Living Democracy, Feeding Hope

We join millions grieving for Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai. She altered the course of our lives, and our one solace is in knowing that she has changed — and will continue to change — the lives of millions of others. She taught us about the work of hope.In the early 1970s, Wangari — the first woman PhD in biological sciences in East Africa — saw the Sahara desert creeping south into Kenya. In just one century, the country’s forests had shrunk to less than five percent of what they once were. Wangari knew that Kenya’s entire ecosystem was threatened, with devastating results. So Wangari decided to take action. On Earth Day 1977, she planted seven trees to honor seven women leaders in her country, and with that act, launched the Green Belt Movement . When she began, the Kenyan forestry service, established under the British, scoffed at her. “What? Untrained village woman planting trees to reverse the encroaching desert? Oh no, that takes trained foresters!” “The foresters were not amused,” Wangari told us, with her signature grin, when we met her in Kenya to learn about her movement firsthand in 2000. “I told them, ‘We need millions of trees and you foresters are too few, you’ll never produce them. So you need to make everyone foresters.’ I call the women of the Green Belt Movement foresters without diplomas.” In the intervening decades, the Movement’s tree-planting village women turned Wangari’s seven trees into 45 million across the country. And the Movement’s “kitchen garden” campaign brought greater food security, too. “When you go home,” village elder Lea Kisomo, told us, looking straight into our eyes, “tell your people that we Kamba people had lost our culture, especially our food security, but now we are going to regain it. What we’ve lost, we’re getting back.” But as we talked with Green Belt Movement members in their homes, we realized that our first impressions of Wangari’s real impact was wrong — or not wrong, exactly, but not big enough: Yes, the Green Belt Movement was about reforestation, but as Wangari engaged further in the work, she realized that in order to protect forests, a transformation was needed in the minds of the members: In this way, the true battle is not about the environment, as such; the real battle takes place inside, when “ordinary people” make that internal shift — as terrifying as it might be — to realize their power. “We broke the code,” Wangari told us as we sat with her in a Green Belt Movement guesthouse. “We told the women: ‘Use the methods you know, and if you don’t know, invent.’ They would use broken pots. They would put the soil and seeds there and watch as they germinate. If they germinate, well and good; if not, try again.” In other words, she told the women to trust themselves. As the result of her work, tens of thousands of village women who had been taught to defer to chiefs, husbands, colonial authorities, multinational corporate marketers, and to disparage their own traditions and common sense gained courage. They learned to say: We have the solutions. We can take responsibility. We can transform our villages and our nation — and our world. Saying good-bye to Wangari as we left Kenya in 2000, we were inspired, but worried: her movement’s resources were shaky, a big international donor had just pulled out and she and her leadership were under threat from government retaliation. Shortly after we returned home, Wangari was jailed — not for the first time — for her resistance to illegal logging. We could never have imagined, let alone predicted, the changes that just a few years would bring: In 2002, Wangari swept into Parliament, out-polling her nearest opponent 50 to 1. Soon, she was named Deputy Minister of the Environment, and women danced for joy in the streets of Nairobi. And then, in 2004, we heard the remarkable news: Wangari had been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. In Kenya we met many women wearing the Green Belt Movement’s simple t-shirt adorned with the slogan: “As for me, I’ve made a choice.” So simple, yet so powerful, are those words: To create the world we want, Wangari always embodied, we must choose to act, even if there is no evidence assuring success — even if we face ridicule, oppression, and loss. Hope, she taught us, is not for wimps. It is not what we find in evidence, it is what we become in action. And so, as we grieve along with countless others around the planet, we remember these simple words of the Movement and what the planet calls us to do: Not to be assured that we will succeed, but that as Wangari did with those seven trees in 1977 — and for the rest of her life — that we make the simple, profound choice to act. Originally published by the Huffington Post on 09/30/2011

Tea Partiers, make room. The Coffee Party is about to steal some of your media thunder. Around for only a few weeks, it officially launches March 13th, having already attracted 109,000 Facebook fans, slightly more than the Tea Party , around about a year. The Coffee Party expects about 300 gatherings in 44 states to participate on Saturday. On the surface, the two “parties” seem radically different. Tea Partiers are known for their shout-downs, but Coffee Partiers feature a “civility pledge” on their homepage. Coffee Partiers, don’t call for a drastically shrunken government, ala the Tea Party, but for “cooperation in government.” And, Coffee folks emphasize whom they will support—“those leaders working toward positive solutions”—rather than the Tea Party’s practice of lampooning those they won’t, like our president. But let’s not get so carried away with the new brew that we fail to read the tea leaves. The Tea Party has so far stolen the show precisely because it’s loud, occasionally outrageous, and can sometimes sound downright scary. But the Tea Party has something to tell us. So as funny as Sarah Palin’s palm-reading antics and Bill Maher’s jabs at Tea Partiers maybe ...we should listen before we laugh. First of all, a lot of Tea Partiers got to their party because they’re angry. And while civility is essential to democracy itself, anger is also appropriate. We should be angry that our democracy is being stolen. We can be pissed without being nasty. Secondly, a lot of Tea Partiers understand a big part of what’s gone wrong in America - and if they don’t understand it, they sense it. The trouble is, they, like most of us, can’t get our heads around it. When kids throw fits it’s often because they can’t explain what’s really bothering them. Maybe it’s the same for grown-ups. The problem is, in this society we have no common language, no frame, to explain why the pain has increased so fast that: Almost half of American families have experienced a lost job, fewer hours, or a pay cut in the last year. Almost one fifth of men in their prime-earning years are unemployed. And half of our children depend on food stamps at some point in their upbringing. So let’s try to name America’s root problem. It might bring some sanity and focus, perhaps telling us why the Tea Partiers are so ticked off; and best of all—suggest a practical path to get our country back. In 2005, Citigroup researchers offered a great suggestion . They labeled our economy a Plutonomy—one driven by the wealthy, as now the richest one percent of U.S. households have as much net worth as the bottom 90 percent put together. We are no longer a middle class country. Far, far from it. We are the “rich” and the “non-rich,” Citigroup explains. And the second group, the “multitudinous many” get “surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” It wasn’t always this way. For 30 years or more after World War II, all of us were doing better and the poorest Americans were advancing the fastest. The huge rich-poor gap was narrowing. So what happened? Too many bought the idea that a fair, middle-class society of opportunity happens on its own - automatically - from what Ronald Reagan called the “magic of the market.” Trusting in the “invisible hand,” we’ve spent years allowing the dismantling of the economic standards and rules needed for democracy to thrive; rules that keep wealth circulating so that we don’t end up like the end of a Monopoly game when I was a kid—with my brother holding all the good property while I couldn’t even afford Baltic Avenue. It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to get a grip on how we got here. In our real-life Monopoly, an economy driven by highest return to existing wealth, we see wealth return to wealth until one family, Wal-Mart’s Waltons, are able to control almost as much as 40 percent of Americans. And it doesn’t take a PhD in political science to figure out that such concentrated wealth has political consequences—it’s able to use its muscle to twist public choices to serve its private interests. Most of the $3.5 billion in lobbying money spent last year, more than double the 1998 total, came from mega-corporations. It’s telling that Tea Partiers tend to come from an older demographic. Maybe they’re angry because they’re old enough to recall a different America - one in which average people had a fairer chance of making it. So Tea Party anger has a lot to teach us. Yet, tragically, their “stop government take-over of...” mantra diverts us from seeing the deeper crisis of privately-held government. To break the spell and find our power, we can ask ourselves some simple but tough questions, like: Why? Why, before the financial meltdown, were most Americans already making less in real dollars than in the 1970s? Why, before the meltdown, did America spend vastly more per person than other countries but rank 37th in health care worldwide? Why did our economy collapse? Was it really “over-reaching government” or was it what Citigroup calls “cooperative government,” in the end so cooperative that it let financial-industry high-flyers game the system and do us in? Struggling with these questions, more of us might see that to make our government “the expression of our collective will,” as the Coffee Party expresses it, we need the guts to name privately held government for what it is. Only then can we see critical and immediate steps to remove money’s grip from our broken democracy—by, for example, publicly funded elections via the bi-partisan-backed Fair Elections Now Act, at this moment awaiting some useful citizen anger to help push it through Congress. To get there we need first to listen to the truths we each see. So whatever your politics, why not find a Coffee Party on Saturday and join the conversation? True, Coffee Partiers might focus more on the threat of concentrated, unaccountable corporate power, while Tea Partiers’ typically target concentrated, unaccountable government power. But see a pattern? Imagine if we realized that the problem is concentrated power itself and joined together to create a democracy accountable to us . Now that would be a powerful brew. Originally published by the Huffington Post on 05/11/2010

A lot of Americans are really angry, as so many of our dreams seem to be fading away. Anger can be useful, it’s true, but only if we can grasp what’s at the root of our pain, if we can understand how we got here — to a society producing almost a quarter of the world’s economic output while one-half of our children will spend some time on food stamps. For only then, can we know what to do. My sense is that much of the anger, too often today turning hateful, is rooted in profound frustration — frustration because we have no clear sense of those roots. If, for example, we absorb lessons from history that tell us government itself is our enemy, we may be blurring our own vision and weakening our grip on solutions. Take the Boston Tea Party. Was it really just an anti-government protest? If we believe that, perhaps we miss a key message that’s relevant today. The Real Tea Party Story from INVISIBLE HAND on Vimeo . Check out our new web doc, Boston Tea Party — the Real Story, created by Invisible Hand and narrated by me. And let me know what you think! Originally published by the Huffington Post on 05/19/2010

This week an open letter to McDonald’s signed by 550 health professionals appears in full-page ads in newspapers across the country. Their message? Real simple: “Stop making the next generation sick—retire Ronald and the rest of your junk food marketing to kids,” said signer Dr. Steven K. Rothschild, Associate Professor of Preventative Medicine at Rush Medical College. The letter’s signers also include Dr. William C. Roberts, Editor-in-Chief of The American Journal of Cardiology, Dr. Walter Willett, Chair of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Deborah Burnet, Chief of General Medicine and a pediatrician at University of Chicago, as well as the Hollywood immortalized doctor, Patch Adams. Their letter coincides with a McDonald’s shareholder meeting in Chicago where 14 institutional investors will introduce the first resolution ever to call on a major corporation to deal with its public health impacts as well as shareholder liabilities for these impact could carry. In a campaign coordinated by Boston-based Corporate Accountability International, the doctors describe the epidemic that alarms them: A full third of American kids are obese. And thanks to diets high in McDonald’s-style fast-food it’s estimated that one in threeAmerican newborns will develop Type II Diabetes in their lifetime. Last year Corporate Accountability International called on McDonald’s to retire its icon Ronald McDonald and halt junk food marketing to kids, including “happy meals.” It didn’t happen. Instead, this year the company pursued a “nutriwashing” strategy: introducing oatmeal with nutritional value no better than Snickers, and strawberry lemonade containing more sugar than Coca-Cola. In recent years, McDonald’s has apparently extended, not cut back, its reach into children’s minds and mouths. A study found that in 2009, small children were exposed to up to 25 percent more McDonald’s ads than in 2007. In 2006 fast food companies spent an estimated $2.3 billion marketing specifically to children, with McDonald’s alone spending $400 million. The White House and the Federal Trade Commission are both recommending an end to junk food advertising to children, with the FTC preparing new voluntary guidelines for the nutritional quality of food that’s marketed to children. But there’s no reason to believe a self-regulating approach can work. After all, McDonald’s committed to reducing junk food marketing to kids five years ago. We see where that landed us. “We’re in the middle of a public health crisis that is exacting a crippling human toll,” says Dr. Donald W. Zeigler, director of Prevention and Healthy Lifestyles at the American Medical Association. He goes on to fault “McDonald’s empty promises.” Unlike doctors, McDonald’s hasn’t had to swear the Hippocratic Oath, but our kids’ health depends on our holding it to account. You can help at: http://www.lettertomcdonalds.org Isn’t it time we start listening to doctors and stop listening to clowns? Originally published by the Huffington Post on May 9, 2011

As the Occupy Wall Street enters its fourth week, the meta-narrative around the rapidly spreading movement is beginning to take shape. From CNN to Fox News to many protestors themselves, one central slogan is sticking: corporate greed. During an inspiring visit to Zoccutti Park, we saw abundant posters with slogans like “Another Mother Against Corporate Greed” to “Corporate Greed is the Vampire.” OWS has historic potential. It’s already succeeding in raising questions typically buried by the mainstream media. We want it to gain power fast, but much will depend on how its core message gets framed. As linguist George Lakoff argued in his seminal book Don’t Think of an Elephant , “frames” have enormous power. Unfortunately, smashing “corporate greed” is not only limiting, but we fear it’s bound to fail. The “we are virtuous, you are evil” message is admittedly, a great way to get people fired up. But does it get us where we need to go? Recall, by contrast, the Civil Rights movement. Dr. King didn’t rail against the racists; he demanded the end to laws that allowed racists to damage people. Going to great lengths not to demonize foes, he called on Americans to live up to our own ideals. And, on a deeper lever, is greed really the problem? We don’t think so. A greed frame diverts eyes from the rules that have enabled all that nasty greed free reign. Surely our species should know by now that not just a few of us but most of us will behave badly given the right — i.e. wrong — conditions. Think only of “ordinary, family-loving” people taking part in mass murder and torture, from the Holocaust to Abu Ghraib to lab experiments in which everyday people — most, not a small minority — have acted in ways most of us also find horrifying. Before the banking debacle, would those who devised and pushed toxic derivatives have scored noticeably worse on a greed scale than any of us? Probably not. It’s just that they were set up with precisely the conditions proven to bring out greed and recklessness, big time. So let’s call the crisis what it is: the rise of privately held government. It’s happened in part because for decades Americans have been told, and too many got swept up in the fairy tale, that we have to turn over our fate to a force that works on its own without us: the market. It’s “magic,” Ronald Reagan assured us, is all we need. Once we buy that notion, we’re done for, for wealth accrues to wealth to wealth until we end up with a society that a 2005 Citigroup report famously dubbed a “Plutonomy,” in which the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. And an America where inequality is now greater than in Pakistan or Egypt , according to the World Bank. And we’ve allowed that tight economic grip to buy political muscle: From warfare to healthcare — in our privately held government — corporations sway public decision making via political contributions and lobbying — now with two dozen lobbyists for every member of Congress. By influencing elections, they also put in place presidents appointing justices to the Supreme Court who, for example, ruled in the 2010 Citizens United decision (which we’d like to rename “Citizens Defeated”) unleashing corporate campaign spending. So we arrive at the hard spot about which FDR warned us back in the ‘30s: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism.” As Naomi Klein recently said , the “sky is the limit” for the OWS movement. So let’s get be really clear: Our challenge is to go beyond Occupy Wall Street — we’ve got to Occupy Democracy. Taking to heart the words of Civil Rights movement hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), “democracy is not a state; it is an act,” let’s mobilize the biggest 99 percent movement America has ever seen. Let’s make sexy and urgent the only viable route to Occupy Democracy: Getting money out of politics so the 99 percent can be heard. We need to tell every legislator in Washington or wannabe that our support depends on their support for Fair Elections Now legislation — now pending in both chambers. With 70-plus co-sponsors in the House, the law would allow a viable candidate to run for office with public financing and therefore not bought and paid for by Big Money. But that’s not enough. Americans also need a positive, do-able vision of where such a movement can take us. That’s why “Take Back the American Dream” seems to be catching fire. A term that captures what see emerging, and working, because it aligns with who we humans really are, is Living Democracy — democracy no longer as something done to us or for us but a culture of mutual responsibility we are together creating. It’s beginning to show up all over the world, in spirit and in action and in fast-multiplying OWS protests. The opposite of “privately held government” — its transparency and ongoing dispersion of power are proven to bring out the best in us. Originally published by the Huffington Post on 10/13/2011

We’ll be living for decades, or longer, with the consequences of the BP disaster. That much seems clear. So the question now is, how — how will we proceed after Deepwater Horizon? What lessons will we take in and use? Randy Kennedy, in the New York Times’ Week in Review suggests one possibility. He likens BP’s reckless pursuit of oil to the obsession that brought down Captain Ahab in his pursuit of Moby-Dick. The lesson we still haven’t learned, Kennedy implies, is a moral one: the dangers lurking not only in oil hunters’ greed and in the hubris of believing we can control nature, but in our own self-indulgence as well. Kennedy closes with the admonition from Columbia University’s Melville expert Andrew Delbanco — that the BP horror is in part of our own making because, “we want our comforts but we don’t want to know too much about...what makes them possible.” In the same issue, Thomas Friedman seconds the point in his it’s-our-fault column “ This Time is Different. ” While greed, hubris and denial have contributed to the worst single environmental catastrophe in our history, to suggest they are “causes” gets us nowhere. A character diagnosis is the evasion, the real denial, we can’t afford. For one, it leads to despair — since few of us can imagine the end of human greed, hubris, or our tendency to deny what’s uncomfortable. Worse, the diagnosis diverts us from the first essential step in avoiding continuing global ecocide: that we accept what we now know about our nature and work with that. We know, for example, that concentrated power and lack of transparency bring out the very worst in us. Yet we’ve fallen for an economic and political doctrine with rules certain to speed both. Nowhere is that concentration more evident than in the fossil fuel industries, where, in 2004, just five companies controlled two thirds of gasoline sales. Their economic might dwarfs that of most countries. Such concentrated economic power infuses and distorts political decision making in its interests. So we’ve ended up creating the systemic danger FDR warned us against: “the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their [the people’s] democratic state itself.” That “in its essence, is fascism,” he told Congress in 1938. Such concentrated power is at the root of what has greased not only massive public subsidies for Big Oil — pushing aside safer, renewable energies — but also BP’s ability to stack up egregious safety violations with impunity. Corporate lobbyists for companies like BP have become so powerful, that in 2009, for every single legislator elected to look out for our common interests, two dozen, mostly corporate, lobbyists spent $3.5 billion working Congress for their private interests. That sum has doubled in less than a decade. We humans can’t change our nature but we can change the rules that bring out the worst in our nature. So rather than focusing on “greed or hubris” as a cause of this disaster, let’s tackle the systemic problem that lets these traits triumph: rules that encourage concentrated power - such as those tolerating monopoly power and corporate secrecy — and its sway over public choices. Let our takeaway from the BP nightmare be that we as a people get serious about removing the power of private wealth in our nation’s governance: enacting, for example, the Fair Elections Now Acts, pending in both houses of Congress that would usher in voluntary public financing of congressional elections. Only as we move to democratic accountability do we have a fighting chance to enact commonsense rules to keep power dispersed, mandate transparency, and align our need for energy resources and basic fairness with nature’s unbendable rules. This, not redesigning our nature, is the road to preventing another Deepwater Horizon. If I’m right, maybe I need to become more nuanced in my objections to a focus on character; for there is part of our moral makeup that sure needs fortification: courage. To move toward democracy by and for the people, and against established interests, takes guts. Yes, we’ve been told that the “meek shall inherit the earth,” but I’ve become convinced that if that turns out to be true, it will be a scorched earth. The only human beings who will be able to inherit a flourishing earth are the courageous. So let’s bulk up our civil courage and go for real democracy. Originally published by the Huffington Post on 06/15/2010

The normally closed Supreme Court opened a crack last week, as Clarence Thomas defended the 5-4 decision clearing away limits on corporate spending to influence elections. “If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group,” he said, “you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association.” And “if all of you formed a partnership,” it would be the same. Then he asks rhetorically, “But what if you put yourself in corporate form?” He implies the answer would not change. “It’s wrong,” he argues, to make any distinction. The “ultimate precedent is the Constitution.” But, Justice Thomas, democracy itself depends on our making distinctions about who can influence political decisions, as the Court has done for many decades. (What about the 1933 Hatch Act curtailing political activity by government employees?) And the most critical distinctions? If I speak out as a citizen, or join with others and decide “to speak, just as a group,” I am choosing to further democratic decision making by adding my voice. Democracy’s foundation is the belief that citizens are able to deliberate and choose what is best for society as a whole . And indeed Americans often vote with this goal foremost—voting what they think is right, not necessarily in their narrow self-interest. But if I form a corporation, or own shares in one, my purpose is utterly different. Partly, I seek to shield myself against personal financial liability and to enjoy other legal advantages for financial gain. These very different purposes and protections are among the reasons a corporation is not a citizen, nor is it a group of citizens; and why it cannot vote or sit on a jury, for example. How can democracy permit an entity that cannot itself vote to have the power to sway voters and power over what a candidate might dare to say without risking a billion-dollar backlash? You argue the Constitution is the “ultimate precedent.” But the Constitution doesn’t mention corporations, at the time they didn’t exist as independent entities. Within a few decades many founders, including Thomas Jefferson began to see how corporate power could subvert democracy. “I hope [that] we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations,” Jefferson said, “which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength and [to] bid defiance to the laws of our country.” It seems inconceivable that founders would approve the corporate influence in elections that you have just approved. You suggest that the Supreme Court majority is expanding freedom and core democratic values. No. The Court’s decision threatens my freedom to know that my purchases and investments don’t fund a corporation’s political speech to defeat my values. But this is the least of my freedoms lost. The decision undermines my choice to be part of a democracy in which each of us can be heard, a voice not overwhelmed by entities whose resources rival those of whole nations, and whose interests lie not in a healthy democracy but in enhancing their markets. The Court’s decision also helps to deprive me of the freedom to choose among a range of political candidates far wider than those favored by our society’s vast concentrations of wealth. In a word, it deprives me of the very essence of democracy itself— effective voice and choice. Citizens stunned by this assault on democracy are devising a range of response. Listening to them, Rep. Michael Capuano (D-MA), for example, is pursuing legislation to require broad consent by shareholders before a corporation can engage in political spending Many Americans feel powerless in the face of such loss. We are not. One immediate step we can take right now step is to ensure passage of the bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act— S.752 , H.R.1826. It establishes a workable system of small donations combined with voluntary public financing for congressional races. It builds on an approach that’s already proven itself in three states. (Watch this inspiring example of its impact.) The Fair Elections approach has not been blocked by the Supreme Court. While it can’t avert all the threats embodied in the Count’s decision, it enables a candidate to run for office without becoming beholden to corporate money. That is huge . So let’s not allow the Justices’ dangerous logic to undermine democratic decision making America needs now more than ever. We can commit to choosing elected leaders who grasp what we’ve lost and would seat justices eager to reclaim the long precedent shielding us from this travesty. Right now, we can press our representatives to support the Fair Elections Now Act. We can back the excellent work, for example, of Change Congress Now , YouStreet , and Publicampaign.org . Originally published by the Huffington Post on 04/10/2010

Early in his Peace Prize speech Barack Obama told the world that “war, in one form or another, appeared with the first man.” The president was wrong. And his mistake has huge consequences. Anthropologists conclude that during roughly 90 percent of Homo sapiens’ evolution, for nearly 200,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in small bands. There were so few of us that it’s unlikely we would have had reason to fight over food or territory. While there are signs of individual violence, scholars have yet to find evidence of warfare during this period. Moreover, during this long stretch as hunter gatherers, our social forms were highly egalitarian. Both food sharing and cooperative child rearing were the norm. U.C. Berkeley Primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and others, argue that what most distinguishes our species, relative to other primates, is the extent of our cooperation and empathy. Yes, of course, we humans, as Obama underscored, can also be unspeakably cruel. But, in large measure we shape ourselves according to ideas we hold. Thus, in repeating the myth that our species began in warfare, Obama reinforces resignation to it. Believing we are brutes because we arose from blood-thirsty origins may well leave many assuming the very goal of peace is naïve. “Oppression will always be with us,” said Obama. Imagine what his speech could have achieved, and what he as our president could achieve, if building on our real origins.President Obama could have laid out for us the good news in hard facts: We now have perspective on the grand (or not so grand) sweep of human history. We can see that whether our deep, pro-social proclivities are tapped, or instead our capacity for evil is triggered, depends in large measure on the rules and norms we ourselves create. Certain norms proven to evoke the worst in us are becoming ever clearer, including these three: Extreme inequalities in power—as in 1 percent of American households controlling as much wealth as the bottom 95 percent, or as in dictatorships and absolutist theocracies elsewhere; Actions hidden from scrutiny and sanctions by anonymity and other means—as in an opaque U.S. financial industry selling billions in arcane financial “instruments” many knew to be toxic; Blaming only the evil “other” without acknowledging one’s own capacity for evil—as in this speech, Obama’s declaring that the U.S. “has never fought a war against a democracy” but not acknowledging that we have helped topple democracies (Chile and Guatemala, for example). President Obama could much more strongly have called us all to identify and uproot these and other conditions shown to bring forth the worst in human beings. While speaking generally about the contribution of economic security and human rights to peace, he also reinforced belief in our warring nature, which seems beyond our power to change. Imagine if instead President Obama had focused our attention on achieving what is completely under our control—uprooting conditions like the three above—and encouraging us, that in so doing, we are reducing the power of evil in the world. Originally published by Huffington Post on 3/18/2010

Want to know the root of the global economic crash? Go to Florida. Yes, the state’s become infamous for its manic house “flipping,” but in a deeper sense the crash can best be understood by paying attention to other disturbing news from Florida. Just drive northwest from Miami to Immokalee. If you’ve bought tomatoes this winter, there’s a good chance they were harvested here. And there you’ll see it. We all know that when a big tree is toppled in a storm, its roots get exposed. In today’s financial hurricane, big roots are sticking out of Immokalee’s sandy soils. There, this week, as part of a delegation sponsored by Just Harvest, suddenly abstract economic “forces” got very real for me — embodied in human lives, human faces. Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney General Doug Molloy described as “slavery, plain and simple”* some of what is happening here: For locking up, beating and threatening field workers— some for up to two years — seven prosecutions in a dozen years have sent men to prison. I got to see the “legal” parts of what’s going on. Twenty thousand farm workers live in Immokalee, and each day many gather at dawn hoping a grower will choose them to pick tomatoes till dusk. They are legally covered by the minimum wage, but in practice, they often don’t even get that. Nor do they benefit from many of the other labor laws that protect the rest of us. They must work as fast as possible to fill and haul as many 32-pound buckets as possible, each bringing them 40 to 50 cents. I’d thought I was pretty strong but was humbled by lifting even one over my head for throwing into a truck; and to earn even $6.00 an hour I’d have to lift and haul 100 such buckets in an eight-hour day. But there’s a theft of dignity happening off the fields, too. I toured a sample of workers’ living quarters: a dilapidated, grungy, unheated, un-air-conditioned two-room, 300 square-foot trailer. Eight guys sleep here, and from them the landlord rakes in a total of almost $1,300 a month. Why do I call this modern-day form of slavery and its legal face — this kind of gross injustice — the secret of today’s imploding economies? It is simple. A market economy only works if people — all people — can participate in it, and do so from a position of real choice not coercion and fear. And that’s exactly what’s been disappearing from the face of the earth. Why? Because of the fantastical notion that a market driven largely by a single rule, by highest return to existing wealth, can sustain itself. It cannot, for wealth returns to wealth until, as in Monopoly, the game abruptly ends. Inequalities have been worsening — in some cases like the U.S. and India quite rapidly — in two-thirds of the world’s nations in the last 15 years. The gap between compensation to CEOs and workers has leapt ten-fold in three decades. This isn’t just an equity debacle; it is a market debacle. When one family, the Walton’s, controls as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans, and when 400 people control as much as half the world’s population, markets get wacky: Not only do customers for even sweatshop-made goods shrink, but ever-more concentrated private-money power infuses itself into public decision making; it then uses that clout to further remove transparency and commonsense safeguards against shady financial instruments, modern-day enslavement, and monopoly control — all of which contribute to the death of a market. This is why I see the treatment of Immokalee workers as the embodied cause of our global financial meltdown. Their plight should alert us! We’ve drunk the market Kool-Aid — the baseless idea that the market can work without us. Without citizens placing values around the market, wealth won’t circulate. Nor can we all participate in the market from the ground of dignity. Without that, a storm will blow in sooner or later that will fell even the biggest tree. Let’s have the guts to examine the roots now exposed. ——— If you’d like to stand with these workers and for yourself, you can. (Note that even if tomato pickers doubled their per bucket pay, their share would come to just over one percent of the $2.00 a pound you might pay for tomatoes.) Here’s our opportunity: The human rights-award-winning organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has in the last four years won commitments from five giant food companies to pay a penny a pound more for tomatoes. But the growers’ association refuses to let its members pass that fairer pay on to the workers. So on Monday, March 9, Coalition members showed up at the office of the Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist (R), who had long refused their repeated requests to meet. Click here to email Governor Crist today! Ask him stand up for these workers’ rights and to stand up for all of us: for the best thing that could happen to our sick economy is for those at the bottom to advance. Click here to download the petition (pdf) and collect signatures in your own community. * The quote from Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney General Doug Molloy may found in an article (9/3/08) which requires purchase from the archives of Newspress, Ft Meyers, FL. UPDATE FROM FRANCES MOORE LAPPE 4/7/09: After my visit and an action at the capitol by the farmworkers (3/35/09), Governor Crist issued a letter of support. Check with the Coalition of Immokalee Farmworkers for the action we all can take to support them. Frances Moore Lappe is author of Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad and Diet for a Small Planet, among many other works. Visit her at www.smallplanet.org. Originally published by Huffington Post on 4/9/09

Tuesday’s big partisan swing has pundits and public alike asking: So, what’s the lesson? With a sea of money sloshing through the campaigns, but not necessarily bringing the biggest spenders into office, some might be tempted to suggest money doesn’t matter after all. Big mistake. And it’s one Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics , made recently on NPR‘s On the Media . Specifically, the question posed in the segment was whether money can buy elections. The Freakonomics brand is all about using surprising data to cleverly refute popular assumptions, and, true to form, Dubner said no. According to research by, among others, his Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt, outspending your opponent actually has a very minor effect on election outcomes. But Dubner misses what matters most. The fact that the bigger spender isn’t necessarily the victor has been known for some time. But while money may not always buy electoral victory (as Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina both found out, very expensively, in California) it does something even worse: It buys candidates . Outside of the independently super-rich, that money comes mainly from large corporations with large corporate interests. Let’s be clear: When these corporate entities give money to political candidates, it’s not a donation — it’s an investment. The winner of an election, whether he outspends his opponent or not, feels beholden to the interests that got him elected. It’s precisely that sense of dependency on your underwriters that corrupts the system. After all, if that candidate wants to get reelected, he or she is unlikely to turn against those funders, and so the unhealthy cycle continues. Certainly the underwriters get it: A recent poll by Zogby International showed that “according to nine in ten business leaders surveyed, corporate America contributes to political campaigns to gain access to influence the legislative process; to avoid adverse legislative consequences; or to promote a certain ideological position.” Yet even among these influencers “(51%) disagree that corporations, unions, and trade associations should give unlimited and undisclosed contributions to other organizations to be spent on campaign advertisements.” And there’s another way big-money private financing of elections perverts democracy. It’s a very practical one. The need to spend massively, even if not as much as your opponent, means our legislators are spending roughly one-third of their time in office, not working for us, the people, but raising money instead. Instead of being lawmakers, the system turns them into fundraisers. Just as perverse: Our high-priced elections also deny us just the kind of leader we most need now — fresh-thinking, smart, committed, feet-on-the ground folks who might just live next door. The need for big bucks, again, even if not THE biggest, blocks keeps untold number of such talented — but not money-connected — leaders from ever having a chance to run. They can’t afford the price of admission. The three states with public financing of elections for their legislation have proven the transformative effects of giving regular citizens a chance to lead. In Maine, for example, Deb Simpson, a single mother and former waitress was able to run for the legislature in 2000 and win. (See the video about Deb below.) She’s so respected that she’s been re-elected four times and has served on the state’s judiciary committee; now she’s a leader on the environment. Can anyone imagine Mike Bloomberg having won in New York if he’d been a bus driver instead of a billionaire? The Supreme Court’s recent ruling, allowing for unlimited corporate campaign contributions, has opened the floodgates to a system already awash in big money. The good news is that legislation like Maine’s could start loosening the grip of corporate money. A bill already exists, with 166 co-sponsors in the House! The Fair Elections Now Act has passed the House Administrative committee and could go to a vote if enough citizens get behind it. Dubner makes some flip and frankly bizarre comparisons — calling current levels of campaign spending “pitifully small” compared to what Americans probably spend on chewing gum. But this is serious, really serious, and the quantity of money is only part of the problem. Regardless of whether money is the deciding factor in most elections, in a contest between two corporately funded candidates, we all lose. So, does money buy elections? It’s the wrong question, distracting us from the deeper corrupting influence that money unarguably has. Money makes politicians beholden to outside interests, distracts them from their jobs, and shuts good people out. What Dubner misses and what all this adds up to is the death of trust — the lifeblood of democracy — and that’s the one thing money can’t buy. (Below is a short video about Deb Simpson and the powerful effect of clean elections from Invisible Hand Media. And we can each weigh in right now at FairElectionsNow.org for a democracy that answers to us.) Originally published by the Huffington Post on November 5, 2010

Libertarians must be ecstatic, even if a bit envious that the Tea Party’s getting all the credit. Anti-tax groups are protesting loudly and calls for “limited” government, and even for cutting the federal government by half — ala Glenn Beck — are stirring the passions of frustrated Americans. The slogans may have a lot of appeal... until we try to get our heads around question Number One: Hmmm, and where would we begin? With the Department of Transportation?... And is that before or after it forces Toyota to stop selling cars that can suddenly go speeding off the road? With the Environmental Protection Agency... when 40 percent of America’s rivers and lakes are still too polluted to swim and fish in ? Or the Food and Drug Administration... when 76 million of us get sick and 5,000 die every year from contaminated food, costing an estimated $152 billion? Beyond the wildest naysayers, the longstanding debate about government isn’t, of course, about doing away with government entirely, but simply making it small enough to “drown it in the bathtub,” as Grover Norquist put it so colorfully in 2001. It is big government that’s the problem. That’s the Tea Partiers’ insistent message and a lot of people feel that way. But in some big ways, a focus on government’s size distracts us. Think about it: small government can oppress, too. After all, in late nineteenth-century India, British civil servants maintained control with just one of them for every three hundred thousand Indians. Government’s size doesn’t tell us much. What matters is whether government is accountable to citizens and whether we’re willing to stand up in its defense because we grasp its essential roles in democracy. So we’d best put sloganeering aside and explore: What are the appropriate roles of government in a thriving democracy? Beyond security and essential infrastructure, on which agreement is easiest, I’d start with government as fair-standard setter and enforcer. Thomas Friedman, hardly a man of the left, sums it up this way, “[G]overnment’s job is to set high standards, let the market reach them, and then raise the standards more.” If government fulfills this role well, it can be lean. Why? Mainly because it’s not burdened by damage control, by the costly and complex job of mop-up after things go awry. Take poverty, for example. The real cost for all of us is not government over-reaching; it is government inaction. By 2008, almost 40 million Americans were living in poverty — many more than the entire Canadian population — and that was before the Great Recession took its toll. Set aside, if you can, the incalculable human suffering and consider some of what we can tally up. So many American children are poor — with one-half dependent on food stamps at some point in their upbringing — that the cost to the U.S., counting only that from lost economic output, higher health care expenditures, and the impact on crime, is estimated at nearly $500 billion a year —or most of our defense budget. We know how to make government work for us to reduce costly poverty because we’ve done it. Remember the 1960s War on Poverty — naysayers’ proof of government ineptitude? Actually, Americans cut the poverty rate in half during that decade. Similarly, enforcing standards to protect the environment is a steal compared to the mega-billions needed to deal with the messes made possible by lax government. One in four of us lives within four miles of one of these messes — officially designated toxic waste sites. “Superfund” cleanups of the hazards have already cost tens of billions of dollars since they began in 1980. And, over the next thirty years, an additional $250 billion may be needed for as many as 350,000 such sites, reports the Environmental Protection Agency — some of which will be paid for with our tax dollars and much of the rest passed on to us in higher prices. Only accountable government can prevent costly and people-killing poverty and environmental degradation. Government’s role as fair rule-setter to create opportunity for all doesn’t mean “big.” At the top, it means, for example, keeping the market free by standing up to monopoly. Take the monopoly on seeds. If you eat, this one matters to you. One company, Monsanto, has patents on genes in seeds making up 80-90 percent of our main feed crops. And the cost of monopoly? Since 2001, prices for these seeds have risen five to almost seven times faster than the consumer price index. Here, we need government to stand up for both us and a free market. Its size has nothing to do with it. And at the “bottom” where the workers are? Ensuring a federal minimum wage that keeps up with real costs of living and protecting our right to organize without fear — neither requires “big” government. Plus, government can serve citizens well as an efficient fiscal agent. Medicare’s administrative costs are significantly lower than those of large private insurers and HMOs. And for Social Security, administrative costs amount to less than 1 percent of benefits. That’s a tiny fraction of what privately managed investment accounts charge. Finally, government can serve a uniquely powerful role as public convener to devise solutions to problems, including the choice of what we protect as a right versus what is a commodity available only to those who can pay. All western industrial countries, except the U.S., have chosen to make health care a right, saving themselves vast sums — on average about half what we pay for health care per person — and some achieving greater longevity, too. And about food? In 22 countries food is now a constitutional right, though still relatively unenforced. But in 1993 when citizens of Brazil’s fourth largest city Belo Horizonte elected an administration that had run on the platform of food as right of citizenship, things began to change. Government didn’t suddenly balloon. With government serving as convener and rule setter, civil society, business and government collaborated to make sure good food is within the reach of the poor. Within a decade their innovations had helped reduce deaths among young children by 60 percent. The cost to the city? About one penny per day per resident. Maybe we here in America could hit on great bargains like this one — once we drop the unhelpful debate over big versus small government and get down to the real question: How do we make government accountable to us? Originally published by the Huffington Post on 05/15/2010

For a world of unprecedented hunger where more than one in seven of us now go without the food we need... As we come together to offer Thanksgiving for all of the plenty we share here today, our hearts seek the courage to end the growing hunger that kills so many millions and makes us all poor. We know how to do it, for hunger is needless. Our world harvests plenty for all to eat well. Together let’s now use our common human caring to take the thrilling risks to be champions for life. To the tune of “We Gather Together,” a common Thanksgiving hymn based on a 16th century Dutch song; with new words by Richard Rowe and Frances Moore Lappe Originally published by Huffington Post on 11/24/2009