information, visit:
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Credit Union National Association
CUNA News
http://www.ncua.gov/News/Pages/NW20121129CUGrowth3Qtr.aspx
http://www.cuna.org/initiatives/hispanic/hispanic_news.html

On Feb. 17, more than 40,000 people from across the nation gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to collectively voice their opposition to the Keystone tar sands pipeline. Despite the freezing temperatures and 26-mile-per-hour winds, the crowd was energized and optimistic.

350.org, the Sierra Club, the Hip Hop Caucus, and numerous other groups helped to plan the  event, solidarity events, and the online gathering, which the organizers calculated garnered the attention of more than 4 million viewers. The four-hour event included speeches by Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Rosario Dawson, and Chief Jacqueline Thomas of the Saik’uz First Nation.

Sarah Kuck produced this video for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions.

Employees at Equal Exchange, the oldest and largest fair-trade coffee company in the nation. It is also a worker-owned cooperative. Photo by Paul Dunn.

Pushing my grocery cart down the aisle, I spot on the fruit counter a dozen plastic bags of bananas labeled “Organic, Equal Exchange.” My heart leaps a little. I’d been thrilled, months earlier, when I found my local grocer carrying bananas—a new product from Equal Exchange—because this employee-owned cooperativeme outside Boston is one of my favorite companies. Its main business remains the fair trade coffee and chocolate the company started with in 1986. Since then, the company has flourished, and its mission remains supporting small farmer co-ops in developing countries and giving power to employees through ownership. It’s as close to an ideal company as I’ve found. And I’m delighted to see their banana business thriving, since I know it was rocky for a time. (Hence the leaping of my heart.)

I happen to know a bit more than the average shopper about Equal Exchange, because I count myself lucky to be one of its few investors who are not worker-owners. Over more than 20 years, it has paid investors a steady and impressive average of 5 percent annually (these days, a coveted return).

Maneuvering my cart toward the dairy case, I search out butter made by Cabot Creamery, and pick up some Cabot cheddar cheese. I choose Cabot because, like Equal Exchange, it’s a cooperative, owned by dairy farmers since 1919.

At the checkout, I hand over my Visa card from Summit Credit Union, a depositor-owned bank in Madison, Wis., where I lived years ago. Credit unions are another type of cooperative, meaning that members like me are partial owners, so Summit doesn’t charge us the usurious penalty rate of 25 percent or more levied by other banks at the merest breath of a late payment. They’re loyal to me, and I’m loyal to them.

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On my way home, I pull up to the drive-through at Beverly Cooperative Bank to make a withdrawal. This bank is yet another kind of cooperative—owned by customers and designed to serve them. Though it’s small—with only $700 million in assets, and just four branches (all of which I could reach on my bike)—its ATM card is recognized everywhere. I’ve used it even in Copenhagen and London.

With this series of transactions on one afternoon, I am weaving my way through a profoundly different and virtually invisible world: the cooperative economy. It’s an economy that aims to serve customers, rather than extract maximum profits from them. It operates through various models, which share the goal of treating suppliers, employees, and investors fairly. The cooperative economy has dwelled alongside the corporate economy for close to two centuries. But it may be an economy whose time has come.

Something is dying in our time. As the nation struggles to recover from unsustainable personal and national debt, stagnant wages, the damages wrought by climate change, and more, a whole way of life is drawing to a close. It began with railroads and steam engines at the dawn of the Industrial Age, and over two centuries has swelled into a corporation-dominated system marked today by vast wealth inequity and bloated carbon emissions. That economy is today proving fundamentally unsustainable. We’re hitting twin limits, ecological and financial. We’re experiencing both ecological and financial overshoot.

If ecological limits are something many of us understand, we’re just beginning to find language to talk about financial limits—that point of diminishing return where the hunt for financial gain actually depletes the tax-and-wage base that sustains us all.

Here’s the problem: The very aim of maximum financial extraction is built into the foundational social architecture of our capitalist economy—that is, the concept of ownership.
If the root of government is sovereignty (the question of who controls the state), the root construct of every economy is property (the question of who controls the infrastructure of wealth creation).

Many of the great social struggles in history have come down to the issue of who will control land, water, and the essentials of life. Ownership has been at the center of the most profound changes in civilization—from ending slavery to patenting the genome of life.

Author Marjorie Kelly: It’s no accident that the deep redesign of our economy isn’t beginning in Washington, D.C. It is rooted in relationships: to the living earth and to one another. Photo by Cameron Karsten.

Throughout the Industrial Age, the global economy has increasingly come to be dominated by a single form of ownership: the publicly traded corporation, where shares are bought and sold in stock markets. The systemic crises we face today are deeply entwined with this design, which forms the foundation of what we might call the extractive economy, intent on maximum physical and financial extraction.

The concept of extractive ownership traces its lineage to Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. The 18th century British legal theorist William Blackstone described ownership as the right to “sole and despotic dominion.” This view—the right to control one’s world in order to extract maximum benefit for oneself—is a core legitimating concept for a civilization in which white, property-owning males have claimed dominion over women, other races, laborers, and the earth itself.
In the 20th century, we were schooled to believe there were essentially two economic systems: capitalism (private ownership) and socialism/communism (public ownership). Yet both tended, in practice, to support the concentration of economic power in the hands of the few.

Emerging in our time—in largely disconnected experiments across the globe—are the seeds of a different kind of economy. It, too, is built on a foundation of ownership, but of a unique type. The cooperative economy is a large piece of it. But this economy doesn’t rely on a monoculture of design, the way capitalism does. It’s as rich in diversity as a rainforest is in its plethora of species—with commons ownership, municipal ownership, employee ownership, and others. You could even include open-source models like Wikipedia, owned by no one and managed collectively.

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These varieties of alternative ownership have yet to be recognized as a single family, in part because they’ve yet to unite under a common name. We might call them generative, for their aim is to generate conditions where our common life can flourish. Generative design isn’t about dominion. It’s about belonging—a sense of belonging to a common whole.

We see this sensibility in a variety of alternatives gaining ground today. New state laws chartering benefit corporations have passed recently in 12 states, and are in the works in 14 more. Benefit corporations—like Patagonia and Seventh Generation—build into their governing documents a commitment to serve not only stockholders but other stakeholders, including employees, the community, and the environment.

Also spreading are social enterprises, which serve a social mission while still functioning as businesses (many of them owned by nonprofits). Employee-owned firms are gaining ground in Spain, Poland, France, Denmark, and Sweden. Still another model is the mission-controlled corporation, exemplified by foundation-owned companies such as Novo Nordisk and Ikea in northern Europe. While publicly traded, these companies safeguard their social purpose by keeping board control in mission-oriented hands.

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If there are more kinds of generative ownership than most of us realize, the scale of activity is also larger than we might suppose—particularly in the cooperative economy. In the United States, more than 130 million people are members of a co-op or credit union. More Americans hold membership in a co-op than hold shares in the stock market. Worldwide, cooperatives have close to a billion members. Among the 300 largest cooperative and mutually owned companies worldwide, total revenues approach $2 trillion. If these enterprises were a single nation, its economy would be the 9th largest on earth.

Often, these entities are profit making, but they’re not profit maximizing. Alongside more traditional nonprofit and government models, they add a category of private ownership for the common good. Their growth across the globe represents a largely unheralded revolution.

What unites generative designs are the living purposes at their core, and the beneficial outcomes they tend to generate. More research remains to be done, but there is evidence that these models create broad benefits and remain resilient in crisis. We’ve seen this, for example, in the success of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, which remained strong in the 2008 crisis, even as other banks foundered; this led more than a dozen states to pursue similar models. We’ve seen it in the behavior of credit unions, which tended not to create toxic mortgages, and required few bailouts.

We’ve seen it in the fact that workers at firms with employee stock ownership plans enjoy more than double the defined-benefit retirement assets of comparable employees at other firms. And we’ve seen it in the fact that the Basque region of Spain—home to the massive Mondragon cooperative—has seen substantially lower unemployment than the country as a whole.

Together, these various models might one day form the foundation for a generative economy, where the intent is to meet human needs and create conditions in which life can thrive. Generative ownership aims to do what the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker have always done: make a living by serving the community. The profit-maximizing corporation is the real detour in the evolution of ownership, and it’s a relatively recent detour at that.

The resilience of generative design is a key reason that people have often turned to these models in times of crisis. When the Industrial Revolution was forcing many skilled workers into poverty in the 1840s, weavers and artisans banded together to form the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the first modern, consumer-owned cooperative, selling food to members who couldn’t otherwise afford it.

During the Great Depression in the United States, the Federal Credit Union Act—ensuring that credit would be available to people of meager means—was intended to help stabilize an imbalanced financial system. Today, credit union assets total more than $700 billion. In the recent financial crisis, their loan delinquency rates were half those of traditional banks. Since the crisis, credit unions have added more than 1.5 million members. In Argentina in 2001, when a financial meltdown created thousands of bankruptcies and saw many business owners flee, workers—with government support—took over more than 200 firms and ran these empresas recuperadas themselves, and they’re still running them.

Last year, with financial and ecological crises mounting worldwide, the U.N. named 2012 the Year of the Cooperative, and cooperative activity, is advancing around the globe. Cooperatives were largely sidelined during the rise of the industrial age. But current trends indicate that conditions may be ripe for a surge in cooperative enterprises. As people lose faith in the stock market, feel mounting anger at banks, and distrust high-earning CEOs, there’s growing distaste for the business-as-usual Wall Street model. Meanwhile, the Internet has enabled the expansion of informal cooperation on an unprecedented scale—with the Creative Commons, for example, now encompassing more than 450,000 works. As the speculative, mass-production economy hits limits, cooperatives may be uniquely suited to a post-growth world, for they are active in sectors related to fundamental needs (agriculture, insurance, food, finance, and electricity comprise the top five co-op sectors).

If many of us fail to recognize an emerging ownership shift as a sign of progress, it may be because it arises from an unexpected place—not from government action, or protests in the streets, but from within the structure of our economy itself. Not from the leadership of a charismatic individual, but from the longing in many hearts, the genius of many minds, the effort of many hands to build what we know, instinctively, that we need.

This goes much deeper than legal or financial engineering. It’s about a shift in the cultural values that underpin social institutions. History has seen such shifts before—in the values that underlay the monarchy, racism, and sexism. What’s weakening today is a different kind of systemic bias. It’s capital bias: capital-ism—the belief system that maximizing capital matters more than anything else.

Just the Facts: What's So Good About Co-ops?
Why support the co-ops in your community? The benefits might be further-reaching than you think.

The cooperative economy—and the broader family of generative ownership models—is helping to reawaken an ancient wisdom about living together in community, something largely lost in the spread of capitalism. Economic historian Karl Polanyi describes this in his 1944 work, The Great Transformation, tracing the crises of capitalism to the fact that it “disembedded” economic activity from community. Throughout history, he noted, economic activity had been part of a larger social order that included religion, government, families, and the natural world. The Industrial Revolution upended this. It turned labor and land into commodities to be “bought and sold, used and destroyed, as if they were simply merchandise,” Polanyi wrote. But these were fictitious commodities. They were none other than human beings and the earth itself.

Generative design decommodifies land and labor, putting them again under the control of the community.

It’s no accident that the deep redesign of our economy isn’t beginning in Washington, D.C. It is rooted in relationships: to the living earth and to one another. The generative economy finds fertile soil for its growth within the human heart. The ownership revolution is part of the “metaphysical reconstruction” that E.F. Schumacher said would be needed to transform our economy. When economic relations are designed in a generative way, they’re no longer about sole and despotic dominion. Economic activity is no longer about squeezing every penny from something we imagine that we own. It’s about being interwoven with the world around us. It’s about a shift from dominion to community.

Marjorie Kelly wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Marjorie is a fellow with the Tellus Institute and is director of ownership strategy with Cutting Edge Capital consulting firm. She is author of the new book, Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution. She was co-founder and for 20 years president of Ethics magazine.

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