Kim Klein and the Commons

One Important Command

2012-01-12T14:57:00.000-08:00

I cannot remember a time when I was not fascinated by religion. From the time I could read, I read the Bible, but also books from other religious traditions that were written for children, and later commentary and religious philosophy. I was greatly encouraged in my interest as I grew up in a religious family. My father was a Christian Scientist and my mother a Methodist. We usually attended the Methodist Church. Both my parents and my grandmother, who lived with us quite a bit of the year, believed that every religious tradition had something to offer.

Even now, I read something from the Bible every morning. I rarely speak of this as I am not at all interested in evangelizing, but sometimes I feel I must speak up when I read about people claiming to be Christians, such as Mike O'Neal, the Republican Speaker of the Kansas State House. Mr. O’Neal wrote recently in a widely circulated e-mail: “At last -- I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president,” and then quoted from Psalm 109: “May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow." He went on to say, “Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN?” (O’Neal is more famous for his racist insults to Mrs. Obama, for which he did apologize.)

To use Bible quotes to shore up positions on various social issues is not unusual. Certainly all gay and lesbian people are more than familiar with the dubious interpretation of Leviticus 18:22 condemning homosexuality but most may not be as aware of Leviticus 19:19 condemning wearing two different kinds of cloth together. (Death to polyester!) However, to be so utterly mean is unusual and troubling. What is even more troubling is the lack of condemnation for his words from other right wing Christians. Technically calling for the death of the President is a crime and others who have made even indirect threats against the life of a president have been arrested. Certainly he should be immediately asked to resign.

I contrast his Bible verse with the one I read this morning in Deuteronomy 15: 1-3: “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because God’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed.” The chapter goes on to say, “There need be no poor people among you….” Imagine if this verse were to be quoted widely, and policies created around it: every seven years, no foreclosed homes, no bankruptcy caused by medical bills, no student debt…the list goes on.

The fact is that the Bible can be made to say what we want it to say in order to shore up our own positions. To be religious means to be conscious of our bias as we read and to give that up as much as possible in order to receive the messages that God wants us to hear. One message that all scriptures have in common is the overarching theme that we are to love each other. This is not easy: that’s why it has to be commanded. I am commanded to love even Mr. O’Neal. He is commanded to love President and Mrs. Obama. To say out loud that you are religious means that you can be held accountable to this standard of love. In this election year, I have set for myself a task, which is to speak out from a place of faith when I see a misuse of scripture. In doing so, I must be willing to be held accountable myself and I know I will be found wanting. But the price of not speaking out is allowing vitriol and racism to be promoted under the banner of religion and I cannot let that go by unchallenged.

Wellness

2012-01-05T15:26:00.000-08:00

The highly regarded “Wellness Letter” published by the UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, generally publishes articles about blood pressure, smoking, what foods absorb most pesticides, and the like. It is only eight pages, but packed with useful and accessible information. In the most recent issue, the lead story was about PSA tests and the other main story about the nutritional value of garlic, which they call a “foodaceutical.” I highly recommend subscribing, but that is not why I mention this newsletter.

The last page of the newsletter has a column called “The Last Word.” That most recent column looks at the causes of premature death and has this to say, “One overlooked cause is lack of money. More precisely, being poor and/or having less than a high school education—what researchers call low socioeconomic status (SES)—is a health hazard, especially when it comes to heart health.” Of course poor people have worse health because they have worse or no health care, they hold more dangerous jobs, and may live in neighborhoods with more pollution. Lack of access to nutritious food and the cheapness of fast food put poor people at much higher risk for obesity, high blood pressure and cancer. These and others are risk factors that come with or may be caused by being poor. But the article goes on to say that even when poor people decrease their risk factors, they are “still at about 50 percent higher risk than comparable well off people. This means that low SES increases the risk of heart disease independent other risk factors.”

They recommend that health care providers who work with poor people take their SES into account as a separate and major risk factor. And of course they mention that we will need to reduce income inequality to really address this concern.

The Wellness Letter is not the first or only place to mention the relationship between a shortened lifespan, heart health and poverty. But since I read this newsletter to get tips on how to be healthier myself, I perhaps was struck by it more or differently than when I have read about the effects of poverty on health in the past.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy asked a number of nonprofit leaders what resolutions the sector should have for 2012 and this is the one I contributed, in part because of reading this article.

Rather than focus on protecting tax incentives that primarily benefit the well-to-do, and fighting limits to the charitable deduction, nonprofit leaders should concentrate on addressing income inequality and the social problems that creates. Let us resolve to remember who we are: the voice of the common good. Our job is to propose answers to the question of how a country can guarantee all its inhabitants a life of freedom, security, and peace. We are smart enough to figure this out and, at 10 percent of the work force and well over a trillion dollars passing through our coffers every year, we are powerful enough to make it happen. This year, let’s be brave enough to actually do it.

Because, literally, lives hang in the balance.

The End of Economic Progress

2011-12-15T15:34:00.000-08:00

As we come to the end of 2011, I begin to think about 2012. I like changing over from one year to the next: I get a new calendar (I still use a paper calendar), I throw away or delete all the articles, newsletters and reports I was sent all year and thought I “should” read, but never did. I clean out my closet and give away clothes I didn’t wear and donate books I didn’t read. Anything that the word “should” is attached to (should read, should respond, should call, should look into) gets pitched. I make resolutions, but first I evaluate how well I did on the ones I made for the present year. Then I contemplate all that has changed before resolving how the next year will be different. Each new year is a chance to reinvent my life, a least a little.

This year I will use my process to create some commons resolutions. The information I need to consider can, for the most part, be found in the research of Pickett and Wilkinson, particularly in their stunning conclusion:

“Economic growth, for so long the great engine of progress, has, in the rich countries, largely finished its work. Further improvements in the quality of life now depend on community and how we relate to each other.” The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

Pickett and Wilkinson looked at a number of serious social problems and asked why these problems were so much worse in some developed countries and not in others? Put more directly: why is the United States the leader in infant mortality, homicide, prison rates, teen pregnancy, obesity, substance abuse? And the answer: Because we are also the leader in income inequality. (See Blog Post on Equality Trust for more details on their study).

A recent Christian Science Monitor reports, “The standard of living for American has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.” They go on to say that real median income is down almost 10% since the start of the recession and inflation has eroded peoples’ buying power by 3.25% since mid 2008.

To truly take in that economic progress has done its work requires sitting quietly for awhile and watching my thoughts swirl around. This is not a small insight and acting on it will require retooling how I think. For example, there is no real need for me to argue against capitalism—all the bad and all the good that it could produce, it has. In the developed world, capitalism is largely over. What this means is that there is no point for a wealthy person in the United States to become wealthier—she will not live longer, nor be less likely to be shot or die of a stress related illness or get divorced or suffer from alcoholism. The quality of life for everyone in the United States is going down and will continue to do so. For poor people (which we have more of every day) a drop in the “quality of life” is disastrous or even fatal.

As a person who makes her living in the nonprofit sector, I must ponder and discuss with others what programs we will create to promote rough social equity that are not about economic growth, what kind of wealth will we need to create in a post capitalist society, and how exactly will we pursue “a quality of life that depends on community and how we relate to each other.”

I intend to ponder this through the Winter Solstice and as the days begin (however incrementally) to grow longer, I will incrementally begin to think of resolutions that allow 2012 to make exponential changes in the direction of rough social equity. The gap between rich and poor is so deep and profound that we must adopt the motto of the 1960’s Apollo 13 mission in our work to change it: “Failure is not an option.”

Irrational Thoughts

2011-12-01T14:26:00.001-08:00

POP QUIZ: Who said each of the following?:

The USA is in serious danger of becoming "a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists."

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

“What I'm talking about is the order of deportation, the sequence of deportation. It is almost impossible to move 11 million illegal immigrants overnight. You do it in steps."

If you guessed, in this order: Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Michelle Bachman, you are right. (From MoveOn.Org, YouTube, the Nation, and the Washington Post.)

I could have put equally crazy quotes in for all the Republicans running for office, most of whom have endorsed adding 2000 miles to the wall between the US and Mexico to the tune of $25 billion, some form of flat tax, and war with Iran.

Gingrich’s quote is the probably the least serious in terms of policy and law, but is the most indicative to me of a dangerous trend in our country, which is to say things in a serious tone of voice that make no sense. He has put together two ridiculous, but also self-cancelling ideas and made them into one thought.

I know that it is possible to have contradictory or nonsensical thoughts—I do it all the time. Just yesterday, I ate a bag of potato chips even though I am trying to lose weight. I read the nutrition label and saw that these chips had 20% of my daily potassium and so told myself they were good for me. I also think my cat understands me and that my dog does not. Or, just last week I said I wanted to read more, but then spent a free evening watching sitcoms.

The difference between me and the Republican front runners is that I don’t believe my irrational thoughts and behavior should be codified into public policy and I am not going to run for office on a Potato Chip platform.

A commons frame calls for rational and respectful conversation amongst people who see each other as valuable and equal members of the human race. To figure out what policies, laws, behaviors and customs will most promote the common good while insuring individual rights requires a lot of discussion. A society based on a commons frame has many gray areas that must be worked out, and probably will have to be worked on for quite a long time.

The current trend toward saying things that make no sense serves a very rational, if evil, purpose: to stop discussion. Who can enter a discussion with someone who thinks a corporation is a person? Who can really talk with someone who thinks that the border between the US and Mexico should be electrified and have a sign on it that says, “This can kill you” as Herman Cain said recently? Or that “compassionate conservatism” is a form of big government, as Rick Perry noted in one of his earliest interviews?

So regular people cease to discuss politics, stop voting, and do not enter into the commons. We must fight this trend by having as many conversations with as many people as we possibly can, and watching in ourselves for those times when we say or do things that are irrational. It is through sharing our feelings, our history, our facts, that we together can create the policies, laws, structures and procedures that protect and promote everyone’s health and well being. Promoting this kind of conversation is the best way to continue to work for the 99%.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T13:43:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday, I celebrated my 58th birthday by going to a play called “How to Write A New Book for the Bible” by Bill Kain. Kain is a Jesuit priest and a well known writer. The premise is fairly simple: a man moves in with his mother as she becomes too frail to take care of herself after the death of his father. Over the course of the play, much is revealed about their family. The mother dies, which is bittersweet for everyone because they loved her very much and will miss her, but didn’t want her to suffer, and also now the son can return to his life in New York City. The premise is that the mother and father are as grand as any characters in the Bible and that the Bible is simply a very long story of a very big family. Every family’s story could be added to the Bible.

The idea that each family is of Biblical proportion is intriguing to me, and I think presents some suggestions of what “family” would be like in a fully commons society. First, there would be no secrets and all would be known. The Biblical heroes have serious shadow sides: King David was an adulterer, Noah was a drunk, Jacob was a liar and a sneak, Moses did not want to help his people escape from Egypt, Abraham let the Pharoah think his wife, Sarah, was his sister and let Pharoah take her to his harem, and the list goes on and on. Human beings doing their best, but only sometimes and other times acting pretty badly. Having no secrets would help everyone feel more normal and would result in far fewer lies as there would be nothing to cover up. We would know that love is constant, life saving, joyful but rarely unconditional. Ironically, knowing that would allow us to forgive and move on much more easily. We would, perhaps, find it easier to forgive ourselves and in so doing, create a world in which kindness was commonplace . The cliché of the human family would begin to have real meaning as we looked at each other and saw everyone as a relative.

This week we have possibly the largest family holiday in the USA—Thanksgiving. It is one of biggest days for domestic violence programs, for drunk driving citations, accidents and travel delays. A holiday of extremely dubious origin, it has become a time to simply have four days off in a row because unlike the birthdays of famous dead people, Thanksgiving can’t be moved to a Friday or a Monday.

I am not a big fan of Thanksgiving, but have come to accept it as something that most non-Native American people celebrate and some even enjoy. This Thanksgiving I will do my best to focus on being a member of a family that belongs in the Bible and use this holiday as a way to practice living a commons life as my current life. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Voter Suppression

2011-11-22T14:02:00.000-08:00

Today, we share some news from our friends over at Nonprofit Vote. They were highlighted in a recent article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy as a key resource for voter engagement in the nonprofit sector.

Read "Legal Efforts to Suppress Voting Should Draw More Concern From Charities." (PDF)

From the article: “Every other foundation and nonprofit, regardless of its mission, needs to understand and act on the threat to its ability to serve society when the basic premise of democracy in America is at risk.”

Path Wanderers

2011-11-10T13:12:00.000-08:00

After spending a fair amount of time at Occupy Oakland (“fair amount” being relative to me who almost never goes to demonstrations), I decided that I must do something entirely for the commons which would not be controversial. I chose to join a work party this weekend with a wonderful all volunteer organization called Berkeley Path Wanderers. Their membership dues of $5 per family insure that anyone can belong. They create, expand, maintain and repair the 140 stairways and public paths that run throughout the city of Berkeley.

I went to the designated site where we were installing stairs up a steep hill to connect one set of paths to another. I learned how to clear the space for a three foot long railroad- tie style step, make sure it was level and the right distance from the next step. It was harder than it looked and each step took about 25 minutes to install accurately. Fortunately I had a great partner who had installed many stairs and was generally very handy.

It was a beautiful fall day and the people were very nice and welcoming. But as for my wish that this would not be controversial, alas, no such luck. The leader of the work party told those of us who were new that at some point, a woman at the top of the hill would come out on her balcony and yell at us. She does not want this path installed near her house. We were instructed to ignore her. Many people have tried reasoning with her and every attempt to engage her makes her yell more. Sure enough, about 20 minutes after we started she came out on her deck and said, “You are in violation of Berkeley City Code 92436.5” and then, for emphasis, “Point 5!”. My stair partner said, “Point 5—that’s scary. Point 4, not a big deal.” We laughed. I looked up just to see what she looked like and she screamed, “Didn’t your mother teach you any respect? What about my privacy? You are invading my privacy!” I looked down quickly and got back to work.

The fact is that we are not in violation of anything—in fact the city of Berkeley loves Path Wanderers because they do so much work and they pay for everything. All the tools, the wood for the stairs, the storage shed where everything is kept between work parties—all paid for by volunteers who also do the work. A cross section of the public is maintaining a certain kind of public space through private donations with the blessing and protection of local government. To me, this in an ideal arrangement. It is the totally appropriate use of private donations and volunteer energy. The paths can be maintained by volunteer time and money for the sake of everyone in the community who likes to walk. Many of the paths are wheelchair accessible and most have benches along the way so you don’t have to be a big hiker to benefit from this work. Since they are throughout the city, there is almost no one who doesn’t live near a path.

I asked if the work parties often had trouble with neighbors. Not surprisingly the answer was no. Most people are glad to have a path near the house and certainly glad to have an existing path maintained or upgraded. However, sometimes people really object to the idea of the public being able to walk by their house and look in their yard or windows. The tensions between private and public, and the width and depth of the liminal space between those is the topic of many commons discussions. What belongs to me alone? What must I share? What must others share with me? How much more do I have when I share? Am I ever willing to have less so that others can have more?

After the work party, I walked by myself for awhile and enjoyed being alone. We often say “less is more” and there are many instances in which that is true. But also, “more is more.” The more public space there is, the stronger the social safety net, the more engaged people are in their communities, the more we all have, both for each of us alone and for everyone.

Reflections on OCCUPY Oakland

2011-10-27T11:54:00.000-07:00

By now if you are following the Occupy Wall Street movement you may be aware of the critical injury two-time Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen sustained two nights ago at a demonstration in Oakland. Footage of the incident from one of the news organizations covering the demonstration has been re-posted on Move-on.org.

As I noted in last week’s blog, I have just returned to Oakland and had intended to go to Occupy Oakland, which is four blocks from my office on Tuesday. My plans were thwarted when, to the shock of many people, the Oakland police moved in on the encampment at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday morning. In a press conference, the spokesperson for the police noted that they had mobilized 200 police for this action. Protestors were given a choice of leaving immediately with their belongings or being arrested. About 30 left and another 75 were arrested. So, 200 cops in full riot gear cleared out maybe 105 protestors. This, in a city that has no money, and a very progressive mayor, Jean Quan.

The protestors were camped at Frank Ogawa Plaza, which is a beautiful and well-used public space in front of city hall, circled by restaurants and other small businesses. Quite a few nonprofits including the East Bay Community Foundation have offices on or near this Plaza and it is a major BART (subway) stop. As with many public spaces, even prior to Occupy Oakland, it was already “occupied” by a dozen homeless people who hung out during the day and slept in doorways and on benches at night.

I went down Tuesday about noon. Barricades had been set up around the Plaza. Behind the barricades stood a phalanx of police in full riot gear. Inside the barricades, city workers dismantled what remained of the encampment. The police stood about two feet apart, their arms dangling above all the stuff they wear around their waist. What remained of the protestors stood on the sidewalk yelling at each other, the police and passersby. I was struck by the sight: a disciplined line of cops: mixed race, almost equal numbers of men and women, facing an unruly but nonviolent crowd of mostly African American young men and women.   The 99% turned on each other while the corporate fat-cats we denounce go on about their business.

I went again Wednesday night about 5:30. By then many of the protestors were back, and the mood was somber.   Scott Olsen had been wounded. Mayor Quan had shown herself capable of calling for military like intervention, to the shock of her supporters. You could even catch the occasional fume of tear gas. The protestors still trended young, but were majority white. I was very dressed up because I had done a presentation earlier so I wandered around particularly near the TV people. I hoped I would show up on Channel 5 because well dressed people at protests almost never do. (To my knowledge, I did not break that pattern.)   I talked with people, patted their dogs (of which there were quite a few) and met several dozen well-dressed older people in the crowd. The Hare Krishnas were serving food and people were making new posters.   The police were not in sight, although two helicopters circling overhead drowned out a lot of the commentary.

A little later I talked with a friend of mine who works for Jean Quan and asked what Jean was thinking. She said the first problem with the Occupy encampment is that there is nothing the city can agree to in order to get them to disperse. There are no demands to the city (to me, part of the genius of this movement).    Second, people had started to build fires at night for warmth and cooking and we are at the height of fire season. If something had caught fire, the entire camp would have been up in flames in a few minutes and people would have been hurt and killed. (Fire is a very real and scary prospect to Bay Area people who years ago witnessed 1000 homes go up in smoke in one evening).   Third, the numbers of people had overwhelmed the public bathrooms and port-a-potties. Fourth, dozens more homeless people had moved to the plaza, drawn by regular hot food and better sleeping conditions. Some fights had broken out. The restaurants on the plaza (which have been largely supportive, even supplying some food and coffee) were beginning to wonder how long this would go on.   The Mayor’s office (the Mayor herself is in Washington DC trying to round up federal money for Oakland) thought something terrible could happen and sought to prevent it. I had a glimmer of sympathy for the City officials. I don’t know why the camping protestors weren’t simply asked not to have fires, and why the city didn’t provide more port-a-potties, or ask the campers to expand their clean up committee to the bathrooms. But I do imagine that those people in charge of public health and public safety have very mixed feelings about any big gathering of angry people. Ironically, though, the most damage was done by those most sworn to protect us: the police.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has sought to have the 99% understand our common identity, but the reality is that in the 99% there are multiple and conflicting identities, motives and needs. For this movement to move to have a more revolutionary impact, those conflicts will have to be explored. Right now they are simply being exploited, and the one group that isn’t really suffering a great deal from OWS is the 1%.

Occupy Everywhere

2011-10-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

I have been on a long business trip for the last two weeks and haven’t been able to attend any of the “We are the 99%” gatherings, which have sprung up everywhere. The right wing clearly doesn’t know what to do with this movement and has resorted to using petty and cliché descriptions of the protestors as communists, lacking any demands, unfocused, and unsophisticated. From time to time, the protests are taken seriously and the protestors are arrested en masse. Clearly the powers-that-be have no idea what to do with this movement. Their efforts to be dismissive have run aground as “occupy” camps and rallies are now literally arising in every town and hamlet. No further proof of this is needed than the fact that next Saturday, Hendersonville, NC will have an “Occupy” movement made up mostly of retirees. Hendersonville is a beautiful little town of 10,000 people about 22 miles from Asheville. Like many towns in Western North Carolina, it has high unemployment and a high poverty rate, with pockets of affluence. With about ¼ of its population over 65, it has the feel of a retirement community. It is an unlikely place to find an “Occupy” protest.

I am in Asheville as we speak. Earlier today, I went by the Occupy Asheville site but it was pouring rain and really cold so I wished them well from my car rather than joining in. I admit, with some embarrassment, to being a person who really does not like to attend demonstrations, rallies and protests. When everyone is chanting, “What do we want?” I want to respond, “To put my arm down” or “A cup of coffee.” I have dragged myself to many demonstrations over the years but largely leave that part of movement building to others who seem to enjoy it. I do love the Occupy Wall Street movement, though, and may just have to pitch my tent in downtown Oakland when I get back.

Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University and author of, 'The Price of Civilization' captures the spluttering outrage of those who can’t believe the other 99% would ever dare say anything in his Huffington post op-ed,

“Here's a short note to the titans of Wall Street to help them understand what's happening.
Let me start with the Wall Street Journal, which seems to be the most confused of all. In its Friday edition, the Journal editorial board couldn't understand why the protestors would want to protest JP Morgan and hedge fund manager John Paulson. The Journal also couldn't understand why the protesters were failing to champion something as wonderful as the Keystone Pipeline, which the Journal assures us would create many jobs.

The protesters are annoyed with JP Morgan because it, like its fellow institutions on the street, helped to bring the world economy to its knees through unprincipled and illegal actions. The Journal editorial board apparently missed the news carried in the Journal's own business pages that JP Morgan recently paid $153.6 million in fines for violating securities laws in the lead-up to the 2008 financial collapse. JP Morgan, like other Wall Street institutions, connived with hedge funds to peddle toxic assets to unsuspecting investors, allowing the hedge funds to make a killing at the expense of their "mark," and the world economy.”
“Mr. Paulson actually made some extraordinary statements in the New York Times on Friday (hard even to believe the nonsensical quotations are correct, but there they are, in the paper of record). He too expressed befuddlement about the protests against his business dealings. Didn't the protestors know that he had created 100 high-paying jobs in NYC? 100?”

He goes on to say,

“What the protestors do know is that Mr. Paulson's success in shorting toxic assets bundled for gullible investors has netted him billions. In 2007, he reportedly took home $3.7 billion by betting against the U.S. mortgage market. And the protestors can also do their arithmetic. Paulson's take home pay was enough to cover not just 100 jobs at $50,000 per year but rather approximately 70,000 jobs at $50,000 per year. Nice try, Mr. Paulson, but the people in Liberty Plaza don't think your hedge-fund play is really worth the compensation of 70,000 people. Nor do they understand why hedge fund managers pay a top tax rate of 15% on their hedge-fund earnings.

The protestors are not envious of wealth, but sick of corporate lies, cheating, and unethical behavior. They are sick of corporate lobbying that led to the reckless deregulation of financial markets; they are sick of Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal asking for trillions of dollars of near-zero-interest loans and bailout money for the banks, but then fighting against unemployment insurance and health coverage for those drowning in the wake of the financial crisis; they are sick of absurdly low tax rates for hedge-fund managers; they are sick of Rupert Murdoch and his henchman David Koch trying to peddle the Canada-to-Gulf Keystone oil pipeline as an honest and environmentally sound business deal, when in fact it would unleash one of the world's dirtiest and most destructive energy sources, Canada's oil sands, so that Koch can profit while the world suffers. And they are sick of learning how many Republican politicians - the most recent news is about Herman Cain - are doing the bidding of the Koch brothers.

Here, then, Wall Street and Big Oil, is what it comes down to. The protesters are no longer giving you a free ride, in which you can set the regulations, set your mega-pay, hide your money in tax havens, enjoy sweet tax rates at the hands of ever-willing politicians, and await your bailouts as needed. The days of lawlessness and greed are coming to an end. Just as the Gilded Age turned into the Progressive Era, just as the Roaring Twenties and its excesses turned into the New Deal, be sure that the era of mega-greed is going to turn into an era of renewed accountability, lawfulness, modest compensation, honest taxation, and government by the people rather than by the banks.

That, in short, is why Wall Street is filled with protesters and why you should wake up, respect the law rather than try to write it, and pay your taxes to a government that is ruled by people rather than by corporate power.”

Resources from IPS

2011-10-18T15:05:00.000-07:00

Today we share the latest resources from our partners from the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. Their research gives some background to what’s being pushed for down in New York City’s Zuccotti Park and around the world.

“No budget cuts until millionaires and corporate tax dodgers pay their fair share.”

Our message and program focus for the last five years has now become a national rallying cry, from Occupy Wall Street to the Halls of Congress. We are providing analysis, talking to legislators, and supporting “street heat” during this critical time.

Last week, a bill was introduced in the Senate to provide a “tax holiday” for companies that have parked over $1 trillion in offshore tax have havens after heavy lobbying from a coalition of Wall Street Companies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We’re pushing back in the news and on the streets. Call Congress today through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them “No Tax Holiday for Corporations That Destroy Jobs.”

We just released the report, “America Loses: Corporations That Take 'Tax Holidays' Slash Jobs" which shows that the 58 companies that got 70 percent of the tax breaks in 2004 destroyed almost 600,000 jobs.

Earlier this month, we released “The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging” exposing the ugly intersection of CEO pay and aggressive corporate tax avoidance. The report was covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, and literally hundreds of other media outlets.

Watch this short video of media highlights.

IPS and our partner project, The Other 98 %, has been providing infrastructure support to US Uncut and the Occupy Wall Street protests, and Chuck Collins recently made these comments at the Occupy Washington DC rally to 2,000 people in front of the Chamber of Commerce.

Occupy Wall Street!

2011-10-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

Today we share a guest post from Ann Holder, a friend of ours who celebrated Yom Kippur down on Wall Street and was touched by the commons spirit of the service and the crowds:

Easily 600 people celebrated the Kol Nidre in the plaza across from Zuccotti Park last night. I’m not a religious person, having already received a severe overdose of Christianity, and neither is my secular Jewish GF (who usually has a small identity crisis at the High Holy days).

But both of us were incredibly moved by this very public ritual of remembrance and atonement, the words of being born anew to move forward without the baggage of regrets or resentments from the past, in the context of this hopeful seizure of the Park, and the outpouring of both righteous anger and goodwill that have accompanied it.

The occupied park—as usual—had a host of activities going on: musicians jamming, people holding signs to be seen by the passing traffic and media, a group cooking, clusters of people talking. As seems to be the case in general, the Info Desk was very helpful and organized, directing traffic, needs, appeals in all directions. They sent us across the street to the Plaza, where five or six headlamp-wearing rabbis were surrounded by an enormous crowd.

Like the flavor of Occupy Wall Street itself, the Yom Kippur service was an immensely joyous and forgiving—if very talkative—circle of humanity. Surrounded by huge office buildings, no one complained about the noise, or the crowds, or the close quarters, or the occasional disruption as bursts of cheering wafted from the Park across the street. The Rabbis and Cantor competed with the roar of traffic, the rumble of generators from the food trucks that are now stationed next to the occupation 24/7. The occasional sound of a blender frothing a fruit drink, or the banging of massive garbage carts being used for Occupation Sanitation provided a fairly steady backdrop, along with the queries of passers-by who stopped to ask what was going on.

No amplification was allowed, so the entire service was done in a kind of call and response, with the inner circle shouting a repetition of rabbis’ words in unison so all could hear. Ritual phrases repeated by hundreds, echoed through the plaza, alternating with “Here’s what we’re going to do now,” or “Turn to page 32, 334 or 331,” the latter of course depending on the various versions of the machzor in use. People shared xeroxed copies, or dialed it up on IPads and smart phones.

The crowd was made up largely of PWC’s, people without children, which meant it was largely the very young adults and then elders like us. There were lots and lots of ‘older people,’ whatever that means these days, many who had brought their own chairs.

To our eyes, it looked like an exceptionally mainstream crowd considering that the Facebook invite had warned, “there may be disruptions and/or the possibility of police interference. Though it is highly unlikely, participants nonetheless risk the possibility of arrest. Please be prepared for that possibility.” It was largely white, though not entirely, and very, well, Jewish—as in lots of prayer shawls, yarmulkes, hardback copies of the service in tow.

The most interesting provocation was the public character of the event.

We left awed and wondering: What would it mean to do more of these kinds of things ‘in public’? Religious services, rituals, celebrations, classrooms—or even a variety of ordinary activities and conversations, all made available for respectful viewing or participating?

(And here I reference the number of people walking by, who had no idea what was going on, and seemed puzzled by the explanations, but who stayed to watch, and listen, with great interest and attention.)

It is this ‘new public’ that is one of the most hopeful and appealing aspects of the Occupation as it heads toward a fair weather weekend. The handmade signs continue to proliferate. Including, “Beware of Dogmatism.” There is now an informal sign gallery, where people leave their signs for display and re-use. Every kind of topic, lettering, color, idea, complaint—all different—mostly on brown cardboard.

Waiting in line at McDonalds, one of the only public bathrooms in the area, I met a young African-American woman carrying her sign. I asked if she was occupying. “Oh yes,” she said. I asked about staying over night. “No” she demurred, “I’m a high school student in Brooklyn. I come down here everyday after school, around 3:00.”

“How’s the homework going?” I asked.

She laughed and said, “pretty well,” adding, “Actually, that’s mostly what I do—sit and pull out my computer and write my homework.”

People are talking, learning to live in close quarters, in far from optimal conditions, to depend on each other, to enjoy the realm of the non-commercially social.

As we walked to the subway after the service, we passed a small group of young people talking excitedly and carrying their backpacks and bedrolls heading towards the park. With the warm weather, the growing crowds and the release of our regrets, anything seemed possible.

Unfortunately, the city/state/police will close this down as soon as they can figure out how. Note headline in the NY Times this morning: “Neighbors are Weary of Protest”

[Apparently the Park is privately owned by a developer who was mandated to build this sliver of ‘public space,’ and keep it open 24/7, as part of agreement with the city. The irony of this privately held public space offers a sanctuary of sorts.]

Wishes/Needs: We’d love to see a solidarity campaign emerge. A ‘Support Occupy Wall St. movement,’ with some strategizing about how to continue to maximize the PUBLIC character of this protest, and a mechanism for calling out a protective ring of civil disobedience when the moment comes for ‘clearing the square.’

Is any such thing in the works? Anybody know? Any ideas?

Truthout: Targeting Dissent

2011-09-22T14:39:00.000-07:00

The following article provides validation and analysis for those of us feeling that suppression of dissent is on the rise in some subtle and not too subtle ways. I thought of reporting on it and pulling out sentences to quote, but I was quoting too much and finally thought, “why not just reprint it?” The following was posted on the Surveillance in the Homeland blog. For full article links, please visit their website.

Targeting Dissent
Thursday 15 September 2011
by: Nancy Murray and Kade Crockford, Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts | Special Feature

Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the "Homeland" is a collaborative project with Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts.

How little - yet how much - has changed in the last 40 years. The COINTELPRO papers sound distinctly 21st century as they detail the monitoring of perceived threats to "national security" by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), Secret Service, and the military, as well as the intelligence bureaucracy's war on First Amendment protest activity.

The Church Committee investigation concluded in 1976 that the "unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order." In addition to massive surveillance, assassinations and dirty tricks "by any means necessary" included the creation of NSA "watch lists" of Americans ranging "from members of radical political groups, to celebrities, to ordinary citizens involved in protests against their government," with names submitted by the FBI, Secret Service, military, CIA, and Defense Intelligence Agency. The secret lists, which included people whose activities "may result in civil disturbances or otherwise subvert the national security of the US," were used by the NSA to extract information of "intelligence value" from its stream of intercepted communications.

We learned that there was, apparently, no easy way to get off the FBI's "security index." Even after the criteria for fitting the profile of a "subversive" were revised in the mid-1950's, the names of people who no longer fit the definition remained on IBM punchcards, and were retained in field offices as "potential threats." A card would only be destroyed "if the subject agreed to become an FBI source or informant" or in another way indicated a "complete defection from subversive groups."

By 1960, the FBI had compiled 432,000 files on "subversive" individuals and groups, and they were getting hard to handle. The following decade brought the promise of a technological fix. Under the guidance of the attorney general at the time, Ramsey Clark, the FBI explored the potential for "computerizing the master index." The goal of Clark's Interdivision Information Unit was to harness "automatic data processing" to put information about people collected from external and internal sources in a "quickly retrievable form."

Forty years later, the same "by any means necessary" mindset is harnessed to a national surveillance industrial complex that pumps out some 50,000 intelligence reports every day into the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database (which contains over a million names, including aliases). This error-ridden "master list" is not to be confused with the National Counterterrorism Center's Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE)system, which held 640,000 identities in March 2011. There are reported to be about a dozen terrorism watch lists or databases, and a single tip from a credible source is all it takes to get into one or more of them, while there is no reliable way to get out.

Given the legion of local, state and federal agents seeking out harbingers of "terrorist activity," the fact that espousing "radical" beliefs is grist for a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) and the virtually unchecked ability of FBI operatives to spy on groups without suspicion of wrongdoing, it is not surprising that the same kind of groups that were infiltrated and spied on by the FBI, NSA, CIA, and Department of Defense (DoD) under COINTELPRO are featuring in Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) investigations and fusion center data banks. The secrecy shrouding "national security" matters and the blurred jurisdictions that turn FOIA requests into pieces in a "pass the buck" shell game have made it impossible to get a clear picture of the extent of spying on protected First Amendment activity. But leaks and oversight reports indicate that a 21st century Church Committee would find a mention of any group that challenges the status quo somewhere in the vast domestic surveillance labyrinth.

In his 2010 report, "A Review of the FBI's Investigation of Certain Domestic Advocacy Groups," Glenn Fine, the (now retired - and not replaced) inspector general of the Justice Department, concludes that the FBI had "little or no basis" for investigating many advocacy groups and individuals, and that it made false and misleading statements to the public and Congress to justify its surveillance of an antiwar rally organized by a peace and social justice organization, the Thomas Merton Center of Pennsylvania. Not only did it routinely classify actions involving nonviolent civil disobedience as "Acts of Terrorism matters," it also, "relied upon potential crimes that may not commonly be considered 'terrorism' (such as trespassing or vandalism)" to get people placed on watch lists and their travels and interactions tracked.

Around the country, databases have swelled with information about antiwar and other protests that are classified as "potential terrorist activity." Intelligence oversight reports indicate that the Pentagon, which defined protest in training materials as "low-level terrorism activity," monitored and shared intelligence on groups ranging from Alaskans for Peace and Justice to Planned Parenthood, and used Army signals intelligence in Louisiana to intercept civilian cell phone conversations. It was revealed late in 2005 that the DoD had a secret database called Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) maintained by its Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) unit. Among its 13,000 reports were dozens detailing antiwar activity, along with photos of protesters. Meetings were sometimes infiltrated and information widely shared among partner agencies. Events classified as "threats" included the gathering of activists at a Quaker meeting house in Lakewood, Florida, to plan a protest of military recruiting at the local high school, a Boston protest outside a military recruiting center and a peace march through the streets of Akron, Ohio, tailed by local police who had been tipped off by the Pentagon.

Although CIFA was disbanded after the extent of its spying was revealed, the TALON database has been preserved and is expected to be part of a new repository of information housed at the Pentagon's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center. A notice in the Federal Register for June 15, 2010, states that the new repository will have a broad domestic and homeland security mandate and will amass personal data, citizenship documentation, biometric data and "reports of investigation, collection, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts by the DoD and other US agencies to identify or counter foreign intelligence and terrorist threats."

The Posse Comitatus Act's substantial limitations on the use of the military in domestic law enforcement appear to have all but vanished. Indeed, in Washington State, John Towery - a member of Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis who infiltrated and spied on peace groups in Olympia and shared information with the Army, JTTF, the FBI, local police departments and the state fusion center - is being sued by groups claiming his undercover surveillance violated the Act. A document leaked by WikiLeaks outlines how a "fusion cell" in a military police garrison integrated with local, county, regional, state and federal law enforcement can avoid the usual constraints on military intelligence by operating "under the auspice and oversight of the police discipline and standards." In the words of former Olympia City Council member T.J. Johnson, who was one of the people spied on by Towery, "The militarization of domestic law enforcement is one of the more disturbing trends in recent years."

Leaks from fusion centers reveal that peace groups share a place on surveillance databases with environmental groups, animal rights groups, student groups, anti-death penalty organizations, Muslim organizations, conspiracy theorists, Ron Paul supporters, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Nation of Islam and "Black Extremists." The Virginia Fusion Center cited various historically black colleges and universities as potential "radicalization nodes" for terrorists. The Maryland State Police, which works with the FBI as part of a JTTF and shares information with the state's fusion center, infiltrated protest activity, kept error-ridden "terrorist" files on activists and was notified by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about what groups should be monitored. Bette Hoover, a retired nurse who is a grandmother and Quaker antiwar activist, was surprised when documents came to light listing her as a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and direct action group The Ruckus Society - organizations she never belonged to - and placing her at demonstrations she had never attended. She now understands why she receives special scrutiny at airports.

Given the enormous dimensions of the secretive echo chamber in which flawed information is disseminated, it is difficult to see how the record can ever be set straight. Once a person is in a database, there seems to be no more inclination to delete all traces of that individual (assuming this is even possible) than to remove an IBM punch card from J. Edgar Hoover's security index. The FBI today wants to keep all Suspicious Activity Reports in its eGuardian database, on the grounds that even if there is no connection to terrorism or crime today, one may become clear tomorrow as it continues to add information to a person's profile and mine information about their associations.

In the age of the Total Information Awareness program, there appears to be no end to the appetite for data to be stored and mined, and all sorts of agencies want a share of the action. There was little attempt to rein in the NSA after whistleblowers Russell Tice and Thomas Tamm revealed an "overcollection" of data of staggering proportions through the Agency's access to the phone calls, text messages, faxes and emails affecting the communications of "all Americans" - including Bill Clinton. Data captured through the NSA's warrantless surveillance program has reportedly been systematically archived for data mining purposes.

The US Joint Special Operations Command is meanwhile establishing a mega fusion center at a secret address near the Pentagon which will serve as "the offense end of counterterrorism, tracking and targeting terrorist threats that have surfaced in recent years" and advising domestic law enforcement "in dealing with suspected terrorists inside the US." It will feature a cloud-computing network combining "all elements of US national security, from the eavesdropping capabilities of the National Security Agency to Homeland Security's border-monitoring databases."

Not to be outdone, the FBI has erected a giant Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW) containing 1.5 billion records and counting - much of it classified - including information collected through nearly 300,000 National Security Letters, criminal records, financial records, intelligence reports, gang information, terrorist information, open source data and more. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation has brought the data trove to light - the "future of the IDW is data mining" as the FBI uses "link analysis" and "pattern analysis" in the hunt for "pre-crime."

The neverending hunger for data may be one reason why the FBI, in late 2010, raided the homes and seized computers, cell phones and files belonging to peace and justice activists in Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan. Twenty-three of them have been issued with grand jury subpoenas, some for allegedly giving "material support" to a foreign terrorist organization by meeting with groups in Colombia and Palestine.

"We're conflating proper dissent and terrorism," warned former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley:

A secretive, unaccountable, post 9/11 homeland security apparatus has increasingly turned inward on American citizens. The evidence includes everything from controversial airport body scanners to the FBI's raids last September on antiwar activists' homes ... Agents are now given a green light, for instance, to check off "statistical achievements" by sending well-paid manipulative informants into mosques and peace groups. Forgotten are worries about targeting and entrapping people not predisposed to violence.... The massive and largely irrelevant data collection now occurring only adds hay to the haystack, making it even harder to see patterns and anticipate events. "Top Secret America" needs to ask itself who is more guilty of furnishing "material aid to terrorism: - its own operatives, or the activists and protesters it so wrongheadedly targets.

Also See: September 11: A Day of Death and a Decade of Constitutional Crisis

Income and Poverty in the US

2011-09-16T13:26:00.000-07:00

Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?
Eduardo Galleano, “Those Little Numbers and People.”

The census has just released a report called “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010” (PDF) and all the media has picked up various aspects of the data and its meanings. It is pretty much all bad news as far as I can see. Basically more people became poor and the poor got poorer. Here are just some of the statistics from that report:

There are 46 million Americans -- about one in six -- living below the poverty line. That's the largest number on record. More Americans are impoverished than at any point in nearly five decades of record-keeping.
Since the recession began in 2007, median household income has fallen 6.4%, to $49,445.
Some 5.9 million people between ages 25 and 34 live with their parents, an increase of about 25% from 2007. About 45.3% of those young adults would be in poverty if they lived alone.
About 49.9 million Americans lacked health insurance, the report also said. That number has soared by 13.3 million since 2000.

This poverty is racialized. African Americans experienced the highest poverty rate at 27%, up from 25% in 2009, and Latinos rose to 26% from 25%. Just fewer than 10% of white people lived in poverty, up from 9.4% in 2009. Asians were unchanged at 12.1 percent. 40% of black children and 33% of Latino children now live in poverty, compared to 21.6% of children overall. The infant mortality rate for black infants is twice that of white infants. In most measures of income, of unemployment, of assets, people of color have fared far worse than white people, expanding an already disgraceful gap.

Further, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has both the highest overall poverty rate and the highest childhood poverty rate of any major industrialized country on earth. This comes at a time when the U.S. also has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth with the top 1 percent earning more than the bottom 50 percent.

According to the latest figures from the OECD (PDF), 21.6 percent of American children live in poverty. This compares to 3.7 percent in Denmark, 5 percent in Finland, 5.5 percent in Norway 6.9 percent in Slovenia, 7 percent in Sweden, 7.2 percent Hungary, 8.3 percent in Germany, 8.8 percent in the Czech Republic, 9.3 percent in France, 9.4 percent in Switzerland.

Given that the poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314, this numbers become even more stark. Try living with three other people on $22,000 a year anywhere in this country. It is next to impossible.

Of course, older people actually did not take nearly the hit of everyone else, in part because of Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security—government programs that actually do their job of keeping people out of poverty.

What do you do with numbers like these? Read them and weep? I find myself wanting to eat salty fatty foods, like French fries, and tool around on the internet to learn how one emigrates to Norway. I sign petitions on-line, post articles on Facebook and tweet and retweet items of interest or excellent analysis.
My frustration is that two key solutions to our vast problems are not difficult to understand:

Immediately create and implement a fair and just tax structure. Stop offshore tax havens, bring back higher top marginal tax rates, make corporations pay their fair share; and
Create a federal jobs program and put people to work. Spend all the money you can on that.

Nothing new and unheard of is called for: simply a commitment to the common good. Langston Hughes wrote years ago, “American never was America to me. But I make this solemn vow: America will be.” I have to join him in believing that “America will be.” There aren’t many other choices that don’t require plunging into despair.

Where were you?

2011-09-09T14:51:00.000-07:00

The “where were you when…?” questions often serve as a ways of getting to know someone, as a cultural reference point, and, as there are more of them, a way to mark how old you are. The ‘where were you when’ questions that mark my life are the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Nov 23, 1963) and Sept 11, 2001. Certainly there are other major events in my life: the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Nixon’s resignation, the Loma Prieta earthquake, the stock market crash of 1987. But they don’t stand out with the clarity of these two events, which I and many others could retell in minute detail.

I was in Montreal on Sept 11, 2011, in a meeting with two colleagues who are also dear friends. I was to leave for Washington DC later that day. One of my friends left the room to take a phone call from his daughter and came back to say “A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center—it has punched through it.” He has a quirky sense of humor and at first I thought ‘Is this a joke?” But his face told me it wasn’t. At first it was hard to imagine and then with the replaying of videos captured on cell phones, it was impossible to forget.

September 11 and the two or three weeks that followed were the only (and probably the last) time in my life that the United States had a chance to unite the world in a true effort for peace. The Congress under the “leadership” of George Bush, squandered that opportunity, voting at every turn for war, with only the voice of Barbara Lee begging ”Let us not to become the evil we deplore.” Taliban leaders offered to find and surrender Osama bin Laden to the World Court in The Hague, where he could have been tried. We could have taken the high road, and not met violence with violence. We could have treated this horrible tragedy as a crime and the perpetrators as criminals.

But there was no intention on the part of the war machine to have peace. Instead we invaded two countries that had done nothing to us, and now ten years, 6200 dead American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Afghani and Iraqi soldiers and civilians, and almost a trillion dollars later, we have become one of the most hated and despised nations in the world. And in one of my ironies of this “war on terror” – when Osama bin Laden was assassinated, one of my students at the University of California asked, “Who was he again?” Of course, this young man was nine in 2001.

And so in the frenzy of memorials for 9/11, I will mourn the loss of life again, and relive again where I was and how I felt, and hear from others where they were and how they felt. Some of us will recall people we know who escaped or were killed in New York or DC, or marvel how we might have been on those planes or at the World Trade Center but weren’t.

But what we won’t talk about because it is too painful, is the fact that the vast majority of people in power then, and now, are not interested in peace. The PATRIOT Act is still in place, Obama makes tepid comments opposing Islamaphobia but continues the war, the economic downturn caused in part by a bloated military has driven the death and destruction half a world away to smaller and smaller articles every day and the “peace movement” is barely to be found.

From our grief must come a renewed determination to do all we can for world peace. The only fitting memorial to 9/11 is peace. The work required is overwhelming but as Che Guevara said, “Be realistic. Do the impossible.”

Labor Day was no picnic for many

2011-09-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

Labor Day came and went the same as most holidays that have lost their meaning. Some people may have gone to a picnic, parade or barbeque over the three-day weekend, but the “reason for the season” was mostly overshadowed by consumerism (taking advantage of back-to-school sales or going to see The Help … again). And since consumption is now the reason for holidays, lots of today’s laborers don’t get Labor Day off at all!

Labor Day became a national holiday in 1894, but the first Labor Day was celebrated in New York City in 1882 when the Central Labor Union organized a march of more than 20,000 union members and their families. Over the next few years, the nation’s unions spread the tradition to other cities and built a movement to get states and the federal government to honor the social and economic contributions made by the regular workers who kept the economy running.

Monday’s day off is part of the enduring legacy of the courageous and aggressive union organizing of the previous century that created the basics of modern life, like: the weekend, the middle-class, and the principle that kids should be in schools not factories. Today those things are taken for granted, but in 1882 – less than 20 years after slavery was abolished – society was organized around a few business owners and robber-barons squeezing everything they could out of millions of laborers working 12-hour shifts in inhumane conditions, but still left struggling to put food on the table.

Labor Day was initially about the struggle for economic and worker justice. But a century later, Labor Day has been so trivialized as to just dictate fashion choices. But today’s economy needs a Labor Day much more like the original march of “workingmen of all trades united in one organization.”

Today, there’s plenty for working people to unite around. Even though workers don’t routinely lose life and limb on the job anymore (though immigrants still face the worst working conditions), our society has sadly returned to many of the worst features of a century ago. Inequality is back at Great Depression levels, and the richest 400 people control more wealth than half of the country. The latest statistics are that 14 million people are officially unemployed (almost half have been unemployed for longer than 6 months). And many millions more are out of work or stringing together part-time jobs that don’t pay enough.

So for today’s laborers – especially people working in the service industry – Labor Day wasn’t a day off. And for the millions unemployed it was just another day spent worrying about how to get bills paid. Let’s all hope that next Labor Day’s headlines focus more on the movement for jobs and economic justice.

From CAP: Lowering taxes doesn’t lead to job growth

2011-09-06T15:15:00.001-07:00

As we await the President’s job speech this week – and in light of the spending cuts the Super Committee is beginning to devise – I’d like to share an article written this past June by Michael Linden at the Center for American Progress. “Rich People’s Taxes Have Little to Do with Job Creation” reminds us that cutting taxes for the wealthy doesn’t have the economic impact we’re often promised it will.

To quote the article: “When the marginal tax rate was 50 percent or above, annual employment growth averaged 2.3 percent, and when the rate was under 50, growth was half that. In fact, if you ranked each year since 1950 by overall job growth, the top five years would all boast marginal tax rates at 70 percent or higher. The top 10 years would share marginal tax rates at 50 percent or higher.”

Our State, Our Budget

2011-09-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

I want to share with readers a wonderful video made by Joshua Busch (staffer for the Community Coalition of LA) which gently pokes fun at the way some nonprofit staff have reacted to news of tax cuts. We are using this video to promote our project, Nonprofits Talking Taxes:

Even if you are not from California, your state is probably cutting services and not raising taxes on corporations or wealthy people, even those, like Warren Buffett, who have offered to pay more and advocated for higher taxes for wealthy people. Please feel free to share this video and the resources on our website with friends and colleagues. Our goal is to make the common good a common topic of common conversation.

Inequality by the Numbers

2011-08-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share with you today a graph that came from this week’s edition of one of our past featured partners, Too Much, illustrating the type of revenue that could be raised if certain changes were made to the tax code.

Along with this, the newsletter this week also featured a great piece on a memo that Justice Powell wrote in 1971 (back before he was a Supreme Court judge) for the Chamber of Commerce that outlined what they could do to “jumpstart a crusade to save free enterprise”. The article notes that even though the memo blasts left-wing “extremists,” the drastic inequality that has resulted from the past four decades of deregulation and decreasing tax rates on the wealthy would most likely trouble Powell. He “saw business as a champion for prosperity for all. He considered unions and collective bargaining ‘essential’ to the freedom Americans enjoy. Today’s U.S. Chamber of Commerce, by contrast, acts as the lobbying ringleader against any and all legislation that seeks to help workers organize and bargain.”

Free enterprise run amok.

What’s in a Title?

2011-08-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

I am consulting with a small social justice organization which is about to hire a “CEO” and I have been giving a lot of thought to issues of titles. Maybe I feel bad because I have never been a Chief Executive Officer, although I have worked in and around nonprofits for 35 years and have been the head person at several. Long ago, before we knew the power of titles, the director of a nonprofit was simply called the “director.” Later that title seemed too lightweight and nonprofits started using “executive director.” I have been a Director and an Executive Director and I did make more money when I was the Executive Director. Some organizations then began use the word “President” which meant that we could no longer call the President of the Board “President” so that person became a “Chair.” Somehow it seems a little bit of a demotion to go from “President” to “Chair”, but perhaps it is better than becoming the “Table”, which is often what the Chair did: tabled the motion, or put something on the table. Some friends of mine have held the title, “President and Executive Director” and now I know people who are the “President and CEO.”

These titles are all borrowed from the corporate world. If I were to borrow titles, I would have probably used titles from a monarchy which are a lot more fun: Duke, Knight, Princess, King and Queen, or from the big gorilla of nonprofits-- the Church --with their Bishops, Cardinals, Right Reverends, Monsignors and so on. Or we could borrow from the military and be generals, admirals, colonels and the like. But nonprofits are not like the military, the church or the monarchy: we are like corporations and we name ourselves after them.

The organization I’ve been working with decided to use “CEO” instead of Executive Director because they thought they would attract more qualified people. Whether this is the case remains to be seen, but they now grapple with the fact the people who want to be “CEOs” want the pay that comes with that title, and they may not be able to afford such a person.

What is the harm in calling someone a CEO? In the larger scheme of things, perhaps there is none. However, if the nonprofit sector, particularly the social justice subset of that, takes seriously our job which is to raise issues of the common good, and to promote rough social equity, we have to think seriously about where we are getting our ideas. With all this title inflation, you would think we would see a commensurate decrease in poverty and oppression, but this is not the case, and that may be a clue that modeling ourselves after corporations will simply move us to a more and more corporate controlled society. We name our children very carefully—should we not name the jobs we do to build a healthy society for them to be raised in just as carefully?

Test your Tax Know-how

2011-08-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

We’ve talked a lot about taxes on this blog, but how much do we really know about taxes? Test your knowledge with this quiz, created by our own Kim Klein and Jan Masaoka from Blue Avocado.

Let us know how you do!

The "Budget Control Act"

2011-08-11T15:42:00.000-07:00

I have been racking my brain about what to say about the debt ceiling “crisis” and the “compromise” that was reached to solve it. A cartoon in our local paper summarized it very neatly: Obama says to Boehner, “You can have everything you want as long as you are willing to say this is a bipartisan agreement. “ Boehner says, “YOU got it, Mr. President.”

The following is from Citizens for Tax Justice and is an excellent summary of what happened and why:

CTJ Statement on the Debt Ceiling Deal: President Obama Breaks His Promise on Taxes Again

The so-called “Budget Control Act” that President Obama signed into law today to increase the federal debt ceiling and reduce the federal budget deficit marks the second time the Obama administration has capitulated on tax policy to the most extreme elements in Congress, those who are least in touch with the American people and most willing to risk economic disaster to get their way.

While our political leaders should be doing all they can to boost consumer demand and create jobs, the administration and Congress have instead agreed to slash public services without guaranteeing any increase in revenue.

To be sure, a revenue increase could result from the process established under this deal, despite Republicans’ claims to the contrary. But anti-tax lawmakers have already demonstrated that they will risk everything — including economic catastrophe — to block any and all revenue increases. As a result, we believe the only hope for a balanced approach depends on President Obama finding the courage (which he has lacked so far) to allow all of the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of 2012.

Read the full statement. (PDF)

Corporate Accountability International

2011-08-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

This week’s featured partner is Corporate Accountability International, which has run campaigns to challenge corporate abuse for more than 30 years. Of particular interest is their work on water, which includes supporting community water rights, while protecting against privatization.

They provide resources and tools to be used on a number of levels, including for government, on campuses, in establishments, in communities, and in faith groups. This is a great resource for getting a lay of the land when it comes to water campaigns, and other aspects of efforts to counter privatization of public space and goods.

smartMeme

2011-07-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

This week’s featured partner is smartMEME, a group dedicated to magnifying the impact of movement building by changing the dominant narratives at work in society today. Using the concept of a “meme,” they provide tools and support to grassroots organizations in order to accomplish this. A “meme” is a piece of the culture that carries meaning (i.e. a custom, slogan, or ritual) and spreads that meaning virally, so by starting small, huge change can be accomplished.

In their own words:

The smartMeme Strategy & Training Project is a nonprofit collective that works to apply meme theory and a narrative analysis of power to strengthen social change efforts. We use a story-based strategy approach to change the world by changing the stories used to understand an issue or situation. We work as trainers and consultants with a host of organizations from coast-to-cost providing strategy, training, graphic design, and communications support to groups working for human rights, democracy, peace, justice and ecology. SmartMeme is also home to a thriving youth network called STORY (Strategy Training and Organizing Resources for Youth), our program to train young activists in story-based strategy.

Check out their site to find out more about the wonderful examples of change they’re seeing.

Public/Private Funding and What Shouldn’t Exist at all

2011-07-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

Two news items crossed my e-mail today, and I have to share them:

I. In Blacksburg, Va., a City Councilwoman last week suggested that citizens donate toward the projected $125 million cost of building three new schools, thus offsetting the need for a tax increase, which would amount to a property tax increase of “10 cents or more.”

II. Build the Border Fence: The Official Border Fence Donation Website for the State of Arizona: This website encourages donations from citizens (and they mean this in the strictest sense) to complete the wall between Arizona and Mexico. The website explains:

“One of the gravest threats facing America today is the lack of security and enforcement along the U.S. and Mexican border. The consequences of this lack of security have yielded an unparalleled invasion of drug cartels, violent gangs, an estimated 20 million illegal aliens, and even terrorists.

Because of the Federal Government's failure to stop this invasion, the State of Arizona signed into law SB 1406. Part of this important legislation established this website for the purpose of raising funds through donations from private citizens, businesses, and corporations across the country in an effort to finance and finish building our border fence. One hundred percent of the funds raised will be held in a trust fund account in the Arizona State Treasurer's Office. The bill also created the Joint Border Security Advisory Committee for oversight and accountability of these funds. Additionally, in an effort to contain costs, inmate labor will be utilized in building the border fence.”

The second item is the most immediately disturbing to me. I wrote about this wall in my Nov 23, 2010 blog post when I crossed it for the first time on a trip to Nogales. It is a WALL, and not a fence, which has a much friendlier connotation. It is 8-12 feet high. In some places it is covered with barbed wire, and in other places, there are two walls running parallel to each other in case someone should get over the first one. Sunk deep into the ground, it stops both people and animals. Aside from its racist and xenophobic meanings, it is also wreaking enormous environmental havoc on a very fragile ecosystem and will probably be the final cause of the extinction of the Mexican jaguar, a magnificent nomadic cat.

This website does (probably unintentionally) have a very funny moment where donors are reassured that their money will be used wisely and go a long way because “inmate labor will be used in building the border fence.” Inmates are apparently cheaper and more controllable than undocumented laborers, although some of these inmates could be undocumented people being held in Arizona’s various private prisons. Private donations are being sought to help enforce public policy and the ability to do that is created by public officials.

The first item is even more blurring of public and private. A public official offers citizens the choice between paying more taxes or just donating money in order to build public schools.

Public officials are now in the fundraising business and are active participants in the privatizing of public structures.

A final fact must be introduced now - $1,216,539,560,417 or, written out: one trillion, two hundred and sixteen billion, five hundred and thirty nine million, five hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and seventeen dollars. This is the total cost, and rising, of what America has spent on war in the past decade.

The cost of war is still firmly in the public sphere. But in all the negotiations about raising the debt ceiling and on whose backs to balance the budget, we have yet to hear loud enough voices asking to dismantle our war machine.

We must have nationwide discussion amongst all our communities about what should be funded publicly, what should be funded privately and what shouldn’t exist at all, if we are ever to really move to a country that works for everyone. Try introducing any of these stories into conversation today. Just by doing so you will be a part of a fundamental change.

Dr. Pop

2011-07-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

This week’s featured partner is Dr. Pop, an excellent website started buy Gilda Hass. Dr. Pop is a popular education website that helps people become better story-tellers and strategic thinkers by explaining complicated things in simple ways. The main areas of focus for the site are the economy, urban planning, and democracy, and how they all work. “The economy is much too important to leave to the economists,” is one of the great lines on the site that gets at the heart of what they do.

You’ll find great resources and tools specifically for organizers, educators, and students, but useful for nonprofit organizations and community members who are working to bring about change.

Overall, the site focuses on fairness and equity and how we can create a better world in which we take care of each other – all cornerstones of a healthy commons.

The Marriage Vow

2011-07-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

Kendra Marr, writing in Politico reports, “In a year when pledges have become all the rage for Republican presidential primary candidates, The Family Leader's ‘Marriage Vow’ seems to be falling flat. The 14-point vow asks candidates to pledge ‘personal fidelity’ to their spouses, remove female soldiers from combat roles and recognize that ‘robust childbearing and reproduction’ maintains America's health and security. It calls for acknowledgment that ‘children raised by a mother and a father experience better learning, less addiction, less legal trouble and less extramarital pregnancy.’ Plus, it requires those who sign to fight prostitution, pornography and Sharia law.”

For a short time, the pledge said that children born into slavery were better off than children born now, but that caused such an outcry that the Iowa-based Family Leader organization removed it with a nuanced apology saying they were sorry the phrase had been misunderstood. Michele Bachman and Rick Santorum have signed this pledge (while the slavery part was still in it) but so far the other Republicans have refused.

A quick look at the website of the Family Leader shows it to be an organization profoundly committed to heterosexual marriage. They ask pastors to sign a four point statement including these two rather odd points:

II. Homosexual behavior is defined by the Bible as immoral and sinful. (Lev. 18:22) It is harmful both to the individuals who choose to participate in it and the society that chooses to accept it. (Romans 1:18-26) Given that understanding, the only truly loving response to the current debate over marriage is to reaffirm the only definition of marriage in Iowa Code – one man and one woman. Keeping in mind that the concept of fairness is subjective, it should never be used as a mechanism to overturn the plain truth of the Scriptures. The laws of Iowa can never be “fair” to everyone, but instead ought to be designed to promote justice. (My italics)

IV. Freedom of conscience is not the issue. We acknowledge that everyone has a right to their own beliefs. The issue is whether or not certain citizens have the right to use their beliefs to redefine that which God has already defined, and then force the rest of society to accept that redefinition. We submit that they do not.

Theirs is an interesting frame: laws which promote justice cannot be fair to everyone. And everyone has the right to their own beliefs, but there is no real point in expressing them unless they are completely in agreement with God’s beliefs. And who knew that God had beliefs? I would think that one of the advantages of being GOD is that you already know everything, having, for the most part, created it. Does God believe in God? (OK—that is an old seminary joke which is only funny if you have been drinking Jack Daniels.)

I am reminded of a woman I knew once who wanted to marry a man who was a quadriplegic. They were Catholic and their priest refused to marry them, saying that the main function of marriage was procreation and this man’s condition precluded that. They were shocked and went to another priest. They told him the story and he said, “I don’t know if the other priest is right, but I will marry you. Because one thing I do know is that I am to be loving and God is the judge. I am not the judge.”

Being loving is a lot harder than being judgmental: take it from someone who has tried both. And I like judging just as much as the next hypocrite, but I do remind myself of this priest from time to time and recommit to doing my job. I am not the judge.

Jose Antonio Vargas

2011-07-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading “OUTLAW: My life in America as an Undocumented Immigrant” by Jose Antonio Vargas in the NYT magazine, June 26 edition. Many people will recognize Vargas’ by-line from years of excellent reporting for a variety of newspapers and blogs, and from his work on HIV/AIDS which culminated in a documentary called “The Other City.”

This is a personal memoir about living as an acclaimed journalist devoted to truth while hiding his undocumented status. Vargas was sent to the United States from the Philippines at the age of 12 and only discovered he was undocumented when he applied for a driver’s license when he was 16. This article details the lengths he went to both to become an American citizen, which was impossible, and then to hide his undocumented status. Moved by the courage of the many undocumented students who testified on behalf of the DREAM ACT, Vargas joins a growing chorus of people willing to risk being deported to countries they have not lived in for years (many since they were infants) in order to protest our country’s unfair and racist laws governing immigration.

Vargas risks not only deportation but loss of his career. He says that he recently managed to get his driver’s license renewed which “offered me five more years of acceptable identification—but also five more years of fear, of lying to people I respect and institutions that trusted me, of running away from who I am. “

He continues, “I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.”

I read this article on the heels of a trip to East Palestine, OH with my cousins, mother and sister. There we visited the house my mother grew up in, saw the schools she went to, and paid our respects to our grandparents and great grandparents, and a variety of other relatives buried nearby. Our family thrives on stories and we have a lot of them about our long dead relatives. But we have no stories about how they got documented or whether they had to live in the USA illegally for any period of time. And why? They came from England and Germany a long time ago and they were welcomed here. Their lives were not easy, but their struggles were not compounded by having to hide their immigration status.

Most people I respect support the DREAM ACT and other elements of immigration reform.   Many of my colleagues work in organizations for which immigrants rights is a main program area. I am sure reading Vargas’ article will cause us to increase our efforts.   But what I hope will come from Vargas’ coming out is that people who may have mixed feelings about immigration will see the very human toll that these laws and attitudes take.   There are approximately eleven million undocumented people living in the United States today. Multiply his experience times 11 million and you get a sense of suffering that is almost unimaginable in a country which has as its most iconic symbol, the Statue of Liberty. Vargas has put a human face on all these numbers.   Now it is up to all of us to change our immigration laws—to work on doing so a little bit every day.

Blue Avocado

2011-07-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

In honor of Independence Day, this Tuesday’s featured partner is Blue Avocado, a nonprofit online magazine for community nonprofits. While not necessarily focused on the commons, this publication is fearless in raising issues of concern to nonprofits, and the role they should play. For example, back in April, they took on the issue of the charitable tax deduction (with our very own Kim Klein).

Led by a steering committee, including Jan Masaoka, they publish every third Tuesday through an HTML newsletter delivered free to more than 50,000 subscribers. In their own words, “Blue Avocado aspires to be a new kind of online magazine.” Find out how by visiting their website and signing up, which you can do by entering your email in the box on the right-hand side of the page.

A New Protection Pledge

2011-06-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

In the last post, I talked about the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” which Grover Norquist has placed in front of all incumbents and candidates for office, and gotten quite a few to sign.

In England, there is a move toward a different type of pledge coming from a similar inequality being experienced there as here. The Equality Trust (profiled earlier in this blog) has asked all members of Parliament to sign an “Equality Pledge” which reads as follows:

"Compelling new evidence presented by The Equality Trust shows that more equal societies - those with a narrower gap between rich and poor - are more cohesive, healthier, suffer fewer social problems and are more environmentally sustainable. In view of these findings I am committed to making the UK a more equal society as the most effective means of building a better society. I will therefore actively support the case for policies designed to narrow the gap between rich and poor; and engage with the debate on which measures should be implemented to achieve that aim."

This is a relatively new movement and is being organized from the ground up. Citizens are asked to place the Equality Pledge in front of candidates or incumbents so that by the time the politician signs it, he or she is reasonably confident that his or her constituency is aware of the issues that give rise to this pledge. So far, 75 of the 659 Members of Parliament have signed it and the number is growing every day. This pledge is much more low-key than the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. The Equality Pledge commits the signer to support the “case for policies” and to “engage with the debate” without holding them hostage to any particular policy or proposal. It does put signers on records as agreeing with the proposition that more equal societies do better than less equal ones.

Given our historical inability to approve even the very mild language of the Equal Rights Amendment or CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women) and the struggles to approve the Voting Rights Act, it seems unlikely that very many in Congress would sign an equality pledge.

But what if we decided to sign it, just in the privacy of our homes, with no hoopla, no announcement on Facebook or Twitter? Just a commitment to raise issues of equity and equality whenever and wherever we can and to engage in deep, meaningful and honest conversation with ourselves, friends, family and co-workers on just what kind of society we want, and what are the policies that get us there?

I pledge to start this weekend: the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution which begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It seems like a good time to raise the questions and to finally acknowledge that these truths are not self-evident at all, but must be made evident through debate, discussion, and made meaningful through very profound changes in the way we all do business

Raising Taxes

2011-06-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

“I don’t think there’s any conceivable way, under current circumstances, that any Republican would vote for any kind of tax increase whatsoever.” Bruce Bartlett, former economic adviser to President Reagan

This interesting sentence appears in the April 2011 issue of the Christian Science Monitor, in an excellent article called “Budget Stalemate: Why America Won’t Raise Taxes” by Liz Marlantes. The sentence does not meet standards of good writing, but does, in its repetitiveness, make a stronger point than if it were the more succinct, “No Republican will vote for any tax increase.”

Let’s parse it and see what we find:

“any conceivable way”: could this mean that some moderate Republicans would like to conceive a way to vote for revenue as one solution to our deficit?

“under current circumstances:” which are what? What could call for tax increases: more than a trillion dollar deficit, double digit unemployment, 60% of seniors living on Social Security alone, 30% of Americans with no health insurance, 25% of children living below the poverty line, and so on? There are apparently other circumstances that pressure Congress and none of them seem to have anything to do with the common good.

“any Republican:” because they are all of one mind? Or are they one mind divided amongst the whole GOP? Or is this is another remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”?

“any kind of tax increase:” Republicans are even willing to reject regressive and unfair tax increases, such as a federal sales tax? This is a new day, indeed.

“whatsoever:” This wonderful old English word in the King James Version of the Bible begins the Golden Rule, “Whatsoever ye would that others should do to you, do ye even so to them.” This word is now the final word summarizing complete abrogation of any commitment to the public good.

The source of the word “any” in this context is an unelected powerhouse named Grover Norquist who runs an organization with the moderate sending name, “Americans for Tax Reform.” Since 1986, Norquist has asked every incumbent and every candidate for office to sign a document called “The Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” The pledge says, “I promise to the people of my state that I will oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes.” Again, we see the emphasis “oppose and vote against” or “any and all” because to do one and not the other is not sufficient.

In 1986, Norquist was able to get 100 members of the House and 20 Senators to sign it. Today 40 out of 47 Republicans in the Senate have signed it, along with one Democrat and one Independent, and 235 out of 242 Republicans in the House have signed it, along with two Democrats. (For a full list of signers and a look at the actual pledge, see the Americans for Tax Reform’s site.)

People sign this because it comes with money and help with campaigning, and not signing – or signing and then not following through – is met with swift punishment. The goal of having bi-partisan dialogue on how to create fair and just tax policy that pulls our country out of this recession and helps everyone have a better quality of life is stopped at the starting gate when so many people have basically said, “Let’s talk, but I have already decided what I am going to do.”

Norquist, who has never run for and so obviously never held public office, is not on the staff of the Republican National Committee nor has he been appointed to any public position. Yet he has amassed the power and money to control how most Republicans vote on tax policy. The only thing he cannot really amass is all the votes of the American people, and this is the good news in the tax debate. The Center on Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland presented voters with a simplified but realistic version of what the budget might be in 2015 and let them make their own tax and spending choices. They weren’t told they had to balance the budget or to bring down the deficit. Those decisions were up to them. The study showed that on average, voters reduced the deficit by about $400 billion, with Democrats cutting more in spending than Republicans. 91% of respondents, including 77% of Republicans and 66% of self-identified tea partyers, chose to raise taxes by an average of $292 billion.

Our Congress is far more opposed to taxes than the people they are supposed to represent. We, who are those people, must make it clear that we believe that taxes are a fundamental tool to creating a working democracy. We call for accountability in spending, a tax structure that calls on everyone (including the corporations who are now people) to pay their share, vigorous and informed debate on what constitutes ‘fairness’. We pledge to vote for people who will return “whatsoever” to the front of our sentences, for example, “Whatsoever is best for the common good should drive any and all public policy."

Wealth for the Common Good

2011-06-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

This Tuesday’s featured partner is Wealth for the Common Good, who along with The Agenda Project are co-sponsors of the Patriotic Millionaires Campaign (which we covered on this blog in April), to increase millionaire tax rates. Wealth for the Common Good is a network of business and civic leaders, wealthy individuals and partners, promoting fair and adequate taxation to support public investment in a healthy economy.

This month they released a video directed to John Boehner and members of Congress entitled “Tax Me”. It’s worth checking out:

And if you haven’t done so already, sign their petition and check out who else is on board.

Death and Taxes

2011-06-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

Recently I stayed in a small house near a cemetery. The cemetery was huge, with a nice walking path encircling it, and so I walked around it. I am fascinated by graveyards and will often stop to visit old ones when I am driving through communities that have them. The old gravestones often have epitaphs which tell cryptic stories for which I fill in the details. In this one, a husband’s tombstone listed his name, birth and death dates, then “Goodbye.” The wife has a tombstone next to him, but she either isn’t buried there or isn’t dead yet (her birth year is 1915.) Why “Goodbye” and not “Goodbye my love” or “Gone but not forgotten” or “Till we meet again” which can be found on several of the other tombstones? Of course I fill in that this guy was a complete jerk, probably a cheater, perhaps abusive and everyone was happy to say “Goodbye, you *#*!”

Another seems more poignant:   “Gone too soon.” But the person lived from 1905-2000. Dying at 95 does not seem too soon in the sense I first read it. I fill in the story: the person died before her only living relative, a distant cousin, could get there and find out where she buried the silver or kept the key to the safe deposit box. “You should have visited more often, you self absorbed creep” I admonish this made up deadbeat relative.

Many of the gravestones had flags on them, probably placed there on Memorial Day. Many of the men in this cemetery were veterans; most from World War I or II, but several from Viet Nam or Korea. Most of the veterans had lived through the war and died as old men, but a few had been killed in action. There are two very recent graves; these with tombstones that are flat on the ground to make mowing easier. They have flags and their tombstones indicate that they were killed in Afghanistan.

I fill in their story. Because I am staying in an economically depressed area, with high unemployment I imagine these young men deciding to join the army, get an education, and see some parts of the world they have only read about. Like many young people, they will not really believe that they can be killed or maimed: that fate is for others. Off they go, and back they come in a body bag.

As I keep walking in the cemetery I think how different our world would be today if we had taken the route of reason after Sept 11, 2001. For almost a week, or maybe more, every country in the world felt sorry for the USA.   Even countries traditionally critical of our imperialism and arrogance felt that the loss of innocent life was wrong. Shortly after 9/11, the Taliban offered to capture Osama bin Laden and take him to The Hague, to be tried in World Court. The United States squandered an opportunity of a lifetime when we turned them down and decided instead to attack Iraq based on a web of lies. Proof that most of us have learned nothing from that experience could be seen in the chanting “USA, USA!” which followed the announcement of the assassination of bin Laden.

A cemetery is a wonderful quasi commons. Although the gravesites belong to individuals, and the maintenance is generally done through a private society, most cemeteries are open to the public and are quiet places for contemplation.

Death and taxes are named as the two things no one can avoid. But must so much of our tax dollar pay for death? Our military budget is larger than it has ever been in history, factoring in inflation. I imagine someday someone generations from now walking through this cemetery and marveling at how many of the really old gravestones are of people who served in wars.   “Thank goodness that is behind us,” she will muse.   “What were they thinking in those days?”

Economists for Peace and Security

2011-06-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

This Tuesday’s featured partner is Economists for Peace and Security, an international network of thirteen affiliated organizations promoting economic analysis and appropriate action for peace, security and the world economy. They work locally, regionally and internationally to to promote non-military solutions to world challenges, and to effect policy changes that can build a more just and peaceful future.

Of particular interest is their monthly e-newsletter, NewsNotes, which in addition to including information on current projects, announcements of upcoming events and publications, and listings of funding and employment opportunities, it also includes an action corner and updates on their member’s activities as well.

The March 2011 edition included a 19 point plan for reducing military spending by almost 7 trillion over the next nine years. And it is written by two libertarians, proving that it is not only liberals who are appalled by the defense budget!

Prisons, Immigration and Profits

2011-06-07T14:24:00.000-07:00

This is the post meant for last Thursday in our Race and the Commons series.

On Saturday, the LA Times ran a story about a family that had been separated for a year and a half because the father was in a Detention Center, while our nation's broken immigration system figured out whether it would deport this husband and father of U.S. citizens to Guatemala, a country he didn't know since he'd lived in the U.S. since he was a young child. The profile of this family is moving because it shows the human impact of our nation's harsh immigration enforcement policies on mixed status families, in particular, and because it's hopeful outcome is the exception to the rule.

But another important element of the story isn't covered by the reporter, but is buried in the comments section where the family's lawyer, Glenn Fogle, added some details to flesh out the story:

The real travesty here is that a man was separated from his wife and young child for about 20 months in a jail 9 hours away because a court notice was sent to the wrong address and then pointlessly kept in jail at a cost to the U.S. taxpayer of $48,000, which went to the Corrections Corporation of America. The only one that profited here was a big corporation. This is not right and something needs to change. Mr. Guzman and his family are one of many, many thousands of cases across the country.

Again, we're forced to ask the question of who profits from our country's obsession with incarceration. In the last few years immigration enforcement policies have been ramped up, and policies aimed at making life unbearable for immigrants have spread across the country; it's a strategy of "attrition through enforcement."

Arizona's SB1070 put this strategy front and center the national debate last April. The racial profiling law has since been copied in other states around the country (particularly in the South).

But what's been largely ignored is the role that private prison companies have played in promoting this type of legislation. With the increased focus on preventing racial profiling in the last decade and the recent changes to drug laws that have fostered racial disparities for many decades, it seems that companies that profit off of incarceration have been working to sustain their bottom line by expanding the pool of people of color they can profit off of keeping locked up.

The coordination of private prison corporations with anti-immigrant lawmakers is yet another example of the importance of keeping certain functions of government public and protected from the profit motive. And the many stories of families torn apart by the prison industry's greed shows yet again that low income people and people of color suffer most by the enclosure of the commons.

Personal Observation on Rough Social Equity (or lack thereof) at the ER

2011-06-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

I was all set to finish the Race and the Commons series last Thursday, but was waylaid by a NYC pothole that wrenched my foot and landed me in the ER. While sitting in the ER, I overheard two contrasting conversations.

At first, a woman was on the other side of the curtain. She was concerned about her lack of insurance and kept asking the Physician's Assistant who was handling all our cases about the costs of procedures, drugs, etc. that were being administered. I sympathized with her financial concern ... even though I have insurance I'd spent an hour on the phone with my insurance company to figure out which hospital was "in network."

At some point the uninsured woman was replaced by a pair of bankers (this isn't an assumption, they boasted quite loudly about their jobs). As a plastic surgeon who'd clearly come down to the ER especially for this case (he was wearing designer jeans and a pink oxford shirt, unlike the rest of the staff's scrubs) was giving one of the duo stitches, the three men chatted. They name dropped ... identifying people they knew in common, marveling at what a small world it is. And they compared notes on their porsches ... I'm NOT kidding: one of the bankers was shocked that the surgeon didn't have a convertible while the surgeon defended the sporting-qualities of his hardtop.

It was such a banal conversation, but strikingly different from the concerns and reality of both myself and the uninsured woman who had occupied the bed just an hour earlier. The experience drove home how how vastly unequal our society is.

10 Years of Bush Tax Cuts

2011-06-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

The next post in the Race and the Commons Series will appear next Thursday. In the meantime…

Our friends at Citizens for Tax Justice have put out this summary of the Bush Tax cuts after ten years. These cuts, if extended, will nearly double the deficit and mostly benefit the rich.

Here’s what CTJ has to say:

Ten years ago, on June 7, 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law the first of several tax cuts that drove the balanced budget he inherited from President Clinton deep into the red. Last year, Congressional supporters of Bush’s policies pushed through an extension of these tax cuts through the end of 2012.
Many lawmakers want to extend the Bush tax cuts again into 2013 and beyond, which would almost double the federal budget deficit.
47.2 percent of the benefits of this tax cut extension would go to the richest five percent of the nation’s taxpayers.
The richest one percent would receive an average tax cut of $68,079 in 2013.
The poorest 60 percent of taxpayers would receive an average tax cut of just $487 in 2013.

One really has to wonder how any of this can possibly come under the rubric, “fiscally responsible.”

Nonprofit Vote

2011-05-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

This Tuesday’s featured partner is Nonprofit Vote, an organization dedicated to helping nonprofits integrate voter engagement into their ongoing activities and services. Nonprofit Vote focuses on the nonprofit sector due to its connection and presence in communities with underrepresented and underserved populations with a history of lower voter participation.

The organization has a wealth of resources available on their site, but we’d like to specifically draw your attention to a study they recently released that recently released study that demonstrates the effectiveness of nonprofit voter engagement efforts based on research done during the 2010 midterm election.

According the Nonprofit Vote, the study found that:

When a nonprofit talked to clients about voting, their likelihood of voting increased.
The likelihood of a client voting increased proportionally with each additional voting-related contact made by the nonprofit.
A nonprofit's outreach efforts go beyond the individual they engage--clients contacted about voting were also more likely to encourage their friends and family to vote.
Among the types of voter assistance provided, registering new voters and offering voting reminders made the biggest difference in increasing voter turnout.

To learn more visit their research page and read the study factsheet (PDF), or the full report (PDF).

Check back Thursday for a post from Sean Thomas-Breitfeld in our Race and the Commons Series.

This is the Time

2011-05-26T10:03:00.001-07:00

Many people followed the prediction that the world would end on May 21, and those who God saved would be taken up to Heaven and the rest of us left here below. Facebook had a lot of pictures of “post rapture looting” which was fun. Harold Camping, the nearly 90 year old minister who predicted this, said Monday: “It has been a tough weekend.” I think he should win a prize for understatement. Cynically I thought, “You cry all the way to the bank.” He collected $18 million dollars this year alone from followers and probably spent $100 million on tracts, billboards, etc. He still has, by some accounts, $72 million in the bank.

Whether he is a crackpot or a charlatan is not for me to determine. What I am struck by is something another minister said today about this whole event, “It is interesting to see what people do when they think they have only a short time left.” He told several stories of people reconciling with relatives or friends from whom they had been estranged, and people taking vacations or getting rid of stuff they didn’t need. I was also struck by how many people made an effort to have fun, to heal relationships that had been hard, to leave jobs they hated anyway, and to throw out stuff they didn’t need. Many commentators have said that the people who follow Camping are naïve or mentally ill, and that may be true. But I also think that this prediction made some people get their priorities in order.

This event raises many questions, some moral, some legal. Will Camping give back the money he raised for this, especially to people who may have given him their life savings? What is the obligation of the state to protect from people like Camping? Should his organization maintain its nonprofit status?

But the question I am most interested in is this: how can all of us have correct priorities all the time, and not just when we think we are about to die (or in this case, be raptured away)? Healing relationships, being with friends, having fun: why can’t do those things every day? Part of the reason someone like Camping can happen in the United States and is less likely to be found in other developed countries is that other countries place more emphasis on people and community than we do.

This minister I was with today finished his talk by saying, “Camping got the day wrong, but not the time. We must always act as if God is here already and we must know that today is the day for justice and love. Not tomorrow, not when the Republicans agree with us, not when the funders help us, but today, now, this minute. This is the time.”

This is the time.

Social Equity in a Multi-racial Society

2011-05-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Equality Trust, which was featured in Tuesday’s blog post, has published a PowerPoint presentation compiling information on how the United States compares to other wealthy countries in terms of a number of social problems. According to the information they have compiled, the USA has the highest rate of homicide, teen pregnancy, infant mortality and imprisonment of any of the 32 developed countries they looked at.

The countries with the lowest of these problems are Japan, Finland, Norway and Sweden. These countries are also the most equal in terms of income. I have presented these slides several times and every time people are shocked by how bad the USA compares to other nations, but then immediately say, “Well, these other countries are very homogeneous,” as though we have nothing to learn from countries that are not like us.

But it was not until I read a column by Ross Douthat of the New York Times, that I realized one of the implications of “we are not like Norway and so cannot have the quality of life that they have.” In his April 17 column entitled, “The Middle-Class Tax Trap,” Douthat says, “Historically, the most successful welfare states (think Scandinavia) have depended on ethnic solidarity to sustain their tax-and-transfer programs. But the working-age America of the future will be far more diverse than the retired cohort it’s laboring to support. Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines.”

Joan Walsh, writing in Salon.com about Douthat’s comments, says, “Douthat seems to be saying we can't have a real social compact in a multiracial society; it only works in monochromatic Nordic societies. I think it would be the ultimate example of American exceptionalism to prove him wrong.”

Reading all this I remembered a trip I made to a poor county in Eastern Kentucky when I was working in Appalachia in the 1980’s. I was visiting with a wonderful progressive organization and we started talking about racism. To my surprise, the Executive Director said, “We don’t have racism here in this county because we have never had any Black people live here. This has always been an all white county. When Blacks were leaving the south, they passed right through here because we had no jobs, and we still have no jobs.”

I asked him, “Do you mean racism only exists with the presence of people of color?” He thought a moment and said, “I never thought of it that way. No, I don’t mean that.” We went on to have a very interesting conversation about how to address racism in an all white environment where the rate of poverty was almost 50% and one in seven households had no electricity or running water.

There is a certain fatalism on the part of people who reject the idea that the United States can be both multi-racial and have rough social equity. I don’t think the people who say, “We cannot be like Norway” are racist – some are anti-racist activists – but the implications of what they are saying has racial overtones and must be addressed. The presence of people of color is not what causes social problems. What if we thought instead that the struggles we are engaged in to end racism give us the insight we need to build a society with the same quality of life for everyone here as is experienced in Scandinavia? That, in fact, we will be called on to teach Scandinavians some lessons about incorporating immigrants into the fabric of our social compact, something that has been difficult particularly in Denmark and Holland? Until and unless we imagine our diversity as an extraordinary gift and asset, we condemn the majority of us to lives of increasing deprivation and a tiny handful of us to lives of excess and consumption. We can do better than that.

The Equality Trust

2011-05-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

This Tuesday’s featured partner is The Equality Trust, based in the United Kingdom. The Equality Trust was founded in 2009 by Bill Kerry, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, following the publishing of The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, which documents the real and negative effect of income inequality on functioning, healthy societies.

The Equality Trust is the online repository of all the research, slides, and tools included in the book, as well as ongoing updated research and commentary on inequality around the globe. While there is a focus on the UK in much of the recent posts, there is a plethora of useful data and visuals on US-based inequality.

As we continue to look at the need for rough social equity for a healthy commons, this work is an invaluable resource.

Check back Thursday for a post from Kim Klein in our Race and the Commons Series.

I-Thou

2011-05-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

The headlong stream is termed violent
But the river bed hemming it in is
Termed violent by no one.
The storm that bends the birch trees
Is held to be violent
But how about the storm
That bends the backs of the roadworkers?
Bertolt Brecht, “On Violence”

Brecht’s poem is a wonderful metaphor for understanding the concept of structural oppression. The image of a riverbed actually being more responsible for the speed and danger of the river than the water itself is a call for a paradigm shift in how we address the structures of oppression. Today I would like to explore a possible commons view of a way to begin to deconstruct structural racism.

Those of us who post on this blog use the concept originally put forward by David Bollier of “rough social equity” as the end goal of our commons work. This concept leads immediately to issues of poverty, income inequality, corporate power, tax justice and so on. We have looked at any number of economic models for addressing economic inequity. Economic inequity cannot be separated from racism since it is so abundantly clear that all forms of economic injustice disproportionately affect people of color. (See Tuesday’s blog post about ColorLines, which is consistently one of the clearest and most articulate publications on this topic.)

However, it is also clear that ending economic injustice will not, de facto, end racism. So it is worth spending time to try think about a commons view of racism separate from economic oppression. “Rough social equity” calls for a transformation of the structures of way inhabitants of a society view each other. In 1923, the theologian, Martin Buber, wrote a book called “I and Thou”, one of the most important books of the last two centuries. He said that human beings can adopt one of two attitudes towards the world: either “I-It” or “I-Thou.” “I-Thou” is a relationship between a subject and a subject, and “I-It” a relationship between a subject and an object. “I-Thou” relationships are characterized by dialogue between entities with no outcome in mind except genuine encounter and understanding. “I-It” is a utilitarian relationship, where the goal is to get what one needs from another. Buber was clear that “I-Thou” or “I-It” relationships were not just about one person in relationship to another, but could describe all manner of structural relationships, such as employers and employees, or countries (he was utterly opposed to any form of nationalism for example), or the attitude of religious traditions to each other. To my memory, Buber did not address racism in great detail, although he wrote extensively about anti-Semitism and later about Arab/Israeli relations, both of which have elements of racism.

“I-Thou” requires that two beings (which could be two races) meet one another in their authentic existence, without any qualification or objectification of one another. An authentic “I-Thou” meeting lacks any structure, and can be understood by some of the ways his German writing has been translated into English: encounter, dialogue, mutuality.

The "I-It" relationship is the opposite of “I-Thou.” In the “I-It” relationship, the “I” treats other people as objects to be used and experienced. Essentially, this form of objectivity relates to the world in terms of the self – how can an object (which could be a person, a group of people or even a state) serve my/our interest? No one can stay in a permanent “I-Thou” relationship and Buber does not judge “I-It” as necessarily being bad, but the objectification of the other can and often does lead to oppression.

Those who love Buber will probably feel critical at how I have summarized his very profound teaching, and I suggest that anyone who hasn’t read Buber go out and do so, but do so in a book group or a study group so that a genuine “I-Thou” encounter might actually happen as you work with these ideas.

Others will probably wonder what this philosophy means for our day to day lives in deconstructing racism. A commons view often suggests ways of thinking that are exactly the opposite of what we have learned and take for granted. To deconstruct racism will require first making sure that no race is seen as “it”, either to be liberated or oppressed by “I.” The stream bed in the opening line must disappear altogether, at least temporarily, for us to be able to imagine a structure that does not breed inequity. Sometimes just sitting with an idea is the commons approach to finding a solution. As we explore more specific and practical ways to deconstruct racism in our society, we must start with the premise of no structure at all, or risk replacing one oppression with another.

I believe Buber helps us understand a commons view of structural racism. Rough social equity requires us to identify, and then remove, all that causes any group of people to be seen as “it.”

Colorlines

2011-05-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

On Tuesdays, we share updates and information from key commons partners we think you should know about. This Thursday in the Race and the Commons Series, Kim Klein will take an initial look at how inequality disproportionately affects people of color and undermines the rough social equity necessary for a healthy commons, which in turn impacts everyone. One group you should know about that analyzes at racial justice issues and how inequality in America gets played out every day is Colorlines.

Colorlines.com is a daily news site offering award-winning reporting, analysis, and solutions to today's racial justice issues. Check them out online, or follow their excellent twitter feed.

As they say on their website: “We consider racism a structural problem, and that perspective informs our journalism. Colorlines.com features dynamic, hard-hitting coverage of the day's stories as they unfold, synthesizing complicated stories with multimedia features and breaking open new conversations with investigative reporting. Colorlines.com covers stories from the perspective of community, rather than through the lens of power brokers.”

Their perspective is fresh, intelligent, and offers incredible insight into the nature of equity and inequality. They provide a great background as we continue to look at Race and the Commons.

Prisons, Inequality and Profits: a Deadly Combo

2011-05-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

In our first post of the Race and the Commons series, Sean Thomas-Breitfeld takes a look at prisons.

Prisons have been one of the public expenditures targeted for cuts as a result of states' revenue crises. There have been indications from several governors that they're finally going to pursue criminal justice policies that are both more humane, and also more cost-effective. Some have called this the "silver lining" of the current budget cutting mania, but reducing prison funding alone won't address the deeper racial dyanamic at play in our criminal justice system.

It's widely known that the criminal justice system is plagued by racial disparities. From profiling practices that put people of color under greater scrutiny to excessively harsh sentencing practices (particularly due to "three strikes" laws and the "war on drugs"), it's no surprise that 1/3 of black men can expect to be imprisoned at some point in their lives and that more than 60% of the prison population are people of color even though we make up less than 30% of the total national population.

We have one of the most unequal societies and the world's largest prison population. The rampant inequality that caused the economic crisis is also connected to the disparities of our criminal justice system. And even in this budget environment where Governors appear to be considering ways to reduce the prison population and seek alternatives to widespread incarceration, there are also signs that there are those poised to profit from the criminal justice reforms.

Ohio's Governor has proposed privatizing several of the state's prisons. And just this past week, Florida's legislature approved their governor's prison privatization proposal. Even California is sending inmates to private prisons in other states. Privatization gets sold to the public as a way to reduce government expenditures and increase revenue (that is IF the private corporations running the prisons actually were to pay taxes). But often privatization simply helps campaign donors go into business and profit off of services that were public.

Not only have private prisons been plagued with abuses of inmates and escapes of violent criminals, but criminal justice -- like healthcare and education -- should be kept public and protected from the profit motive.

Race and the Commons Series

2011-05-03T14:49:00.000-07:00

We’ve spent the last month taking an in-depth look at Taxes and the Commons. Two themes come up again and again when we talk about these issues: 1) how taxes are collected and spent is a reflection of our values as a society, and 2) a healthy commons requires rough social equity. We will be revisiting those two themes over the next five weeks as we explore Race and the Commons.

One of the critiques levied against the commons frame has been its race neutrality or “blindness,” and the lack of a race analysis. However, the impact of tax policy and the enclosure of the commons, particularly in urban areas that have experienced white flight, disproportionately affect people of color and poor people. We will be examining the current manifestations of this in our Race and the Commons series.

Every Thursday through the beginning of June, you will find a new post examining a key area of how tax policy and the steady enclosure of the commons affects communities of color and how the commons frame can be used as a tool to counter those effects.

We will also continue to feature key partners on Tuesdays who are thinking about and addressing these issues. This Thursday, Sean Thomas-Breitfeld will be looking at taxes and the role they play in pipelining people of color, particularly men of color, into prisons. A key partner in this work is Policy Link, and their Center for Infrastructure Equality. They have a wealth of information, reports, and fact sheets that uncover the underlying causes of inequality and propose new structures in which everyone who benefits from these public investments—including and especially residents of low-income communities and communities of color—must have a seat at the negotiating table.

Taxes and the Commons Series: Tax Havens Cause $500 billion in lost revenue globally

2011-04-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

In our final post of the Tax and the Commons Series, Kim Klein takes a look at tax havens and the real effect they have on revenue. Check back next Thursday for our series on Race and the Commons.

I first heard the word “tax haven” in 1989 when reading a story about a man who worked for Michael Milken the “junk bond king” and who was convicted, along with Milken, for fraud, racketeering and insider trading. This man added to those crimes the crime of cheating on Michael Milken. Whenever he saw Milken invest a lot of money in a stock, he invested some of his own money without Milken’s knowledge or permission. He kept his earnings in an account in the Cayman Islands under the name “Cookies.” He reasoned that he was getting the equivalent of a few cookies to Milken’s massive cakes. This man was caught because some enterprising bankers in the Cayman bank which held his money started to notice big influxes of money every so often. They followed the money trail and figured out what this man was investing in. They invested very little and kept their money in an account they called “crumbs.” Another enterprising but honest banker followed the activity of “crumbs” to “cookies” and was part of the evidence against Milken’s associate.

Today, Milken himself would probably be shocked at how much money is kept in these offshore accounts. According to Peter Gillespie, in his article, The Real Pirates of the Caribbean,

In today's globalized world, tax evasion is occurring on a massive scale. As corporations and wealthy individuals shift their assets into offshore tax havens, the annual loss in global tax revenues is more than $500 billion. This huge revenue shortfall is constraining the ability of governments to provide vital services to their societies, especially in the aftermath of the colossal bailouts of financial institutions. At the G-20 meetings in London, Toronto, and Seoul, civil society groups have advocated for improvements in the transparency of the international economic system and an end to offshore secrecy jurisdictions.

Switzerland, of course, has been a tax haven for almost a century, but today there are more than 70 tax havens, most of which are based in small states such as the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Panama, the Channel Islands, Monaco, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Singapore, and Switzerland.

Richard Murphy, of the Tax Justice Network says there are four reasons why tax havens exist:

First, they are used by those wishing to avoid or evade their obligation to pay tax. Tax avoidance is legal, but contrary to the spirit of taxation law, while tax evasion is always illegal, involving the non-disclosure of a source of income to an authority that has a legal right to know about it.
Second, they are used to hide criminal activities from view. That criminal activity might be tax evasion itself, but might also be money-laundering or crimes generating cash that needs to be laundered - theft, fraud, corruption, insider dealing, piracy, financing of terrorism, drug trafficking, human trafficking, counterfeiting, bribery and extortion.
Third, they are used by those who want their activities to be anonymous, even if they are entirely legitimate. Some people wish to hide their wealth from their spouses, for example; others might want to conduct trade which, though legitimate, might risk their reputation.
Fourth, they are used by those seeking somewhere cheaper to do business; in these locations they can usually avoid the costly obligation to comply with regulations that would apply onshore.

Tax havens are now an integral part of the international economy. At least half of all international bank lending and approximately one-third of foreign direct investments are routed via these secrecy jurisdictions. Gillespie estimates that more than half of all global trade is conducted through tax havens, and half the global monetary stock is estimated to pass through them at some point.

Tax havens host more than two million international business corporations. One modest building in the Cayman Islands is home to more that 12,000 of these firms. A January 2009 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office revealed that 83 of the 100 largest publicly-traded companies in the U.S., including big banks receiving bail-out money, have scores of offshore subsidiaries.

In 2007, the pharmaceutical company Merck was assessed $2.3 billion in U.S. back taxes for transferring its drug patents to a Bermuda shell company and then deducting from its taxes the royalties it paid itself.

Tax havens are also used to conceal liabilities. Before being exposed as a spectacular fraud, Enron had established a network of 3,500 shell companies, 600 of which were registered in the Cayman Islands.

Scott Klinger, Chuck Collins, and Holly Sklar in their report, Unfair Advantage: The Business Case Against Tax Havens, point out:

“A half-century ago, nearly a quarter of federal revenue came from corporate taxes. This year, corporate taxes will contribute just 7.2 percent of federal revenue totals, or so estimates the OMB, the federal budget office.”

This shift has much to do with the creation of tax havens.

“Unfair Advantage” notes these examples:

In 2008, the 29 offshore subsidiaries of Goldman Sachs helped slash the tax rate on the bank’s $2 billion in profits to less than 1 percent. Goldman that year actually paid its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, over three times more in personal compensation than the bank paid Uncle Sam in federal taxes.
In 2007, of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. corporations, 83 ran subsidiaries in offshore tax havens.

There are many proposals for dealing with tax havens, and they will have to be regulated internationally. I don’t have the knowledge to discuss the proposals with any wisdom, but as a regular person who couldn’t even create an account in the Caymans, even if it were called “Dustballs”, I can say that capturing the $500 billion a year that is kept in these small countries would go a long way to closing many budget gaps. What this says to me is that we have choices: there are ways to close the budget gaps around the world. The money exists to have the communities and the countries we want, and it is not too hard to figure out where it is.

For more on tax havens read:

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson, Bodley Head, 329 pp, £14.99, January 2011, and
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Simon and Schuster, 368 pp, £11.50, March 2011

Economic Policy Institute

2011-04-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

On Tuesdays, we share updates and information from key commons partners we think you should know about. Today we want to point you towards the work of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Their tagline is “Research & Ideas for Shared Prosperity,” and that sums it up well. EPI does fantastic research on the impact of various economic policies on low- and middle-income Americans. The State of Working America comes out every two years, and the accompanying website offers a wealth of charts and graphs based on specific demographic groups and issue areas.

When you have a second, visit their website and sign-up for their newsletter to hear about the their latest research and findings (right-hand side of the homepage, about half-way down). Their work on the Federal Budget, Deficit, and Taxes is particularly interesting given our recent series on taxes and includes a great analysis of The People’s Budget.

Come back Thursday to read the last post in our Thursday series on Taxes and the Commons. Kim Klein will look at tax options that won’t break the bank, but will generate a lot of revenue.

Taxes and the Commons Series: Tax Cheats – and even some of their critics – miss reason for the season

2011-04-21T01:52:00.000-07:00

Tax Day has come and gone once again, and this year the big story was GE’s tax avoidance strategies. It’s a familiar meme that seems to get recycled in the public discussion about taxes around this time every year, just note the consistent spike in “corporate taxes“ google searches.

There’s no doubt that corporate tax avoidance schemes are a problem, but the solution is probably going to be more complicated than closing tax loopholes and shelters. After all, the ways GE plays the tax game isn’t limited to shady accounting practices. Corporate America lobbies aggressively for tax policies that favor their interests; like the “active finance exemption” that costs us $9 billion in lost revenue. They hire former IRS and Treasury staff willing to figure out better ways to cheat their former employer. And even if for one month a year the media beats up on them about how low the actual tax rates are for corporations, the other 11 months the media does the bidding of their corporate sponsors by parroting myths about “high” tax rates and defending the legality of their tax shelters and loopholes (as in this MSNBC clip below).

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Unfortunately some of the populist outrage about GE and the other corporate tax cheats actually reinforces the demonization of taxes and serves the interests of the corporations and the super-rich who have their own tax breaks and tax-avoiding strategies. The “make them pay” argument seems to rely on people’s own resentment about paying taxes. Surely, the anger about regular people being left with the bill of keeping our government running while rich corporations find every way possible to avoid contributing to our society is useful for organizing – and we’ve seen lots of creative actions these last few weeks, but tax season should be celebrated.

We need to cultivate a more fundamental ethic of the value of paying taxes. Faithful people don’t complain about their weekly offering at church – and I know that it’s not a perfect comparison for people from traditions where offerings are completely voluntary and secret, but in other churches donation goals are set for members by the pastor and the offering plate gets passed around as many times as it takes to hit the goal for that Sunday. In the same way that people live out their faith and values by sharing their wealth, our taxes are a demonstration of our commitment to the success of our community and nation. Corporations and the rich should have the same commitment to our nation, commons and collective well-being as the rest of us.

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength

2011-04-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

“We should pay more, we want to pay more…” – Patriotic Millionaires

On Tuesdays, we share updates and information from key commons partners we think you should know about. Today, we direct you to a petition you can sign to support US millionaires who want to be taxed more. In their own words:

Our country faces a choice – we can pay our debts and build for the future, or we can shirk our financial responsibilities and cripple our nation’s potential.

Our country has been good to us. It provided a foundation through which we could succeed. Now, we want to do our part to keep that foundation strong so that others can succeed as we have.

Please do the right thing for our country. Raise our taxes.

You can sign the Friends of Patriotic Millionaires petition here, and I would also encourage you to think about anyone you know who may fall into that bracket, whether on their own or in combination with a spouse or partner, and encourage them to sign as well.

Come back Thursday to read the next post in our Thursday series on Taxes and the Commons. Sean Thomas-Breitfeld will take a look at corporate loopholes and who isn’t asking to be taxed more!

Taxes and the Commons Series: Giving Thanks

2011-04-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

In the second post of our Thursday series on Taxes and the Commons, Kim Klein looks at what we can celebrate about taxes as tax day approaches. Check back on Thursday the 21st for the next post in the series which looks at all the loopholes that certain corporations are thankful for. On the flip-side of that, stop by on Tuesday when we feature the work of our key partners, and learn about millionaires who WANT to be taxed more!

I am self-employed, which means that April 15 (or this year, April 18) is always an important day for me. I have to pay any tax I owe from last year, and also make the first of four payments on the money I will earn this year. We call these payments, “estimateds” for short. Usually I have waited until now to fund my IRAs, so all in all, this is an expensive day. Because of that, it is important to me to give thought and thanks for all the things taxes pay for that I use, need, enjoy or want to know exists.

So, in no particular order, here they are:

Infrastructure, such as sidewalks, streetlights, roads, traffic lights, storm drains, bridges, and the like.

Libraries everywhere. I love the Berkeley Public Library, and a few days ago I was in a wonderful library in Medford, OR. I have done hundreds of trainings in libraries all over the United States. Libraries are not just for books (although for me that is the # 1 greatest thing about a library), but also internet access, community meeting space, a central place for posting announcements of events, a source of information from the librarians “(what are 8 year olds reading now?”), etc. Not all libraries are funded by taxes, but most have some help from tax revenue and ideally should be mostly or entirely funded by tax revenue and sale of used books.

Public Transportation: In the Bay Area, BART runs mostly on time and goes a lot of places. Right now I am in Portland, where the bus is free in the downtown area. I know the quality and reliability of public transportation varies from place to place, but when it works, it is really helpful.

Inspections: I spend a lot of time in hotels, airports and office buildings and I use elevators, moving sidewalks and escalators to get to my room or flight or appointment. I love seeing the inspection stickers and knowing regular inspections are required by law. I also eat out quite often and I don’t worry that the kitchen of the restaurant is overrun with rats or crawling with cockroaches because of health inspections.

Social security and Medicare: I am not quite old enough for either of these programs, but I have many friends who are already using them, and I look forward to retiring and collecting social security. I am so conscious that the idea of social security would never pass now, and that Roosevelt would be considered so far to the left as to be unimaginable. A friend said recently, “Why are all programs that help ordinary people called ‘entitlements’ and programs that help corporations and wealthy people called ‘subsidies’?”

Federal Aviation Administration: Flying, although more and more unpleasant, is still the safest form of transportation we have.

Public Parks: the variety of these are astounding, from the major national parks like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite to the magnificent human built city parks such as Central Park in New York City or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to the small “pocket” parks that provide open space and playgrounds in thousands of neighborhoods—to me, they are all a gift. Who has not enjoyed a park of some kind?

So you get the idea. You go through your week and you notice what you use, what you enjoy, what you rely on, and you think to yourself, “what made that possible?” In many cases, you will see that taxes paid for or subsidized whatever it is.

As Tamara Draught, Vice President of DEMOS, wrote recently, “Without the public systems and structures that taxes pay for, America as we know it would cease to exist. Taxes matter.”

For more on the work of Demos and “Taxes Matter” week, please visit the Our Fiscal Security website. One of their free, downloadable graphics is below, and illustrates my point exactly!

Faith in Public Life

2011-04-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

On Tuesdays, we will be featuring links to some of our favorite websites, lists, and partners that broaden our thinking on the commons. Check back Thursday for our next post from the Taxes and the Commons series that will look at what we can be thankful for when it comes to paying taxes, as April 18th draws closer.

Faith in Public Life is an excellent daily newsfeed of current events that reflect various points of view from people of faith, or about issues that have spiritual elements or overtones. Faith in Public Life also publishes a daily blog and the following is a snippet from a much longer piece which you can read on their website. Sign up at www.faithinpubliclife.org to read high quality and thoughtful reports and commentary from a faith perspective on the issues of the day.

Budgeting is about priorities, about using our resources in ways that reflect our values. Politicians want to preserve tax breaks for big oil companies, yet cut funding for vital programs that provide health care to our seniors, children and disabled citizens. That is a direct reflection of what our elected representatives care most about. Our public schools are a primary means by which we fulfill our moral obligation to prepare all children for a bright future. Yet, funding education cuts proposed in HR-1 would total $11.5 billion. Ten aircraft carriers, the first to be completed in 2015, the last in 2040, will cost $120 billion. Couldn't we just build nine and make sure our children get the education they deserve?

By: Michael Livingston, Director of the National Council of Churches Poverty Initiative

Taxes and the Commons Series: Shared Sacrifice

2011-04-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

From the time I was about 9 years old, I did small jobs for neighbors to earn money. I mowed lawns in the summer, shoveled walks in the winter, cleaned houses, babysat, and then as I got older, worked as a waitress and cashier in a restaurant. My family did not have money, and I learned early on that if I wanted something, I needed to work for it. I saved most of the money I earned all those years for college and actually had a tidy amount to put toward tuition and books when I finally left home. Most of the kids I grew up with did the same—we thought nothing of it. We did not use this language of “austerity” or “shared sacrifice” that informs budget discussions today but we actually practiced it. Because most of the families in my neighborhood went between “struggling” to “getting by” to “doing OK” and back again, we also helped each other. The boys up the street knew a lot about bicycles and could find and patch a hole in an inner tube in about 15 minutes. I read very well and could help with homework so we could all get to work or play faster.

I am not nostalgic for my childhood, and I don’t look back at those times as the “good old days.” But I am grateful that I know what austerity and sacrifice are, so I can recognize it when I hear about it on the news.

Here are some shared sacrifices I would like to see, as suggested by the Center for American Progress:

How about if people with vacation homes could not deduct their mortgage interest? This would generate almost $9 billion over ten years, so that people needing low income housing could actually have it. (The cut to low income housing programs is $8.9 billion).
What if Congress had not extended the Bush era tax cuts for the top income brackets? That would have generated $42 billion a year, almost enough to save all the programs currently at risk; the total cost of which is $42 billion. (To name just a few of these programs: early childhood, WIC, job training for unemployed, Low Income Home Energy, or LHEAP grants, community health centers, legal services for the poor, and Title X Family Planning.)

In a new report by Chuck Collins, Sam Pizzigati and Alison Goldberg, the following policy suggestions are made. Taken together, they would boost revenue by $4 trillion over the next decade.

Close overseas tax havens ($90-100 billion)
Add new tax brackets for households with more than $1 million in annual income ($60-80 billion)
Institute a modest financial transaction tax ($150 billion)

The report shows how America's increasingly concentrated income and wealth, coupled with historically low effective tax rates on the richest households, are fueling the deficit. For example, if U.S. corporations were taxed at the same effective rate that they paid in 1961, the additional tax revenue would total $485 billion.

Shared sacrifice? I am not seeing it, unless one defines this as the super rich and corporations sharing in sacrificing the majority of Americans, particularly the poor, toward their own unending need to concentrate wealth in a smaller and smaller number of hands.

We Just Have to Know What We Want

2011-04-01T09:50:00.001-07:00

I just did a “Talking About Taxes” workshop for the staff of a very large social service agency. Of the 50 people in attendance, almost 3/4ths were under 35. They were enthusiastic and interested in all aspects of the discussion and raised many good questions and comments. But what struck me most was something one person said to me after the workshop, “Now I realize what we have to do: put forward a vision of what we want and tell the policy people to create policies that will make it happen. We don’t need to understand every little detail about taxes and tax policy: we just have to know what we want.”

What people seemed most struck by is the notion that taxes are a mirror of community values. Some economists have said they can tell what the quality of public schools are going to be, what kind of arts and culture a community will have, and about how many poor people will live in a place just by looking at the tax code.

“We just have to know what we want.” Sounds simple, but it is hard. However, as we move closer to Tax Day, I see more and more clearly that in not knowing what we want, and not standing up for what we want, we get what we have. And I think most of us are pretty clear that what we have is not what we want.

Let’s get busy imagining something else, and creating a structure to make it happen. In honor of Tax Day, we will be featuring posts over the next six weeks that explore what it is that we want and the implication of taxes and tax policy on nonprofits, communities, and the values we want to reflect. We will also be highlighting some of the work that other groups are doing on this issue as well.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Too Much

2011-03-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

Today we bring you an article from TooMuch, an excellent online weekly that explores excess and inequality in the United States and throughout the world. We suggest you sign up to receive their weekly email on Monday’s, which you can do by clicking here.

This week’s email features, “The Right’s Pushback Against Taxing the Rich,” by Sam Pizzigati, which includes the great graphic below and covers the growing popularity of taxing the rich more. It also lays out the many and varied arguments coming from the wealthy and their advocates.

As you can see, even with proposed increase, the tax rate would still be far below what it has been in the past. Check the article out over at Too Much.

Enough Wealth?

2011-03-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

In the midst of a horrendous earthquake and tsunami in Japan which has already claimed 11,000 people, a brutal crackdown on rebel forces in Libya and more subtle crackdown on dissent in Saudi Arabia, a complete selling out of any democratic values or process by the Republicans in Wisconsin, and the usual reports of war and famine all over the world, the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle (March 15, 2011) picked up a story written by Elizabeth Ody for Bloomberg News called “Not Feeling Wealthy? Would $7.5 million make it better?”

And I read it because there is nothing like other people’s money to get your mind off other people’s problems. According to this story, in a survey of 1,000 households with an average of $3.5 million in investable assets, 42% of respondents said they do not feel wealthy, feeling they would need about $7.5 million to feel rich. In other words, these households who are in the top 5% of the US population, need more than twice as much as they already have in order to feel wealthy. The 58% of respondents who already (and sensibly) do feel wealthy right now at $3.5 million, are by and large younger and have more time to earn even more money.

Sanjiv Mirchandani, President of National Financial, commented kindly, “Wealth is relative, and to some extent the more you have the more you realize how much more you need.” Someone else might have substituted “addictive” for “relative” and “how much more you can buy” for “how much more you need.”

According to this same article, the 5.5 million US households with at least $1 million is assets, control 56% of the country’s wealth. These same people planned on giving $38,000 to charity in 2010, up from $36,000 in 2009. Of course, the $38,000 they plan to give will actually only cost them $23,000 because of the tax bracket they are in and the charitable tax deduction they will get.

I admit my own hypocrisy in judging this top 5% of households. I have also found money to be addictive. The more I earn, the more I spend. Ten years ago I felt good about earning $50,000 a year, and now I would find it hard to live on that, and it is not because of inflation or the rising cost of health care, although those are factors. It is because I look around me and see how people of my age and station live and what they live on, and I compare myself to them. What gets me passed that frame of reference is remembering that financial wealth is not real wealth.

Rough social equity, the goal of a commons based society, requires a redefining of what it means to be wealthy. This article focuses only on money: perhaps in a different survey these same people might mention their health, their children, their sense of meaning and purpose as a source of wealth. But no one asks about that or adds that up as part of our liquid assets. Until we measure our common wealth (friends, leisure time, wilderness, history and culture, access to clean air and water, etc) as wealth, we will have neither a commons based society, nor, ironically, actual wealth.

The Commons and The Death Penalty

2011-03-09T15:15:00.000-08:00

Today Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois abolished the death penalty in that state, joining three other states who have done so in as many years. Much of the impetus behind getting rid of the death penalty has been the very fine work of Equal Justice USA, the Innocence Project, the many chapters of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and numerous other organizations. I commend them all and I commend Patrick Quinn for doing the right thing.

There are many criticisms of the death penalty. The Death Penalty Information Center (www.deathpenaltyinfo.org) has excellent documentation on its website of the racist nature of its enforcement. You are far more likely to get the death penalty if the person you killed is white than if they are Black or Latino. If you kill someone, you are more likely to be sentenced to death if you are Black than if you are white.

Another problem is how many people on death row have not committed murder, or may not have committed any crime at all. Many who have been exonerated have led the charge to abolish the death penalty, but many did not live to see their names cleared.

Another problem is the cost. There are now 34 states that still have the death penalty. One of them is my state, California, where almost 700 people wait for execution on death row, while the taxpayers of California pay $125 million a year more to keep them there than if their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment and they joined the rest of the inmate population.

Other problems include how cruel are current methods of execution are, the fact that the death penalty does not deter other people from committing murder, the psychological toll the executions take on guards, chaplains and the doctors that oversee them, and the ultimate irony that the person who is punished in this way has no chance to redeem him or herself.

From a commons point of view, each of the above is reason alone to abolish the death penalty. But the biggest reason and one which I don’t see mentioned nearly often enough, is that it is simply wrong for the state to murder people. I am horrified by the number of people who have been wrongly convicted and sit on death row innocent of the crime for which they will eventually be executed. However does that mean if we could somehow guarantee that every person on death row was a cold blooded murderer, the death penalty would then be appropriate? If we could insure a race neutral justice system, would the death penalty then be OK? And if we could get the cost down, should we execute more people?

We have become so practical that we even approach literal life and death issues with logistical or cost concerns. But the question of the morality of the death penalty, the moral questions that surround our prison system, and the moral questions that should permeate our justice system are by and large unanswered because they are unasked.

The questions we really need to dive into here are crime and punishment. Should criminals be punished? If yes, how, toward what end? The word ‘penitentiary’ comes from a Latin word meaning “I am sorry.” The notion is that the Penitentiary lets people repent, be rehabilitated and be returned to their communities. Perhaps there are some people that cannot be returned, and for the sake of the common good, must remain in prison. But it is hard to imagine that this describes more than a tiny fraction of the people now in prison, whether for murder or for some lesser crime. I hope that all of us who are promoting a commons view will raise the larger moral questions that need to be asked when we enter the conversations that will undoubtedly happen as a result of Gov. Quinn’s very correct decision.

Feminism and the Commons

2011-03-08T18:52:00.000-08:00

Today was the 100th International Women's Day. So it seemed appropriate to reflect on how feminism is woven into a commons-based perspective.

Feminist critiques of economics have not just focused on the way that caregiving is gendered, generally unpaid and devalued even when it is paid. Feminist economists have also emphasized the importance of measuring economic progress in terms of well-being, not just private accumulation and wealth. Ecofeminists have made the case that the same mentality that justifies the oppression and domination of women similarly leads to the exploitation of the natural resources we should all hold in common. It sure leads me to wonder how much more nurturing, environmentally stable, equitable, and just commons-based our society would be if feminist views and analyses were the rule, rather than exception, in our economic and social relations.

None of this is a fresh insight but I thought this quote from an article titled "Macho Economics Still Rules the Agenda" summed this up perfectly.

We need to value our communalities, the quality of relationships, communities and the care and nurture of others, to put a good society in front of a growth economy.

We need to work with men who are equally sick of being just moneymakers. Maybe then we can solve future difficult issues collaboratively rather than destroying ourselves competitively.

A Commons View of Free Speech

2011-03-03T14:04:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court issued a very important ruling about free speech yesterday, stating that the First Amendment protects hateful protests at military funerals. The case arose from a protest at the funeral of a Marine who had died in Iraq, Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder. As they had at hundreds of other funerals, members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., appeared with signs bearing messages like “America is Doomed” and “God Hates Fags.” The church contends that God is punishing the United States for its tolerance of homosexuality.

The 8-1 decision reflected an interesting alliance of conservative and liberal judges against the minority opinion of another conservative judge, Justice Alito.

Many will decry this ruling and many others will celebrate it as a victory for free speech. Certainly what has to be kept in mind is that the law is tested in its ability to protect people who are not at all likeable and who do horrible things to other people.

This most recent ruling in favor the Westboro Baptist Church is reminiscent to the 1977 decision to allow members of the Nazi Party of America to march in Skokie, IL, a suburb of Chicago which at the time was predominantly Jewish and was home to more than 5,000 Holocaust survivors. The plan was for the marchers to wear uniforms similar to those worn by the members of Hitler's Nazi Party, including swastika armbands, and to carry a party banner bearing a large swastika. The residents of Skokie sought an injunction against the marchers on the grounds that the march would incite violence. The ACLU defended the Nazis (which cost them hundreds of donors, including many major donors) and won. (Ultimately the Nazi party did not march in Skokie, but instead marched in downtown Chicago.)

The right to remain silent and the obligation of the police to “Mirandize” suspects comes from a ruling in a case of Ernesto Miranda. 1963, Miranda was arrested for the armed robbery of a bank worker. While in custody of police, Miranda -- who had a record for armed robbery, attempted rape, assault and burglary -- signed a written confession to the armed robbery. He also confessed to kidnapping and raping an 18-year-old girl 11 days prior to the robbery. Miranda was convicted of the armed robbery, but his attorneys appealed the case on the grounds that Miranda did not understand that he had the right against self-incrimination. When the Supreme Court made its landmark Miranda ruling in 1966, Ernesto Miranda's conviction was overturned. Prosecutors later retried the case, using evidence other than his confession, and he was convicted again and served 11 years in prison. (Ironically, Miranda was killed in a bar fight in 1976 at the age of 34. A suspect was arrested, invoked his right to remain silent, and was later released without being charged. )

As any school child knows, there are limits to free speech. You cannot say something that has a predictable result, such as yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. You cannot threaten to kill the President. But for the most part people and organizations are free to say what they want in public places.

It is too easy to say that in a commons based society we wouldn’t have rapists, murderers and vitriolic hate-mongers. Certainly Scandinavian countries are dealing with frightening and racist anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim organizations and individuals. Figuring out a commons approach to free speech is a vigorous conversation about what it is, so that we all understand the Court’s decision. Then we need another conversation about the increase in hate speech and hate mongering that is happening in our public spaces – including on the internet and in video games – and what we are going to do about it.

In the meantime, though, as Justice Louis Brandeis once explained, the Framers of our First Amendment knew "that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones."

Abundance

2011-03-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday a friend of mine sent me her political joke of the day, with the message “Might be too true to be funny”:

A unionized public employee, a teabagger and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the teabagger and says, "watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.”

As states around the country prepare to go head to head with workers’ unions, I’ve heard many differing viewpoints, the most confusing of which is the complaint that unions are stealing from the middle class. I continue to be shocked that the link between budget deficits and corporate tax cuts (or dwindling tax revenue) is not the major argument that I’m hearing.

But what I find more surprising when I view this through a commons lens, is that we continue to let the argument be one of scarcity. That in order for me to get mine, you have to give up some of yours. We are like the public employee and the teabagger fighting over one cookie while the CEO’s get full. In an abundant society, resources – as well as hardships – are shared by all. Another way to think of this comes from an article David Bollier wrote back in 2007: “competition may work reasonably well when resources are abundant, but cooperation may be more successful when resources are scarce.”

As we continue to move through this recession/depression, it’s heartening to know that there is a way to not turn on each other. We can support each other without seeing it as a loss for ourselves.

Reflections from Kim

2011-02-24T13:36:00.000-08:00

This post is from Kim.

I was six years old when Nixon ran against Kennedy. My grandmother , whom I adored, was living with us at the time, and she and my mother were for Nixon. My father was for Kennedy. LIFE Magazine did a spread on both men, with big pictures of their faces on the cover. I declared that I was for Kennedy as he was much better looking. My grandmother said, “He is that, and if that is a qualification, then you have made the right choice.” She said in such a way that I thought she was praising my insight and only later realized she was being a little sarcastic.

My grandmother was a lifelong Republican. She died the night McGovern was overwhelmingly defeated by Richard Nixon, Nov 7, 1972. I had almost flunked out of my first semester of college because I working day and night for McGovern. So that night I mourned two huge losses. I think my grandmother liked George McGovern—he was, after all, a Methodist minister, and she was also a lifelong Methodist. But Nixon was her man and I am grateful she did not live to see Watergate or the tapes that have come out revealing his profound anti-semitism and overall crudeness. On the other hand, she missed his signing of Title IX which she would have been proud of, and his unsuccessful attempts to pass universal health care and a guaranteed annual income.

My grandmother was solidly pro-choice and felt the government should have no role in the reproductive lives of women, except to protect our freedom. She believed that rich people should pay a higher proportion of their wealth in taxes, a view she shared (or perhaps got) from Eisenhower, a Republican president who presided over an America with a 90% top marginal tax rate. As a young woman, my grandmother was a suffragist and marched for women’s right to vote.

She would not recognize today’s Republicans. MoveOn.Com just put the following list of attacks on women by the GOP. My grandmother would have opposed every one of these, but then she belonged to the Grand Old Party, which really bears no relationship to today’s vitriolic, mean and illogical officeholders hiding behind the rubric Republican. From a commons point of view, the terms “republican’ and “democrat,” “liberal” and “conservative” have almost no meaning in any traditional sense. I am searching for a new word for myself and, retroactively, for my grandmother. A word that indicates that the person using it starts with questions about the common good and goes from there. I’ll let you know when I find one.

Meantime, here is some of what we are up against:

Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women
*(Posted on February 21, 2011 by MoveOn.Com)
1) Republicans not only want to reduce women’s access to abortion care, they’re actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven’t yet.
2) A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to “accuser.” But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain “victims.”
3) In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care.
4) Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids.
5) In Congress, Republicans have a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.
6) Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids’ preschool program. Why? No need, they said. Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.
7) And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.
8 ) Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.
9) Congress just voted for a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.
10) And if that wasn’t enough, Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can’t make this stuff up).
Sources:
1. “‘Forcible Rape’ Language Remains In Bill To Restrict Abortion Funding,” The Huffington Post, February 9, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=206084

Madison on My Mind

2011-02-22T20:05:00.000-08:00

I grew up in Wisconsin, only an hour's drive from Madison. So I've watched the news of the growing demonstrations opposing the new Governor's attacks on a few of the state's public sector unions with a mix of awe and state pride. By now, everyone knows about the power struggle going on in my home-state's Capitol -- and quickly spreading across the rest of the Midwest too!

It's always impressive when masses of people turnout for change, and given the massive demonstrations in North Africa these last few weeks it's easy to get swept up in a sort of protest mania. But Madison isn't Cairo (no matter what privatization-loving, budget-cutting Rep. Paul Ryan says). And it's not clear whether these challenges against the collective-bargaining power of public sector unions across the country will galvanize the majority of workers who aren't unionized, much less the many who are still unemployed. And that's because too many people seem to have bought into the myth that public sector employees have it too good. And rather than unionize everywhere to organize for better benefits and more job security, some people who are suffering would rather stick it to the unions than the rich businesses (including Wisconsin companies like Harley Davidson) using the recession as an excuse to boost profits through labor-saving and automation -- aka laying off workers.

The issue flying under the radar in this whole debate about just how draconian state budget cuts will be is the fact that the so-called budget and deficit cutters want to simultaneously pad the pockets of their campaign funders. The first thing that Gov. Walker did when he got into office in January was cut taxes for businesses. And at the end of last year, unemployment insurance was held hostage to tax cuts for the rich.

Cutting seems to be the only budget agenda of the Right. State facing a budget deficit? Slash public programs that we all rely on during tough times. Cut pay and benefits for state employees. And cut taxes for the rich and corporations that are experiencing record profits and raking in huge bonuses? A commons economy can't be based on forcing state employees to accept benefit cuts while showering tax cuts on the rich.

Living a Commons life

2011-02-10T15:09:00.000-08:00

A friend wrote to me recently:

I read your blog regularly and I agree with a lot of what you propose. Even when I don’t, or more often when I don’t know what I think, I find a lot of interesting ideas to share with friends. You, Sean and Caroline do a great service! However, while I oppose neoliberalism and abhor the rising inequality of the United States, I am not sure what I can do on a daily basis to address this. Most of what you suggest would require major policy shifts to become real, and I want to know what I can do to lead a ‘commons’ life right now, without needing to be involved in advocacy. Or am I just kidding myself, and really getting involved in a commons revolution is the only way to truly affect change?

My friend is a therapist. She works for herself and volunteers as a therapist in a program for abused children. She votes, gives away money, and buys most of her food at the Farmer’s Market. She has a cat and a dog she took in when a client of hers died. I think she is living a commons life in many ways.

But her question is legitimate—if we always propose ideas that few ordinary people have access to implementing, then how useful is our philosophy? On the other hand, we cannot be so naïve as to propose that everything can be solved by individual agency. Living a commons life, however, is not just about all the action we take—whether it is individual or as part of a large movement. It is about how we ARE in the world. When I was in seminary, we often debated the concept of evangelism: should we go out and try to convert people to Christianity (and of course, sub-debates about what form of Christianity we were talking about), or should our lives be such that people would be attracted to our faith without us having to say anything about it? I came down fairly solidly in the second camp, partly because I did not have a firm grasp on what I would be converting people from and to. (I was like the joke about what happens when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah’s Witness? You get someone who knocks confidently on your door, and when you open it, she has nothing to say.) Yet when I look at my actions on a daily basis, I know there are many times when people would not be at all attracted to what I believe.

So how can we live a “commons” life right now, in our work and home? Here is a short list based on my shortcomings over the past week:

Don’t honk at people who cut you off in traffic. It jars all the other drivers and it doesn’t really fix anything.
Speak to homeless people who ask you for money, whether you give them money or not. They are used to being looked through and over and around. I feel badly when I don’t give a homeless person money, but pretending I didn’t hear them is just rude.
Don’t imagine what someone you dislike, but have to work with, is going to say, and then don’t imagine what clever cutting bon mot you are going to say back. This is a true waste of brain cells.
Buy a few extra oranges or a hunk of cheese and give it to a homebound neighbor. Act like you bought the stuff by accident and want to share it so it doesn’t spoil. Tell her she looks nice in whatever she is wearing.
Send a thank you note, even if it is really late.
Stop working after 6-8 hours. Then do something fun. The only way to have a balanced life is to have a balanced day today.

Retirement Age

2011-02-08T10:58:00.000-08:00

Looking at society through the lens of the commons often yields views that are the polar opposite of what we are reading. The following editorial by James K. Galbraith is a case in point. What should be done for the common good is to lower the retirement age and to structure our society around the reality that we all have to rethink work altogether.

ACTUALLY, THE RETIREMENT AGE IS TOO HIGH
by James K. Galbraith

The Tune of a Hickory Stick

2011-02-03T09:21:00.000-08:00

I started school in 1959 and so most of my formative school years where in the 1960s and early 1970s. Like most of my classmates, we heard stories from our parents about their school years and the ones about punishment were usually cruel or humiliating. For example, being forced to stand in a corner with a “dunce cap” on was common in my mother’s school. My father recalled students being slapped in the face or spanked. A little ditty composed around 1907 remained popular even through the 1950’s:

School days, school days.
Dear old golden rule days.
Reading and writing and 'rithmetic.
Taught to the tune of a hickory stick.

The Golden Rule in the song was apparently a ruler and not a formula for promoting the common good.
I certainly felt grateful that corporal punishment was forbidden in my public school. Punishments for those of us who committed infractions were usually going to the principal’s office and the dreaded, “We have called your mother.” Actions requiring punishment (or “discipline” which sounded less punitive) included smoking, skipping class, cheating on school work, and playing tricks on other kids. The latter was my downfall. I never smoked and I didn’t cut class because I actually liked learning. I never cheated although I often allowed other students to cheat off of my spelling tests in return for some of their lunch. Tricks I played on others included:

Putting tape over the faucet of the bathroom sink, so that when someone turned on the water, it sprayed out all over them;
Taking out a desk drawer, then placing a piece of cardboard over the top, and putting it back in upside down and removing the cardboard. The next person to open it watched all their stuff fall on the floor;
Thumbtacks on chairs of particularly obnoxious teachers.

Of course one of the points of a practical joke is not getting caught so I wasn’t reprimanded nearly as often as I deserved.

Fast forward to today where suspension and expulsion are the commons forms of punishment and “zero tolerance” policies trump common sense in dealing with kids. According to the most recent issue of the PRRAC report, which summarizes a number of studies on punishment, schools with higher rates of suspension have lower ratings in academic quality and quality of school governance, and that disciplinary removal appears to have negative effects on student outcomes, and is a “moderate to strong indicator of dropping out of school.”

Given that today in California alone, 30% of students drop out of high school, with Los Angeles showing a 55% drop out rate, anything that increases the likelihood of someone leaving school should be immediately stopped.

The racialization of punishment is also abundantly clear from the studies PRRAC summarizes. White students are far more likely to be punished for offenses that could be objectively observed, such as smoking, whereas African American students are referred more often for “disrespect, excessive noise, threat and loitering—behaviors that would seem to require a more subjective judgment on the part of the referring agent.” (From “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis.” The full report can be downloaded from www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu) Kids in general make “excessive” noise—that is their job. (Why else would we have the admonition, “Indoor voice, please”?) They are disrespectful to people who don’t respect them first. Respect cannot be commanded but must be earned. Clearly the subtext here is that the African American students are not acting “white” enough. And how in any kind of society would “excessive noise” at a school be grounds for suspension?

Of course the larger context for how we “progressed” from hickory sticks to going to the principal’s office to expulsion cannot be separated from the often discussed “school to prison pipeline” that has filled our prisons in the last 30 years with nonviolent offenders. California built 23 prisons from 1985-2001 (and during that same time frame, only one extension to the University of California.) A board member of the San Diego Literacy Council told me that California plans how many prisons to build based in part on how many kids flunk third grade. The general feeling is that if you can’t read very well by third grade, you will probably end up in prison.

Many far more learned people than myself have noted all this and written about it, including recommendations for research and data collection to keep documenting the relationship between excessive discipline, race of those being disciplined, quality of education and likelihood of dropping out of school, and the concomitant policy changes in schools to address and reverse all of this.

My contribution to the debate (besides lifting up this information to people like me who may be unfamiliar with it) is this: our attitudes towards other people are very much formed in school and we need to build our policies around the idea that each child is a bundle of gifts and talents, wrapped in a fragile personality, and that our job as adults is to develop the talent, channel the gifts into positive expression and appreciate that we all act out in various ways as part of how we grow up. Zero Tolerance is a tool of repression: those two words should not appear together ever. There is no doubt in my mind that I would not get through school today, even as a white person. I did too many things that sent me to the principal. But it was in the principal’s tongue lashing, then forgiveness, that I learned the most important lesson of community: nothing I did would cause me to be expelled

Safe, Legal, Free, and Rare

2011-01-27T07:07:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, Jan 22, marked the 35th Anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, in which the Supreme Court legalized abortion. Every year the anniversary is marked with marches, pro and con, and the same arguments on either side. The irony is that although abortion is legal, it is inaccessible for most women who need it either because of the cost or because no doctor or clinic in their community provides this service. In the early days of working for abortion rights, feminists insisted that abortion be safe, legal and free. Eventually we settled for “legal” only, dropping the demand for “free” and assuming that legal would insure “safe.” In retrospect, as many feminists predicted, this was a major mistake, in large part because the power to determine what is legal remains primarily in the hands of men and the decision to have or not have an abortion is not something men will ever experience directly.

What is a commons view of abortion? To think this through requires stepping back to a larger view of health care, which of course, would be universal and would include a range of reproductive choices. Excellent free pre-natal care, day care, maternity and paternity leave would insure that no one had an abortion simply because they could not afford to have a child. Access to a range of birth control, along with a social norm that says sex between consenting adults is not only normal but even fun and joyful, would mean that people would not get pregnant unless they wanted to or in the rare occasion that birth control failed. Abortion in the case of rape or incest would be the norm and no one would have to justify seeking an abortion under those circumstances. In a commons society, abortion should be safe, legal, free and rare.

The above scenario seems so simple, but it requires not just universal health care, but a larger change in our society—to accept ourselves as sexual people free of guilt and shame over our sexuality and the fact that we are sexual—we have sex, we want to have sex, we enjoy sex. When we can accept that, we will take appropriate precautions when we want to have heterosexual sex if we don’t want to become pregnant.

The debate over abortion and birth control is complicated and multi-faceted. The so-called “pro-life” forces are often anti-abortion but pro death penalty and rarely seen at demonstrations against war. The so-called “pro-choice” forces have not done enough to address all the issues surrounding reproductive justice, which include making sure women don’t work in toxic environments that can cause miscarriage and infertility or making sure that women are not bribed or forced into birth control. And both forces ought to join sides to call for universal health care, then debate all that would be offered under that rubric. As it is now, the debate is about power over women, and who will have it. When the debate becomes about the common good, we can really address the issue of abortion in an appropriate and larger context. Until then, look for more anniversaries of “legal” and more notices of women dying of back alley abortions, or bearing children they have no social safety net to help them raise.

Where Does the Money Go?

2011-01-25T14:22:00.000-08:00

As I wait for tonight’s State of the Union and think about the role of the economy, the budget, the deficit, and reflect on the vitriol coming from Washington, this book (with accompanying website) was a nice distraction and a breath of fresh air from the coverage I’ve been seeing:

Where Does the Money Go?

From the website:

New 2011 Edition:
UPDATED WITH EVEN MORE DEBT!

The battle over the federal budget is on, and it's not just an inside-the-Beltway argument. The rising national debt -- and what we choose to do about it -- will affect your savings, your retirement, your mortgage, your health care, and your children. How well do you understand the government decisions that will end up coming out of your pocket?

Here is essential information that every American citizen needs—and has the right—to know. This guide to deciphering the jargon of the country's budget problem breaks down into plain English exactly what the fat cats in Washington are arguing about. Where Does the Money Go? lays out the ideas put out from the left, right and center, explores why elected leaders have so far failed to address this issue effectively and explains what you can do to protect your future.

The updated edition includes new sections on:
So whose fault is it? President Obama or President Bush?
The stimulus and Wall Street bailouts: Did they help or hurt us?
Health care reform: Will it bankrupt us, or is it the first step in controlling costs?

We’ll have more this week and next on our thoughts about tonight’s address, but in the meantime, enjoy.

Guns and Power

2011-01-20T10:16:00.001-08:00

When I was a child, I was fascinated with guns. Partly this is from the television shows of the time, such as Bonanza, The Virginian, Branded, The Rifleman and so on. I watched all of them and imitated the main characters. I owned toy six guns, rifles, shotguns and small handguns. I very much wanted to be a boy as a child. The women on these shows did not have fun, and I could not see myself in the character of Miss Kitty who ran the saloon and was one of the only characters who appeared often. Many of the women got shot or died in childbirth or got run over by horses—as though the writers could not really think about what to do with their characters so wrote them out of the scripts.   I imagined myself a Sheriff or some other heroic and fearless cowboy, shooting bad guys with deadly accuracy and no remorse.

When I was about 16, I got a job working for a real estate firm as a secretary. The building I worked in had a very small pond next to it, which had been put there as part of the design. It was stupid, since we lived in an area prone to drought and with few, if any, natural ponds, but the real estate firm thought it was lovely. They stocked it with a male and female duck who then had ducklings. My desk looked out on this pond and over the course of two days, I realized that the ducklings were disappearing. My boss figured out what was killing them—a big rat would go in the water or simply snatch them as they swam by. He gave me what he called an “air rifle”—basically a small rifle used for killing small animals. He told me to shoot the rat in order to save the ducklings. “Aim a little ahead of where the rat is swimming and pull the trigger nice and slow. One bullet should do it.” Despite my many imaginary killings, I had never handled a real gun with real ammunition and found it was not nearly as exciting as I would have thought. Further, although I did want to save the ducklings, and I did not really like rats, I couldn’t really imagine killing one. For a few days I thought I had dodged this bullet, so to speak, because the rat did not appear and no more ducklings disappeared. But then one afternoon, when I was alone in the office, I was watching the ducklings swimming around and I saw the rat come out of a hole near the pond and go in the water. I went outside with the rifle, took aim and shot. I killed the rat with one bullet.   For several minutes afterwards, I felt almost euphoric and powerful.   I hoped that another rat would emerge I could kill. Then I felt really freaked out. “What kind of a person am I?”

My boss was pleased with me. “You are a real cowgirl!” he said. “I didn’t imagine you could really do it—I thought I was going to have to do this myself.” I was pleased and pretended it was nothing, but I realized what was upsetting to me about this shooting: it was so easy to pull the trigger. Once I decided to obey my boss, I simply looked down the sights of the gun and with one little movement of my forefinger, I killed this animal.

I decided that I would never own a gun after that. For me, it was way too easy to use.

Much has been said about the shootings in Tucson two weeks ago, and I hesitate to think that I could add anything original or helpful. But reflecting on my own gun story has made me wonder what a commons perspective is on gun control. I am in favor of gun control laws, but I don’t think gun control laws will really solve the problem of gun control. In my case at least, I had to come to terms with what I would do with absolute power (in this case over a swimming rat) and realize that there is something addictive about that kind of power.   As commoners we must reflect on the nature of power, and what are healthy expressions of power. We must ponder how we can feel powerful without making someone else feel powerless.   Gun sales went up 60% in Arizona in the days following the shooting. Two congresspeople have said they will carry a gun when they are out in public.

We all imagine ourselves the shooter, and not the shot. But our frame of reference has to move to an entirely different analogy if we are to live in a violence free society. Pondering these shootings in Arizona, where so many of the gun battles of my childhood imagination took place, I see how seeped in violence I am, and how differently our society has to be constructed to not have these regularly occurring mass murders. Deconstructing the nature of power is the first step.

Reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr.

2011-01-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

Today is the national holiday celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Fortunately, this holiday is still a day where many people reflect on the lessons that King taught, the actions he took, and the life he sacrificed to bring about a more just nation and world. It hasn't yet been reduced to just another day for stores to put sale signs in their windows and workers to take the day to be consumers. But the myth-making and re-telling of who Martin Luther King was is too often watered down and de-toothed, so on this holiday it's important to think about the full range of what he stood for -- both the struggles that were won and the ones that are sadly ongoing.

There are many thinkers and scholars who will write about the true meaning of Dr. King today, but here's a sampling:

The Meaning of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday
by Coretta Scott King

Dr. King once said that we all have to decide whether we "will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. Life's most persistent and nagging question, he said, is `what are you doing for others?'"

Martin Luther King's Vision of the Beloved Community
by Kenneth Smith and Ira Zepp

Plainly, King’s vision of justice included all the world’s poor -- blacks, whites, browns and reds: North and South Americans, Africans, Asians and Europeans. Economic justice, he held, is a right of the entire human race. He was aware too that securing this right for all would require elimination of the structures of economic injustice characteristic of capitalism.

We Twisted King's Dream, So We Live With His Nightmare
by Tim Wise

Were this tendency to render King divisible on multiple levels -- abstracting non-violence from justice, colorblindness from racial equity, and public service from radical social transformation -- merely an academic matter, it would hardly merit our concern. But its impact is greater than that. Our only hope as a society is to see the connections between the issues King was addressing and our current predicament, to see that what affects part of the whole affects the greater body, to understand that racism and racial inequity must be of concern to us all, because they pose risks to us all.

Tax breaks for charitable giving?

2011-01-06T15:13:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, I had a chance to ask a dentist for a very large donation to an organization I was working for. As is often the case when asking for money, I learned a lot about his philosophy of giving. We had in common being religious and believing that the Bible commands that everyone “tithe” a portion of their income. A “tithe” is commonly understood as 10% of your income, but more important than the percentage is the notion that you are not giving away anything but rather that God has given you everything and you are to return 10% to the common good. Further, you are to give the first 10% --the first crops, the first paycheck, the first livestock. This man said, “I give 20% because the first 10% is not mine to give—that is owed to God. The second 10% is my true gift because I don’t have to give it, but I want to.” At 20% of a very successful practice, this man gave away about $50,000 every year. He was African-American and laughingly, if ruefully, told a number of stories about sending large amounts of money to various organizations, then having fundraising staff or board members come visit him to thank him or to ask for more, only to have those people be completely shocked that “a man of my race could attain a station in life to be able to give such a big gift.” He had been honored once at a Gala. When he walked in, the Chair of the Gala, an older white woman, said, “Are you Dr. Smith’s driver? Does he need any help coming up the stairs?” He said, “I feel sorry for these people. I am not surprised by them, but they are surprised by me. It is not up to me to judge them; Someone with way more power and insight will do that eventually. I am to love them which is a lot harder than judging them.”

I thought of him recently because another thing he told me is that he never declared his charitable giving on his taxes. “Why should the government have less money because I am doing what I am commanded to do? I am supposed to pay taxes also—not reduce my taxes by my giving.”

One proposal for broad base tax reform includes getting rid of the charitable deduction for giving, something which I completely and totally support. 71% of Americans receive no tax benefit for their giving because they don’t exceed the standard deduction and they file a short form. One of those 71% is my mother. She owns her house free and clear and has no other deductions so despite the fact that she gives often and generously, close to or surpassing the Biblical 10%, her tax bill is not reduced. Contrast to someone I know who earns $250,000 per year, gives at most $2,000, declares all of it and proudly announces “It only cost me $1,200.” Richard Thaler, writing in the Dec 19, 2010, edition of the New York Times, calls this, accurately, I think, a tax subsidy. The government is subsidizing wealthy people’s giving while ordinary people (the majority of people) get nothing.

Of course many charity leaders are squawking that getting rid of the charitable deduction will be another body blow to nonprofits. In fact, it will be a minor scratch to the people who receive tax benefits for giving. And one such person who receives tax benefits for giving is me. I own a house, I have a mortgage deduction (which I also think should be abolished) and my partner and I give away 5-10% of our income. I am more of a hypocrite than my dentist friend so I have always declared my giving.

Thaler and others have suggested that if the government must incentivize people to make gifts, at least make the tax advantages of charitable giving fair. This could be easily done by changing the deduction to a credit. A credit comes off of income for everyone and would be capped at some amount—say 15%. If I give $1000 and my income is $10,000, I save $150. If I give $1,000 and my income is $100,000, I also save $150.

The charitable deduction will be much debated in the next period of time. It is very important that those of us who work in and for nonprofits think through what we believe about whether we should be able to save on our taxes while patting ourselves on the back for being charitable, or whether giving should be its own reward.

Happy New Year!

2010-12-30T08:24:00.000-08:00

This is the last blog post of this year and this decade. This next decade could either be our best one or it could be our last one. We hope and work for the former, and to do that, we all must feel excited and rested on January 1, 2011.

In truth, this date is only one among many that mark a New Year. The Chinese New Year, in February, will usher in the Year of the Rabbit. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, is celebrated in September.

The notion of celebrating the New Year is the oldest known holiday in history and was started by the Babylonians some 4000 years ago. Their new year began with the first new moon after the Spring Equinox. Spring is a much more logical time for a new year than January, but the Romans moved New Year’s to Jan 1 in order to synchronize their calendar with the sun.

The idea of ending one year and starting another is a good one, in my mind. I love New Year’s resolutions and always make about ten of them. Over the 40 years I have been doing that, I have a pretty good sense of what kinds of promises to myself I can keep (read one novel a week, for example) and which are probably not going to happen (the perennial “lose 20 pounds” ). I find that the most productive resolutions are very specific and positive. “Be nicer” doesn’t work, but “Perform one gracious action every day” does, particularly when I also make myself write down what I did every day, and catch up if I miss a day or two. According to Wilstar.com, the Babylonians also started the idea of New Year’s resolutions and their most common resolution was to return borrowed farm equipment.

Whatever you resolve, please have a great New Year. I look forward to blogging with you in 2011.

Commons in the Snow

2010-12-29T13:36:00.000-08:00

As a Midwesterner living in New York City, blizzards are nothing new for me. But this snowstorm that hit the Northeast has been impressive. In a 24-hour period the city got nearly 20 inches of snow – that’s almost an inch an hour. Back in Wisconsin and Minnesota, cities have the infrastructure to deal with that amount of snow, but here in New York City the storm has taken its toll.

New Yorkers are frustrated with the city’s inability to clear the streets; leaving many without critical services (like ambulances, police and firetrucks needed for emergencies).

It’s times like this when people remember how important investments in our Commons are. In times of emergency we realize that our roads, public transit and emergency services really are critical to our collective well-being; but all of these systems suffer when the tax-cutting ideology takes over. It’s no surprise then that the city’s response to the blizzard has been worse than in past years because of cuts to the city’s Sanitation department.

Still, even in the midst of a lot of rumbling and discontent about the city’s ability to respond to the snowstorm, there have been many stories and images of regular New Yorkers helping each other out. And it’s refreshing when the heroes are the men and women doing the back-breaking work to keep the city safe and streets clear.

Herod's Order

2010-12-23T13:55:00.000-08:00

We are almost at Christmas Eve, the night Jesus was born, according to Christian tradition. I feel I am living in a parallel universe this week, trying to stay true to what Christmas is supposed to be about, but amazed by the actions of the House and Senate. Many might have thought Congress had reached its nadir with the tax vote, which my colleague, Sean Thomas-Breitfeld, has described very well in Tuesday’s blog post.

But this week managed to be even weirder. We started with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” which now allows gays and lesbians to serve in the military without having to hide their sexual orientation. This repeal came after almost 17 years of fighting, and is being hailed as a major civil rights victory. So now gays and lesbians can fight and be killed in bloody, pointless and largely illegal wars around the world! Yeah, I guess. One reason given as to why DADT had to be repealed is that not enough people are joining the military.

We went on to the defeat of the DREAM Act, which would have given provisional legal status to some 65,000 young adults who came to the United States as children and who have little relationship to the country where they were born. These young people could have earned citizenship after completing a number of requirements, including a minimum five-year residency and either service in the military or two years of college.

I know that progressive and complete immigration reform is a big stretch, but I seriously thought no one could really oppose the DREAM Act. Story after story appeared in all forms of media about students brought here when they were 6 weeks old, three years old, six years old; who went to grade school and high school and now want to go to college – law abiding residents of our country, living in law abiding families who work hard and simply want to improve themselves and fully participate in their community. Only someone without any heartstrings at all could resist this.

In the end, our side was five votes short of the 60 needed to “invoke cloture” which would end the debate and allow the vote to go forward. The final vote was 55-41. The DREAM Act died in a procedural battle. The blockage of this bill almost entirely affects people of color who cannot vote.

And finally, as the last vote of the House of Representatives this year, the 9/11 First Responder bill passed which gives free medical care and compensation to people who were at Ground Zero Sept 11, 2001. Again, unbelievably to me, this bill was controversial, and people have been fighting for it for several years. In fact, this morning there was some doubt about whether it would pass, although in the end it passed 260-60. This bill affects a small number of people, and even though First Responders have a hero-like status, that has not been enough to get the bill passed sooner, helping people sooner, including many who have already died.

Jesus’ birth is surrounded by stories and myths, most of which are charming with lots of shepherds and angels, but one of which is horrible and only appears in the Gospel of Matthew. The three Wise Men visited Herod who was the King of Israel, to ask him if he knew where “the newborn ruler of the Jews” might be. They had been following a star which they believed would lead them to this child. Herod knew nothing of this, and asked them to let him know if they found this child. The three Wise Men found the baby Jesus, but, having been warned in a dream not to tell Herod anything, returned to their own country by a different route than they had come. Herod was furious with them and felt his own power very threatened so he ordered all baby boys under the age of two to be killed. Mary and Joseph, with the infant Jesus, fled to Egypt, where they lived until Herod died and they could safely return.

Most people are appalled by the story of Herod’s order. The existentialist Albert Camus says this story is the main reason he became an atheist. How could anyone believe in a God who would let a slaughter of these innocents happen? Better to believe there is no God than a God like that.

My question in light of the motives for passing or not passing these various bills (and the time it took to do so) is not whether God exists. My question is can we face that Herod still exists? And will we, like the Three Wise Men, simply slip away to our own place, or will we stand and fight the good fight? There is no empirical evidence that any of this story ever happened, but that is not the point. We are asked every day to choose whose path we will follow. The Winter Solstice suggests following the light and as Christmas approaches those of us who celebrate that holiday should ponder how we can do that in 2011.

My Holiday Wish: A Cooperative (not corporate) Economy

2010-12-22T06:11:00.000-08:00

Although the recession officially ended a year and a half ago, this is still a very difficult holiday season for millions of us. Job losses left 8 million people looking for work at some point over the past three years; and even those who held on to their jobs lost their savings due to declining home values and retirement accounts. But we keep hearing news about the record-breaking profits that businesses and banks are raking in, and it’s never been clearer how far we are from a cooperative economy.

Last month, the Commerce Department reported that American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter; the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago. Then last week, the President met with 20 executives from corporate America to appeal to them to “get some of the cash off the sidelines;” a more politically correct way of asking corporations to share the wealth and cooperate in extending the economic recovery they’re experiencing to those of us on the ground. A couple of days later, Congress passed a tax deal that cost more than the 2009 stimulus, undercut the future funding of Social Security by “temporarily” cutting the payroll tax that goes to the Social Security trust fund, and also extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Those last two provisions make up almost 30% of the total package (see the chart from CBPP) and reject the commons vision that we can care for people and the economy better together.

In the midst of all of this public debate over the economy, and how/whether/what to contribute to it, public opinion has been consistently confused and confusing. The tax cut deal may have sparked a revolt by some members of the President’s party, but a Washington Post poll found that the compromise was supported by a majority of Americans. Taking a closer look at the poll results though, we learn: that the only provision in the deal with strong support was the extension of unemployment benefits; that slim majorities want to reduce the deficit now (not after the economy improves) and support the estate tax cut provision (though it’s doubtful they understood that the estate tax cut will benefit less than 1% of the estates in America), and; that a plurality think the tax deal won't make a difference in the national economy. Yesterday, a poll found that 68% of voters believe that when a corporation has a tremendous amount of cash on hand that it’s primary objective should be to create jobs; but 50% opposed having the government require such an investment in job creation by corporations. If we take these polls at face value; Americans want those who are suffering with the real economic depression that continues in our communities to get extended unemployment benefits, but still want ultra-rich heirs and heiresses to inherit more un-earned wealth, and (as we're told over and over) want to reduce the deficit in some mystical way. And Americans want corporations to do the right thing by creating jobs; but don’t want the government to ensure they do.

These sorts of contradictions about what and how we should expect our economy’s winners to contribute to the real economy that affects people on the ground reflects a faith in the beneficence of corporations and the wealthy. And while this is a season of faith and hope; these myths about the good intentions of the wealthy, corporate wise men ignore the fact that they are sitting on cash reserves and tax cuts in order to enrich their own coffers, not to get Main Street out of this depression. They haven’t been offering us any gifts of gold (or even incense and myrrh) for decades, and neither ‘charm offensives’ by the President or favorable public opinion are sufficient to get them to invest in an economic recovery that extends to those of us in the bottom 80% of the income spectrum (last year the richest 20% earned over half of all income in the U.S.). If we want a better economy we will need corporations and the rich to contribute, just as we’ve contributed to their bottom lines with our spending this holiday season.

In sickness...

2010-12-16T13:54:00.000-08:00

For the last several days I have been dealing with a terrible cold. I grew up in a combined Christian Science/Methodist home where illness was regarded as being mostly or all in your mind and a sign of weakness. The school regarded illness with great suspicion and tried to insure that no one missed school without a valid written excuse signed by a parent or doctor. As an adult I often think people are malingering when they say they are ill (“the old ‘I have whooping cough’ excuse”) and I always think that I should be able to maintain my schedule just by force of willpower. I feel embarrassed when I get sick. “I caught a cold” sounds in my mind like, “I am a failure and have no will power.” In other words, I am not good at being ill. I ignore all the signs that I am getting ill, I do my best to keep doing my work even when I am ill, and I certainly don’t tell people I am ill unless I have to.

Why is that? I can blame it on my childhood (and do, to some extent), but I also know that I have sometimes said I was ill to get out of an engagement or to avoid a deadline, and I know that I have suspected others of doing the same. I try not to tell an outright lie, but say something like this: “Hi, Person I Don’t Actually Care About, this is Kim. I am sorry to cancel our lunch date but I think I might be coming down with something.” ‘Think’, ‘might’ and ‘something’ mean that if, God forbid, I run into this person the next day I can say, “Whatever it was, I think it passed, thank goodness.” When people call me to say they can’t meet a deadline or can’t come to a meeting because they are ill, my first instinct is not always sympathy.

Mostly I am guilty of pushing myself even when I was ill. Many years ago I managed to go from bronchitis to pneumonia by refusing to cancel anything. Then I was sick for weeks instead of just days. I told a friend that I had been punished by getting pneumonia. “No” she rightly observed. “Pneumonia was a warning that you need to take better care of yourself.”

This week I have had to admit to having a cold. I lost my voice, so could not conduct a training that had been scheduled for months. I was too exhausted to finish a project I had promised, and I kept myself and my partner awake a good part of several nights coughing.

In a commons based society, we would still get colds. Colds cannot really be blamed on capitalism. But if I were to model the way a person living in a commons based society would relate to illness, I would live my life differently, as follows:

I would not overschedule
I would get plenty of sleep
When I got sick, I would tell people right away, and I wouldn’t be embarrassed to be sick
I would never say I was sick when I was not
I would never suspect people of not being sick when they say they were
I would encourage people to take time off, by setting an example

Since this is the end of the year, these five things sound like good New Year’s Resolutions.

All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons

2010-12-14T08:54:00.000-08:00

We’d like to announce the publication of a new book by our friend over at OnTheCommons.org!

All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons, edited by veteran journalist Jay Walljasper together with the movement strategy center On The Commons, is the indispensable introduction to this new world of positive social action. Showcasing first-person stories, cartoons, real-world examples, photographs, lists and action items as well as thoughtful analysis, it brings to life the promise of the commons as a new social, political and community tool.

Download a sample chapter
Learn more about the book

In a time when the economy is shaky, politics are volatile and people are wondering about their futures, this book offers a genuine measure of hope that people like us can make a difference around the world.

Secrets, Lies, Leaks and Cover-ups

2010-12-09T11:37:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, a friend of mine told me that a very close mutual friend was having an affair. Our mutual friend had told her, but sworn her to secrecy. Our friend’s wife was also a friend, although less close, and their relationship had seemed solid and happy. My friend was so shocked she had to tell someone who knew them both. She swore me to secrecy. I, in turn, told a therapist . I felt she was safe, being bound by professional ethics to confidentiality, and, in any case, didn’t know any of these people. The therapist told me two things about secrets:

The difference between something secret and something public is that the public finds out the information all at once whereas a secret is leaked one person at a time until most everyone knows, although the information has now been filtered and is probably quite changed from the original secret.
A person or a family is only as sick as the secrets they keep.

This week’s news has been dominated by the continuing release of 250,000 diplomatic cables through Wikileaks. Many have debated whether Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a criminal, a publishing hero, a terrorist, a defender of free speech, or any number of other labels.

As Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer aptly notes,

The official outrage is as synthetic as it is predictable, and what drives it is not fear for the lives of American diplomats and spies but concern for their careers. But how did a big, grown-up government like that of the United States blunder into the error of making all this ‘secret’ material so easily available? It made the elementary mistake of thinking that electronic communications could really be kept secret, even when widely disseminated, if you just surround them with a sufficiently impressive clutter of passwords, security clearances and encryption. Any historian could have told them they were wrong. If it's written down, then it will come out sooner or later. In this case, it was sooner.

Dyer goes on to point out that the General Accounting Office in 1993 reported that 3 million people had the security clearance needed to get into the Siprnet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network). Probably twice as many have that clearance today. All it takes is one of those people to send the data to WikiLeaks, and the whole system is compromised.

I juxtapose the WikiLeaks story with two others: Valerie Plame and Elizabeth Edwards, to try to see what a commons perspective might be on secrets, lies, leaks and cover-ups.   Valerie Plame was a CIA agent who had infiltrated an extensive network of weapons dealers who were operating illegally. Her cover was blown by a leak by someone high in the Bush Administration to columnist Robert Novak. Elizabeth Edwards, who died earlier this week, is best known for how she dealt with the cancer that ultimately killed her, and for how she dealt with the revelation of the infidelity of her husband, John Edwards and the elaborate cover-up he designed to keep that information from her.

My reaction to each of these stories was very different: I admit to having mixed feelings about WikiLeaks, thinking that diplomats probably do need some assurance that some things they say or offer are not always made public, but still rooting for Assange and eagerly reading everything that is being revealed.

On the other hand, I was completely outraged by Plame’s treatment, particularly when that was largely a punishment of her husband who himself was revealing secrets and lies of the Bush Administration. Yet, in other time and place, I suppose it would be possible that Plame’s cover would be blown by WikiLeaks.

And I was sickened and saddened by John Edwards, who I liked a lot and I felt was one of the few politicians who truly spoke up for poor people. I also liked his wife a great deal: she was down to earth and she was a crusader for good in her own right. Her last six years were dominated by cancer and by increasing revelations of not only her husband’s affair but his elaborate cover-up, including the child he fathered by Rielle Hunter and even his plans for marrying her once Elizabeth was dead.

These stories are very different, but in every case that which was secret is now public. So my therapist was right on the first count: there are no real secrets—ultimately the truth, or some version of it, comes out.

But on the second count, that families are only a sick as the secrets they keep: is this true of countries as well?

In a commons-based society, the number of secrets would be drastically reduced. Imperialism, genocide, greed and their siblings rely on deeds formed in back rooms and carried out in private with some “messaging” to assuage the public. A worldview based on rough social equity, with policies and laws in place to insure it, relies on a lot of information being public and able to be understood and debated by as many people as possible.

But would there be any secrets? Of course: what we are getting someone for their birthday, the surprise party we plan to honor a long time employee, the neighborhood block club announcing to our most senior and disabled member that we will be painting her house and cleaning up her yard, something she has wanted for a long time but not been able to afford: secrets that make everyone happy.

In other words, in a commons society, secrets would give us joy, and the greatest joy would come from revealing them.

Our country has massive problems, and in this time approaching the Winter Solstice, where darkness begins to move into light, it bears pondering the role of secrets in creating and maintaining our societal sicknesses and what light do we need to shine on what?

The Tax Deal vs. The Commons

2010-12-07T15:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the White House announced a deal to extend the Bush tax cuts for another two years. I’ll leave the analyses of the deal’s merits to economists like Paul Krugman and our friends at Citizens for Tax Justice. I’ll also let the pundits like Chris Cillizza dissect the compromise’s political fallout. But what interests me is the inability of our political and governmental leaders to have a conversation about the value and benefit that taxes contribute to our collective well-being.

One example of the value that tax revenue makes in the form of good government is the tax deal’s extension of unemployment insurance for another year. The UI program doesn’t just help people who are unemployed make ends meet in the midst of a recession (though that should be a worthy goal in itself); it has been shown over and over to have a stimulative effect on the economy for everyone. In fact the UI program and the expansion of tax credits aimed at moderate- to low-income people are estimated to generate more economic activity and jobs, and add less to the deficit, than extending the tax cuts for the rich. But instead of being able to see UI as taxes at work, the media has repeated the myth that asking anyone to pay more in taxes (even the super rich) would destroy the economy.

Another example of value of taxes is the high cost of states not having the revenues needed to maintain the infrastructure we all share. A study of Pennsylvania’s deteriorated roads and bridges found that the state’s transportation needs cost drivers about $8.2 billion a year in added costs for vehicle maintenance, gas, crashes and time lost in traffic jams. Without more revenue the infrastructure in our states will only get worse, and the costs of living in a crumbling commons are higher than paying a little more in taxes. But again, even though Pennsylvania’s political leaders can diagnose their transportation needs, the governor-elect, Tom Corbett, took the Americans for Tax Reform pledge to never raise taxes.

What will it take to reframe taxes as producing value?

Fiscal Security?

2010-12-02T14:29:00.001-08:00

Our friends at Citizens for Tax Justice released the following statement today. We thought we’d share it with you as our nation's leaders continue to try and reduce the deficit with seemingly little thought about the myriad effects that may have on the common good…

CTJ's Statement on the President's Fiscal Commission Plan
The deficit-reduction plan taking shape before the President’s fiscal commission is seriously unbalanced. It relies on cuts in public services for two-thirds of the deficit reduction it strives for, while relying on increased revenues for only one-third. In fact, the plan claims it would somehow “cap” federal revenue at the arbitrary level of 21 percent of the economy. As a result, the plan relies far too much on cuts in public services that will be impossible to make without adversely affecting Americans — including those with very modest incomes.

Part of the problem is the commission’s approach to closing tax loopholes. The plan makes bold proposals to close tax loopholes, but unfortunately uses most of the resulting revenue to lower tax rates! Since the goal of this commission is to reduce the budget deficit, it’s hard to fathom why lowering tax rates would be on its agenda at all.

Read the full statement here. (PDF)

Common Security Clubs

2010-11-30T14:43:00.000-08:00

We mentioned Common Security Clubs (CSC’s) briefly when we were blogging from our convening on “Applying the Commons.” For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, CSC’s are small groups of individuals who meet together to learn, support each other, and take action to create a new economy that serves people and the planet. In the process, a common security club allows neighbors (co-workers, etc) to get to know one another, find inspiration, have fun, and strengthen community.

The number of clubs has grown quickly over the last couple of years as people struggle to find a sense of security in very uncertain times. Many have realized that security cannot be created by individuals alone, but rather by coming together and sharing what we have in common.

On Wednesday, Dec 8th at 3pm Eastern, there will be a webinar on how to start a Common Security Club, the background behind them, and a review of the curriculum

For more information on Commons Security Clubs, as well as resources and additional groups and trainings in your area, visit the CSC website.

Thoughts On Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T14:18:00.000-08:00

I start by admitting that I am not a fan of the Thanksgiving holiday. When I worked in domestic violence, it was one of the two busiest days of the year for men beating up women (the other was the Super Bowl). We always had a full house at the shelter and all lines lit up on the hotline. It is a day of gross consumption: a few people (generally again women) work very hard for many hours making a meal, and everyone, including the cooks, spend 30 minutes eating it and two hours recovering from it. Then a few people spend several hours cleaning up. Families often come together on Thanksgiving, which should be good, but people who love their families probably see them as frequently as time and money allow, and those who only see their families on Thanksgiving are often not in the “love my family” category. People have too much to drink, causing old resentments to be aired and new ones to be formed. However, one could hardly expect a holiday with such dubious (some would say imperialist and genocidal) origins to be other than what it is.

But Thanksgiving has its upsides: leftovers! And an automatic four day weekend as Thanksgiving cannot be moved to Monday.

Even though I don’t like Thanksgiving, I am a fan of holidays in general and I wish there were way more of them. They provide good practice for not working, particularly for Americans who are chronically overworked. When a society has only a few holidays, each holiday has to multi-task: get the family together, eat well, have fun, get some rest, and get caught up on all kinds of tasks that we don’t have time to do during the normal work week. It is no wonder that few holidays are really fun—they are layered with a to-do list that makes going back to work something to look forward to.

In the Middle Ages, people had about eight weeks worth of holidays in addition to Sunday. Peasant life was hard and life in general was short, (the average lifespan was 30 years), but pleasure was a value for all classes of people. In fact, Christmas, which we have narrowed down to one day, was 12 days long.

A commons society has a lot of holidays, far more than the eleven Federal holidays we observe in the USA, (many of which are not given to people who work in the private sector.) We have built into our Constitution the basis for a commons society: “the right to….the pursuit of happiness.” If we made happiness our highest value, how would we structure our society? Perhaps sometime over this weekend, between turkey and pie, phone calls to distant friends and watching the Macy’s Day parade, we should think about that.

A Gated Country

2010-11-23T11:12:00.000-08:00

The second day of our trip to Arizona was spent in Mexico at a border station. Half of our group went to Nogales and the half I was in to Naco. Naco is a tiny little town that is divided down the middle by “the wall”, with a fairly empty and depressed downtown on the Arizona side and a livelier but still small downtown on the Sonora side.

We parked on the AZ side and walked over the border to a migrant station about 100 yards from the checkpoint. The border crossing into Mexico is staffed by US immigration officials, which is odd because generally other countries staff their own borders. The border between Arizona and Mexico is essentially occupied by the US. The border guards were friendly and entering into Mexico was easy, as was coming back. We showed our passport and said we were going to visit the Migrant Resource Center. They waved us through.

The most striking detail in this town is “the wall.” I am not that good at estimating height, but I would say it is at least 12 feet high. It runs the entire length of the Arizona border, as well as much of New Mexico and California, and you can see it snaking along the border in both directions. Unmanned planes, or drones, provide surveillance. Parts of the wall are made from old runways from the first Gulf War. Built by Marines, it is sunk into three feet of cement and cost about $1 million per mile. On the US side, there is also a ditch right along the wall. In many places, there is a double wall, and apparently the plan is to have a double wall along the entire border.

The wall causes all kinds of environmental problems because animals can’t migrate as they would normally do and water can’t follow its normal routes. Flooding in border towns is now common. Debris piles up along it, and mostly it does not really keep migrants out of the USA, although many people sprain or break their ankles or twist their knees as they come off the wall on the US side. In the summer the metal of the wall radiates heat and burns any sentient being that touches it.

I found the wall far most upsetting than I thought I would. I could imagine animals trying desperately to find a hole or break in the wall, and people climbing up one side and then shimmying down the other, tearing up their hands in the process or jumping and landing in the ditch. The desert is one of the most fragile ecosystems and the heavy equipment used to build the wall, and the All Terrain Vehicles now used to patrol cause scars and damage that will never heal.

The wife of a border patrol agent organized schoolchildren to paint flowers and pretty designs on that part of the wall that goes through Naco. I can imagine her motives were good: she does not want this hulking behemoth to scare children or to appear so threatening. But as one of our hosts pointed out, you don’t want to make something like this pretty. It is not just ugly, it is evil, and no mural of smiling children skipping through fields of flowers can change what this wall is about.

On our southern border, we are a gated country now, and we might as well put up a sign: “Americans only. Brown people not born here are not welcome.”

"And for what?"

2010-11-18T12:55:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went to Tucson, AZ with 15 members of a religious community I belong to called Loretto. I went to see for myself the ways that undocumented people are treated in Arizona and also to participate in a protest at Ft. Huachuca, which is where “enhanced interrogation techniques” (which a layperson might be forgiven for mistaking for torture) are taught.

Friday we went to the Federal Courthouse to witness “Operation Streamline” which is a way of moving hundreds of undocumented people through the court system quickly. About 50 men and 7 women, ages varying from 18-40, sat waiting their fate. They were handcuffed and these cuffs were in turn attached to a chain that went around their waist, and their feet were shackled. A bevy of public defenders sat near them. We were the only people in the audience. There were also a small number of border patrol agents and two US Marshals. The prosecuting attorney, called throughout the day, “the government” wore a light colored linen suit, but everyone else was in a dark wool suit, except the accused, who of course wore whatever they had on at the time of their arrest. All of them had been arrested Nov 10 and their trial was Nov. 12.

Except for the shackling, the proceedings were surprisingly humane. The Judge seemed genuinely kind and concerned that the accused understand what they were accused of, and what their options were. Each of the accused had a headset and everything was translated into Spanish. The Judge explained slowly and carefully what would happen in the court room and often paused to see if there were any questions or concerns. There were none.

The accused were brought to the front of the courtroom in groups of seven. They were each asked a series of questions:

“Are you a citizen of Mexico? (or in two cases, Guatemala)”   Answer “Si”
“On or about Nov. 10, did you enter the United States at a time or a place not approved of by the US immigration service?”   Answer: “Si”
“Did anyone threaten you or promised you anything for the plea you are about to enter?” Answer: “No.”
They were then told what they were accused of again, (“petty offense of entering the US illegally”) and asked as a group “how do you plead?”
Answer in unison:    “Cupable” (Guilty.)

The Judge then handed down sentences of 30-150 days (depending on how many times they have committed this offense) to be served in a private prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America in Florence, AZ. They then shuffled out of the courtroom, and the next group of seven went to the front.

Immigration is very much a commons issue. In a “commons” world, there would either be no borders at all, or people would be welcomed at borders. “Welcome to our country! We hope you enjoy your visit and that you find our culture and way of life kind and friendly. We hope you will share some of your culture with us.” Of course in a commons world, people would only travel to other countries if they wanted to and not because they felt forced to by desperate poverty.

How much further from a commons world we are is evidenced in the treatment of these prisoners. Someone not knowing what the proceedings were about could well conclude that these people must be, at the very least, serial killers or war criminals. To have hands and feet shackled for the “crime” of coming into the USA, and no other crime, is absurd.

I was most struck again by the total commodification of everything (neo-liberalism). These people come to the US to do work for a low wage. This allows their employers to make more money and thus these undocumented workers are worth quite a bit. But now, whether they work or not, they are valuable commodities because taxpayers will pay CCA (the private prison) $2,270 per month to house them. This makes them profitable as prisoners. Prior to the private prisons, a public defender told us, they would simply have been deported. Now they serve time and then are deported, making each of them a profit center. The sheer cost of arresting, prosecuting, sentencing, housing in prison and then deporting these workers, is staggering. A public defender calculated that the Judge handed down $300,000 worth of prison time in the two hours we were in court. That same judge will preside over another 70-100 accused in the afternoon, and does this five days a week. Almost 1,000 undocumented people a week are sent to Florence and then deported, for a total of over $2 million of federal tax money paid per week to a private prison.   This total does not include those undocumented people who are accused of more serious crimes of drug trafficking or robbery or driving under the influence who are tried separately.

A public defender we spoke with afterward said this entire process is a money-generating scheme and a gross injustice. It has gotten much worse since 9/11, and will get worse if SB 1070 is found to be legal (it is currently in court). He also noted that there are Russians, Poles, and Asians in Tucson illegally, but they are never brought in front of a judge or deported. “The system is aimed at Mexicans and Latin Americans. No other undocumented people are dealt with this way.”    He voiced the question in all our minds, “And for what? For what?”

Call-in Day to Stop Cuts to Unemployment

2010-11-16T09:26:00.000-08:00

Groups across the country are sending out announcements today asking folks to call their representatives and stop them from cutting unemployment benefits. Their message? Don’t cut benefits for the unemployed to pay for MORE tax cuts for millionaires!

In last week’s Real Change interview post, Kim Klein noted that “what we do with tax dollars is a mirror of community values.” Our friends at Citizens for Tax Justice point out that, “if Congress fails to continue the unemployment programs, 2 million people in December alone will be left with no income. In the next five months it will be almost 6 million people.” What does this say about our values as a nation when at the same time as talk of these cuts is happening, talk of extending the Bush tax cuts is going on as well?

Furthermore, EPI analysts have shown that “maintaining these extended unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed will create about 700,000 full-time equivalent jobs and save millions of people from poverty. The authors also note that because unemployment insurance benefits are quickly invested in local communities, thereby stimulating economies and creating jobs, the “sticker price” of these benefits is considerably less than advertised.” (Read more in their issue brief A Good Deal for All)

To call your representatives today, Go to www.usaction.org or call 1-866-606-1189.

US One of Least Taxed Countries

2010-11-11T11:45:00.000-08:00

In this blog post, I want to share with readers the following report from Citizens for Tax Justice, which lays to rest any mythology that Americans pay a lot of taxes. It is clear that revenue increases must be part of the solution to debt. Decreasing debt by increasing human suffering is immoral and, more to the point, unworkable. Cutting public service programs simply throws people who need these services onto those public agencies which cannot be cut (such as emergency rooms), strains existing public services to a breaking point, or provides a pipeline to one of America’s favorite ways of dealing with needy people: criminalizing their behavior and sending them to prison. All of these options cost money, and so debt is deferred but not reduced.

There are dozens of fair and just revenue solutions which would decrease unemployment, reduce (and eventually end) poverty, and address health care and climate change issues. Tax revenue is an integral component of any conversation about the common good, and that conversation will begin when Americans realize that people in other developed countries live much better and longer than we do because they pay taxes.

United States Remains One of the Least Taxed Industrial Countries (PDF)

Reimagining the common good

2010-11-09T09:32:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago, Kim Klein was interviewed by Timothy Harris, Executive Director of Real Change for their newsletter. I thought I’d re-post the link here today since it captures so well why this work is important to nonprofits and why fundraising for our organizations is no longer enough.

This is a democracy, and what we do with tax dollars is a mirror of community values, and right now the values say that we don’t care if a lot of people are homeless, and we don’t care that a lot of people are hungry, particularly children, which is now 20 percent of those living below poverty, and we don’t care that a handful of people have massive amounts of money while the vast majority don’t have nearly enough.

Click here to read the full interview.

Giants fever

2010-11-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Giants have won the World Series for the first time since they came to San Francisco and only the second time since 1954, when they were still the New York Giants.

Almost everyone in the Bay Area caught “Giants fever” over the past few weeks. People dyed their hair orange, total strangers greeted each other with “Go Giants” and conversations were struck up by BART riders, people standing in line at the bank and at the grocery check-out stand about the Giants. Schools and offices emptied out for the parade yesterday down Market St, and the day became a holiday by the sheer exuberance of the fans.

I was in a yoga class while the last game was happening. Our class is fairly sedate. People move from pose to pose following our teacher’s instructions, which are delivered in a soft mellifluous voice. There are no questions, and it is really not a bunch that grunts or sighs with effort, so the class is very quiet.

This class was every so often filled with the sound of shouting as the Giants scored once, then twice, then again. Somewhere between Downward Dog and Warrior Pose, the teacher said, “I think the Giants are winning.” We all laughed (softly) as she had read all our thoughts. With inward cheers, we moved into Shoulder Stand.

I am not much of a baseball fan or really much of a sports fan. I have tried to be because I like being caught up in excitement and rooting for something or someone to win, and I like anything that cheers people up so much, and I like things that appeal to all kinds of people. The World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Tour De France, all have these huge followings and people seem to suspend their other judgments of each other as they discuss teams and players. I like those things, but the extent of my contribution to the conversation is usually, “How about that game?” Then I nod sagely as if I understand all the commentary that generally follows. God forbid I ever talk to someone more ignorant than me and have to face the question, “What game?”

Contrast Monday night’s World Series win with Tuesday night’s election results. Where I was there was no cheering, no crowds in the streets. There were some victories, to be sure, but overall, state by state and town by town, the country seemed to take another giant step in the wrong direction.

Of course during the Obama campaign and for awhile afterwards, many of us had the excitement generally reserved for sports victories. And Giants fever will soon be replaced by other concerns or excitements. People want to be excited and to be transported beyond ourselves. Many of us love having an excuse to smile at strangers and to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. Our task as commoners remains to find a way to generate and then maintain that kind of excitement for questions of the common good.

Voting: A Duty of the Commons

2010-11-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

Election Day has taken on huge political significance this year. The balance of power between the two parties is up for grabs, and the projections have been constantly changing. Polls show that half of voters see this election as a referendum on the President’s agenda. And the rise of the right-wing Tea Party’s influence has captivated the media. So politicos have been looking forward to this day as if it’s a political Superbowl -- a partisan death-match. This may make for exciting political theater tonight as we watch the returns, but seems at odds with our progressive, commons-based values.

Sadly, our form of democracy just reflects a society based on competition, enclosure, and an overall winner-takes-all mentality. In her book, Governing a Commons from a Citizen’s Perspective, nobel-winner Elinor Ostrom wrote about how governing a common pool of resources requires a different notion of responsibility and citizenship. But we have allowed our political processes to be enclosed by corporate interests, just like the environment and so many other parts of our Commons. The Citizens United case exacerbated the long-standing problems of private money dominating elections. According to the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to government transparency, there has been more than $450 million in outside spending on this election; with nearly $200 million being spent just in the last two weeks. That level of spending by private, corporate interests is dramatically increased compared to the 2006 midterm. And we’ve seen the results of that spending when we turn on the tv for the last month.

All of the spending on political ads (especially this season’s overtly racist ones) is in a perverse way a response to the general lack of interest and involvement in our democratic processes. Voters are a rare commodity in the U.S., so candidates (and their corporate sponsors) spend as much money as possible to appeal to our basest, ADD-afflicted, sensibilities. In the 2006 midterm elections, the voter turnout rate was only 40%. Although turnout was significantly higher in 2008 for the presidential election (it usually is), we still have roughly two out of five people who are eligible to vote opting out of the democratic process.

In response to this lack of involvement in the democratic commons, many countries have established compulsory voting. In fact, roughly 10% of the world’s governments use compulsory voting. Australia established compulsory voting at the turn of the 20th Century; with the “impetus for compulsory voting at federal elections appear[ing] to have been a decline in turnout from more than 71% at the 1919 election to less than 60% at the 1922 election.” Imagine, our high-turnout mark of 60% was enough of a shock to Australians that they made voting a duty of its citizens.

I don’t know that compulsory voting would be a magic bullet, but a robust democracy needs both commons-based (public) financing for elections and for its citizens to step up to the call of duty and vote. Otherwise we’ll be stuck with the rash of outside spending that amounts to the enclosure of campaigning by rich corporations, and the hyper-partisanship due to our obsession with competition over cooperation. And what’s worth it’ll be what we deserve.

Freedom of the press and the people

2010-10-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine has passed on the following message he got from a French colleague of his concerning the strikes in France. I use it as today’s blog post because I think it is interesting and it follows my earlier post, but also because it shows the degree to which we are not getting the full story from our press. And this will bring me eventually to another blog post: the health of the commons requires a truly free, diverse and not corporate owned press for the people to hear anything like the truth.

The author of this 'personal note' is Jean-marie Fardeau, whose day job is with Human Rights Watch.

Dear friends and colleagues,

This is a personal message in order to share with you some information and personal thoughts about the current social situation in France. It seems that international media are looking at us again! (after the riots in Paris poor suburbs in 2005, Sarkozy's wedding with Carla in 2008 and immigration policy targeting Roma people in 2010 - among other issues!)

As you know, the social tension raised at the occasion of a pension system reform.

Everyone in France, including those striking and demonstrating, knows that we need a reform of our highly financially unbalanced pension system.

Therefore people are not protesting against A reform but against THIS reform which appears to be unfair for the most vulnerable (poor workers, women with hectic careers, workers who have physically demanding jobs, etc.). The problem of THIS reform is the following: it does not seem to take into consideration those who are living in the low and middle-low "ranges" of the society (to avoid the word "class/classes"). For instance, the government should have included in this reform that people who started working at 18 or 19 years old (majority of the workers / nurses..) - and in particular for those having physically demanding jobs - will continue to have the right to leave at 60 .. (After 41 or 42 years of work...).

Some so-called "realistic" people say that French people should take into consideration that the life expectancy increasing, people should work longer... and therefore the symbolic "right to retire when you complete 60 years" became unbearable... But actually, the previous reform (voted in 2003 with the support of the most reformist trade union, CFDT - negotiation led on the side of the government by Mr. Fillon) established that you are entitled to your full pension only if you work 41.5 years.. Which means that, if you start working at 23 years old.. You ALREADY have to work until 64.5 to get a full pension. You are currently allowed to leave when you are 60 but with a lower pension.

The reform (and the change from 60 to 62 and 65 to 67) might have been more acceptable if the government would have taken at the same time measures going in the direction of social justice and of reducing inequalities in France. Sarkozy (he is the only one making decisions) should have abolished his less popular and most unacceptable decision taken in 2007: to limit the income tax for the richest people (ceiling at 50% of their income).

The content of the reform could be (and should be) different. But also the method used by the government has been really insulting for the trade unions. As usual, the government prepared the reform on its own, and consulted the trade unions very late in the process without any willingness to negotiate with them on the content of the draft bill. Over last spring, the trade unions (CGT and CFDT leading the trade union coalition - both being pragmatic and not leftists) tried to persuade the government that a negotiation should take place before the discussion before the Parliament. No discussion took place and the government tried to speed the discussion at the Parliament and hoped that the concessions it was prepared to do (on women's pension, for dangerous professions) will be enough to stop the protest. But the concessions were not sufficient to persuade citizens that this reform was the only one possible (several recent polls show that 70% of the people are against this reform and supporting the strikes - see below).

And, in a typical French style (since the different governments do not know how to negotiate before a important bill is passed), the confrontation was unavoidable and the trade unions know exactly the weak points of a country like France: oil, transportation, and the greatest fear for a French government: the youth in the streets.

Many other proposals to reform the pension system have been put on the table by the opposition parties, economists, trade unions but, once again, no serious discussion was possible with the government on alternative projects.

Last not least point: the current social tension is also the result of three years of Sarkozy's regime during which we felt the tension growing growing (because of cuts in education and health systems, migration policy, increasing of security measure leading almost 1 million persons a year to police custody for minor infractions..)... and this unjust reform of the pension system became THE opportunity to oppose Sarkozy's policy.

What will happen in the next days? Nobody knows.

The goal of my message was to give you some contextual information around this important social movement. It may seem a bit "outdated" way of making reforms in an country like our but this is also the result of three years of attempts by President Sarkozy and his team to reform France in a top-down way without listening to the people and their representatives. In July 2008, our president said in one of his famous speech: "Quand il y a une grève en France, plus personne ne s'en aperçoit." ("when there is a strike in France, nobody notices it") in an attempt to delegitimize the trade unions (Thatcher's nostalgia remains high among French right-wing leaders who never succeeded to destroy the trade unions) The current movement shows that French rebel spirit remains strong.

To conclude, I would like to answer to those saying that a majority of demonstrators do not not why they are demonstrating and do not understand the complexity of the pension system...

I personally doubt that the 3 million people demonstrating 6 times in France over the last 45 days (i.e. that means one person over twenty in the whole French population in the streets once a week !!) are ignorant and not able to understand why they are demonstrating...

And the latest polls published on Oct 21st:

59% are in favour of "the continuation of the movement" (until the opening of new negotiation and the suspension of the law)
71% are supportive of the demonstrations and of the strikes (against 56% early September and 64% early October)
71% of the French people unable to understand why they support this social movement they consider legitimate and necessary?

Any comments welcome

All the best

Jmf

War and Peace, and Pensions

2010-10-21T12:28:00.000-07:00

Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle provided an unintended commentary on two related commons issues: the role of work as it is understood in Europe, and the degree to which military spending is the one thing that almost no one is mentioning as a major source of the worldwide economic recession.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative (by French standards) President of France, is seeking to raise the retirement age to 62 from 60. Even teenagers took part in the resulting strike, with 261 high schools blocked or disrupted Monday. (“France Protests Disrupt Schools, Transportation” SF Chronicle, 10/19/10). Further 71% of French people sympathized with the strikers, who have brought France to almost a grinding halt with blocked highway traffic, airlines instructed to bring enough fuel into France if they plan to fly back out, and shipping ports closed. Almost 1 million people have participated in what is now several days of strikes and protests. Critics of Sarkozy’s plan describe it as “American style capitalism.”

To be fair to Sarkozy, France is suffering the worst recession in 70 years and the cost of pensions given to people at 60 who may well live to be 90, is astronomical.

However, not in the newspaper, but in any reports on military spending to be found on Wikipedia or from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is the fact that France has the third largest defense budget in the world, behind China and of course dwarfed by the United States (which spends more than the next nine most militarized countries put together). France has increased their military budget every year and shows no sign of slowing down. In a cursory search of major news sources on the French protest I did not find one person quoted as suggesting a cut in military spending as a way to pay pensions.

Pacifists and anti-war activists make the connection between war and world wide military spending, which globally tops $1.3 trillion a year. (The USA accounts for 44% of the world’s military spending.) Movement building and commons activists have got to start making connections between bloody and pointless wars waged around the world, ineffectual, bloated and corrupt clandestine “intelligence” efforts to prevent terrorism, suppression of dissent in the name of safety, and the global recession. The only cuts in spending that would increase the health, safety and peacefulness of our planet are weapons and military and (with a handful of exceptions) the left is not doing nearly enough to call this out.

Finding the Commons in Rescue of Chilean Miners

2010-10-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

Last week’s rescue of the 33 Chilean miners was a massive media sensation. It was the kind of human interest story the media loves. The public’s interest had been building steadily since the San Jose mine collapsed on August 5, so when they were finally rescued, after 69 days, everyone tuned in and cheered. Unfortunately, there are important Commons-lessons that the media industry (at least in the U.S.) obscured in their coverage.

First, the mainstream coverage of the trapped miners missed a discussion of the dangers and damage wrought by the anti-Commons ethos of profits, exploitation and indifference. Although the United States was still seeing oil seep into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon Disaster that took the lives of 11 workers (by the way, today marks the 6-month anniversary of the explosion on the BP well), there was very little scrutiny of the corporate pathologies that led to both crises. Whether drilling for oil, or drilling for copper, neither industry tends to show much regard for the environment. And both BP and the San Esteban mining company had histories of workplace safety violations, and taking advantage of lax governmental regulations. In spite of all this, the Wall Street Journal declared (without any intentional irony) that “capitalism saved the Chilean miners.” [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allison-kilkenny/capitalism-didnt-save-the_b_765079.html]

The second lesson that the media got wrong was the Commons-based decision of the miners to share the proceeds of their story. Rather than cover the miners’ cooperative impulse in the same feel-good vein as they covered their rescue, reporters speculated about what it would take to break up this collective. The New York Daily News gleefully reported that some of the miners “may break pact of silence, for the right price.”

The rescue of the Chilean miners has certainly been a moving story, but it could be even more impactful if the media were willing to tell a fuller story.

Transit Cuts in Chicago: Update on LVEJO

2010-10-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

As we mentioned in an earlier post, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) was one of the partners in a People’s Movement Assembly at this year’s US Social Forum. During the gathering, they lead an exercise on taking back the public transit system in Chicago, demonstrating that public control of the system was the only way to ensure fair and equal access to jobs, food, housing, etc. The participants experienced first-hand how LVEJO works “for a real voice in building democracy, including if, how, when and where any development of [their] communities takes place, as the basis for environmental, economic and social justice.”

We now see that exercise taking place on the streets of Chicago, where LVEJO, in conjunction with Chicago I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) is coming up with a solution to the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus cuts. LVEJO is raising money to buy buses and create a system that can pay bus drivers a living wage while still providing quality service. They are taking things into their own hands until the CTA can restore service, but as David Bollier points out in a blog post on this issue, “If the Little Village neighborhood is going to wait for the CTA to restore service, it could wait a long time.”

What would it look like if we had transit systems that were adequately funded and could apply some of the ingenuity these groups are showing? In the meantime, it’s DIY in Little Village.

For more information on LVEJO campaigns and how they link democracy with environmental and racial justice, please visit their website.

Columbus Day is Over

2010-10-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

Across the U.S., many marked yesterday's national holiday with parades; some workers got the day off (at least some of those who haven’t already been laid off in this recession); and the banks took a break from the business of profiting from interest rates, fees and foreclosures. Among many of my facebook friends though, this day was mocked with sarcastic e-cards (below), and criticized with links to youtube videos asking us to “Reconsider Columbus Day.”

I also lament the legacy of colonization and enslavement brought about by Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic and am part of the 27% of Americans who think we shouldn’t be devoting a holiday to him. However, the analogy of “walking into someone’s house and telling them we live there now” lazily reinforces the anti-commons views that led to the bloody history begun by Columbus.

Equating the lands held in common by Native American tribes with a private home is a false equation and misrepresents many tribes’ commons approach to land. In fact, it was the commons-view of Native Americans that European conquerors saw as uncivilized because “there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.”

I’m by no means defending or apologizing for the enclosure of land that had been shared and held in common by Native Americans. But interpreting that horrific history only through our current framework of theft and ownership fails to honor the wisdom of traditional, commons-based patterns of native land tenure.

Note: to read more on the history of how the U.S. government dismantled the Native American communal approach to land, read two articles that Lewis Hyde wrote for On the Commons here and here.

Pat Cody

2010-10-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

Last week a dear friend of mine named Pat Cody died at the age of 87. I had known her since I was 24, and she was younger than I am now when we first met. We worked together at an organization called the Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women. I was the first development director they had ever had, and this was my first development job. The combination worked out very well, and Pat was a great part of the reason why.

I have been thinking about why she was such a great person since I learned of her death. She had many accomplishments to her name: she and her husband, Fred, started one of the most successful independent bookstores in Berkeley called Cody’s Books, and ran that for 30 years. Prior to owning the bookstore, they had lived in Mexico where they hung with the likes of Pablo Neruda and Diego Rivera. They were Communist sympathizers, caught up in the suppression of dissent called the McCarthy Era. Pat founded or helped to found a number of Berkeley institutions: the Berkeley Free Clinic, DES Action (her great passion for many years), and later Grandmothers Against the War.

But what made her great was that I never learned any of the above from her. She focused always on the future, bringing in lessons of the past without nostalgia or righteousness. She had the mind of a steel trap and could bring to mind dates, names, and places with no effort at all. She had learned Spanish in Mexico, but then rarely spoke it, yet when we went to the UN Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi in 1986, she easily talked with the Spanish speakers there.

In our working relationship, she offered unconditional support, great enthusiasm, and gave me credit far past what was due to me for any success we experienced at the Coalition with fundraising.

Pat introduced me to the idea that taxes were a good thing. In the mid 1970’s, nonprofits could opt out of paying social security tax and I wanted us to do that, to save money. She was able to help me see that any short term gain from this move would only hurt all of us later, and that social security tax was our obligation to the entire society. She was the first ‘commoner’ I ever knew, although she did not use that word to describer herself.

I did not see her very often in the past few years: I was too busy and I did not take into account that she would not always be around. I missed some great opportunities and I regret that very much. In terms of rough social equity, death is the great equalizer: it comes to us all and those that go on living are never entirely prepared for the shock of it.

Although I was not as good a friend as I should have or could have been, I never got that message from Pat. She was always glad to see me when she saw me, with no recriminations.

I only hope that I can offer that same unconditional loving support to the people who are younger than me that she gave me.

Pat, you live on!!! Thanks.

The Movement Moment

2010-10-05T16:29:00.000-07:00

The Building Movement Project team just met in Oakland this past weekend. We meet in person twice a year and the meetings are always, in almost equal parts, fun, exhausting, stimulating, overwhelming, theoretical and practical. I am amazed at all we get done and daunted by what we commit ourselves to do.

One of the things we came back to over and over, from different angles, is the notion that this historical moment provides those of us who work in and around the nonprofit sector some important opportunities which we could easily miss if we simply hunker down and wait for the economy to get better.

While this current recession has caused enormous suffering, it has also created the space to promote profound economic change. Every economic assumption is up for grabs right now. People are talking about banking, regulations, compensation, the role of government, the role of the corporate sector in a deep and thoughtful way, and are asking fundamental questions. We of the progressive nonprofit sector need to get out in front of this “movement moment” and provide some suggestions and even some answers to the questions people have, and we must invite people to develop their own analysis. The right wing will happily provide simple easy to understand answers, largely beginning and ending with the frame “no taxes”. We must provide a simple easy to understand beginning frame which begins and ends with ‘the common good.” Peter Maurin, the teacher of Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker Movement, said that our job is “to create a society in which it is easy to be good.” There are many elements to this society, but it does presume a commitment to a rough social equity which will be achieved in part by a progressive tax system. The nonprofit sector can be instrumental in insisting on this, or we can be the primary organizational victims of not having it. It is our choice, and it must be made quickly.

Who's Responsible for Maintaining Public Space?

2010-09-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

Recently I have been spending a lot of time on bike paths. This past Sunday I did a two hour ride on the Ohlone Bike Path which starts in Berkeley and winds through Albany, El Cerrito and into Richmond. As I ride along, I notice the scenery, nod to the walkers and bikers coming the other way, and think on what a wonderful part of the commons these paths are.

The bike path in Berkeley provides a glimpse of the median income level of the towns it passes through, and the willingness or ability of the residents to be engaged in maintaining their path. In Berkeley, various parts of the path are planted with native plants, shrubs are trimmed and the path is free of trash. Some parts of the path even have beautiful murals. As I moved further north, some parts of the path are beautifully planted, watered and well kept. Other parts are planted with drought resistant plants, reflecting attention to the chronic water shortage that we have in California. But some parts are overtaken with invasive fennel or other weeds, and weeds crowd into the path. In Richmond, the path begins with a creek restoration project which is really lovely, then deteriorates into a path marked on either side by a chain link fence, one side of which is topped with barbed wire. Richmond is, by and large, much poorer than Berkeley.

In a “Show Me the Money” training recently, participants argued about how these paths are to be maintained. All agreed that the government should provide land for these kind of trails and should build them. One participant, a retired Marine who works with pre-teens who have brushes with the law, felt that the kids he works with should be employed by the county to maintain parks and outdoor areas. They would learn discipline, they would gain skills, earn some small amount of money, and have fun being outdoors. Another participant felt that this would mean we always have to have a supply of kids on their way to juvenile hall, and in the long term, this is not what we want. He felt homeowners should be assessed a small amount which would be put into a pool and evenly divided over all the public outdoor areas so that each town would have nice bike paths and parks. Another believed it would be best to keep it the way it is: each community decides how important these areas are to them and maintain in whatever way they can. Why should people who own homes in poor communities have to spend money on bike paths? Maybe they would prefer to put their money into street lights, or just keep what little money they have. (He later admitted he doesn’t like to go outside.)

I found myself agreeing with everybody, which meant that I kept changing my mind as the conversation progressed. What is the role of an individual, a neighborhood or a whole town in creating and maintaining outdoor public space? If government agencies do all of it, does this decrease creativity? What if one community wants a mural and the other doesn’t? What do we do with kids who have few job prospects and go to terrible (and badly maintained) schools to encourage them not to get into the prison pipeline? And why should people pay for something they have no intention of ever using?

The reality is that the commons is so large and so important that is has to maintained (in some cases, restored) and upgraded in as many ways as possible. Volunteers have an important place in taking care of public spaces. Those same volunteers need to make sure there is enough money in the tax stream for costs that volunteers cannot incur. And those of us who need a little help with our lives need to find the joy of helping our communities. But above all, how we decide to keep our public spaces open and accessible to the public will require a certain equality of opportunity for involvement that is sadly missing now. One participant ended this part of the discussion by saying, “We should be having this conversation with all the people we meet on our bike paths.” Even our companion who doesn’t like going outside agreed. “I’ll be having a conversation in the computer bank of the library,” he said. “It will be almost the same in terms of content.”

USSF 2010: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization

2010-09-28T09:18:00.000-07:00

As we mentioned in an earlier post, the Building Movement Project, in partnership with many groups, participated in a People’s Movement Assembly at the US Social Forum last month, which drew over 100 participants from all over the US and the world. We featured one of those groups in a post this summer.

This week, we want to highlight the work of another one of our partners in organizing the session: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization in Chicago. Little Village joined the People's Movement Assembly process to explore the links between their environmental justice work and how to build a healthier, more inclusive, and racially just democracy. They think of the environment as, “where we live, work, study, play and pray,” and they follow a mission to “work with our families, coworkers, and neighbors to improve our environment and lives in Little Village and through out Chicago through democracy in action. [They] work for a real voice in building democracy, including if, how, when and where any development of our communities takes place, as the basis for environmental, economic and social justice.”

In order to protect the environment around us, all people must first have full agency to act. At Little Village, they “live by the principle that, as working and poor people of color, we have the right to control our lives and resources.”

For more information on their campaigns and how they link democracy with environmental and racial justice, please visit their website.

Americans for Tax Reform vs. the Common Good

2010-09-23T12:45:00.000-07:00

Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, is one of the leading anti-tax crusaders in the United States. He is famous for saying, “I don’t hate government. I just want to make it small enough that I could drown it in the bathtub.” He and his followers take a “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” to every incumbent and candidate and ask them to sign it. It says, "I ____, pledge to the taxpayers of the district of the state of _____ and all the people of this state that I shall oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes." Here in California, all but one Republican legislator has signed this pledge. (You can see an actual copy of it on the ATR Website) The organization also claims that it "opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle."

I found another quote from Norquist recently which really shows his true values. In an article by William Greider called “Rolling Back the 20th Century” (The Nation, May 12, 2003), he said that he wants to bring America back to what it was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”

He will say almost anything about anyone, such as this extraordinary analogy: “Clinton and Obama practice this politics known quaintly as the Richard Speck strategy: if you cannot take on everyone in the room at once, take them out of the room one at a time.” (Richard Speck raped and murdered 8 nurses one night in July, 1966. He took them out of their dorm room one at a time.)

I thought of him today when I was leading a workshop on what nonprofits need to do to address California’s broken tax structure (www.compasspoint.org/showmemoney). Our call in these workshops is to engage in conversation, to listen to others, to show compassion and to encourage nonprofit staff to get involved in supporting any and all efforts to reform our budget and revenue structure here in California. In some despair I wondered what kind of conversation I would have with Mr. Norquist and his followers. Fortunately I believe he does not represent the majority of Americans, but he has drawn a firm line in the sand and we must do all we can to counter his point of view by emphasizing the common good and what it will take to create a rough social equity. Taxes are not the only solution, but they are an integral part of any real and lasting change that helps everyone.

An Un-Commons Recovery

2010-09-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

On Monday, the announcement came out that the recession officially ended last summer. The chatter online was that the “egg-head” economists are out of touch with the economic woes of people on the ground; and setting aside the technicalities about how the National Bureau of Economic Research determines what constitutes a recession and when it comes to an end, there is wisdom in our skepticism about the recession’s “end.” There’s also a commons angle to the ‘cognitive dissonance’ created by news of economic recovery in spite of our real-life experience of job losses, foreclosures and troubles making ends meet.

The sad fact is that the recovery isn’t something that’s being held in common.

The economic growth over the last year has not only been “anemic,” it’s also been highly targeted. The rich have rebounded very quickly in this “recovery” but the rest of us are still struggling.

The number of people with more than $1 million in assets grew by more than 17% last year, thanks to the surge in the stock market; but the U.S. poverty rate rose to 14.3%. At the beginning of this year, companies had the highest share of assets in cash since the early 1960s because they were sitting on cash instead of using it to hire back workers and create new jobs. In fact, FedEx announced last week that it was planning to cut 1,700 jobs, even though its “first-quarter net income doubled”.

But this isn’t new. Over the last two decades, the economy has been structured to benefit a few, while the rest of us tread water or go under. The New York Times created this chart that shows job growth (or losses) following the end of a recession. It’s not just a coincidence that the recessions of the 70s and early 80s were followed by major job growth, but the more recent recessions were jobless. The trickle-down economic theory of the 80s -- which justified de-regulation, attacks on unions, and tax cuts for the rich -- fundamentally re-structured our economy in a decidedly Un-Commons direction.

It's time to re-think and re-structure our economy so that the recovery doesn't continue to be privatized for a few, but can instead strengthen our Commons.