Due to the efforts of thousands in a grassroots campaign, as well as the actions of Senator Maria Sachs and Representative Vasilinda who started a campaign 3 years ago, 3 GMO labeling bills are being put forth in Florida – Senate bills SB 1700 and SB 1708, and House bill HB 1369.
Polls report that ‘9 of 10’ people in the U.S. want to know what’s in their food, while 64 other countries already require GMO labeling. Yet we’re still struggling to achieve the right to know exactly what we’re consuming. With the DARK ACT and TTIP threatening food security and transparency, biotech giants like Monsanto and others in the biotech industry have been trying to keep everyone clueless about what’s in the food.
But as Vermont has proven, we can rise from the defeat of California’s Proposition 37 – a low point for the anti-GMO movement.
To support these bills, since we know that the biotech industry and organizations like the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association already have their henchmen trying to defeat them, consider calling to ask your Senator to co-sponsor SB 1700 and SB 1708 today!
You can say:
I am calling to request that Senator ___________ co-sponsor Senate Bill 1700 & 1708, the genetically engineered food labeling bill, introduced by Senator Sachs, because we have the right to know what’s in the food we feed our families.
If you don’t know what district you are in, search here.
Here is a brief overview of SB 1700, SB 1708, and HB 1369.
HB 1369: Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods
“Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods; Provides mandatory labeling requirements for genetically engineered raw foods & processed foods made with or derived from genetically engineered ingredients; directs DOH to adopt rules; provides for injunctive relief actions; requires court to award costs & fees under certain circumstances; specifies injunctive relief actions do not preclude civil actions for damages or personal injury.
SB 1700: Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods
“Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods; Providing mandatory labeling requirements for genetically engineered raw foods and processed foods made with or derived from genetically engineered ingredients by a specified date, etc.”
SB 1708: Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods
“Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods; Providing lists of raw agricultural commodities at high risk or potentially at risk for cultivation in a genetically engineered form; requiring the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to publish the lists by a specified date and to update a published list annually, etc.”
Keynote Address at the 2nd Edition of the DEEEP Global Summit: Towards a World Citizens’ Movement – Learning from the Grassroots [Johannesburg, November 19, 2014]
Yesterday, holed up in a stubborn chair somewhere in the reception of this hotel, I was casting about for an appropriate title for my speech. I knew what I thought I’d like to say, what I’d like to conduce to today’s rather unwieldy discourse on global transformation, but I wasn’t comfortable with the ways my mind sought to frame it. Something nameless and deep within resisted my frantic attempts to simply chug along with rather unremarkable options like ‘The Urgency of Slowness’, ‘A Different Politics’, ‘The Utility of Shared Inquiry’ and so on. That same ‘something’ invited me to wait. So I left the matter unresolved, and entered into a ‘Whatsapp’ text-based conversation with my wife, who is in Richmond, Virginia at the moment. Just as I made to leave the conversation, Ijeoma – my wife – sent me an undecipherable series of alliterated alphabets, smiling icons, and nonsense syllables, patched together with the enigmatic abandon only a non-adult could master. It was Alethea, our 1 year old daughter. My wife told me she had grabbed the phone from her, typed the ‘message’, and returned it to her – saying ‘Dada! Dada!’ as she did so.
I got the message.
Perhaps the universe sought to sanction my conditioned fondness for tame and manicured titles – and, in doing so, hoped to broaden my vision of what is possible; perhaps there is more to be learned from that which resists representation, coherence or meaning – what Foucault called the ‘unthought’, what I call ‘the wilds beyond our fences’; and, perhaps, it is true after all – that the crises of our times invites us to acknowledge our imprisonment to the politics of adulthood by listening intensely to our children, to the weak, to those who have failed, to the so-called stupid, and thus learn from their expansiveness.
So this is my title. I fought the urge to stick in a subtitle beneath, or to reduce its rawness by bracketing it with quotation marks. I do not think it is an appropriate title, but I think it is powerful because it means nothing, because it has no immediate utility – except maybe to introduce a little turbulence to our treasured cognitive rituals, to humiliate our established ways of knowing (and thus to humble us), and to trick our exhausted minds into relaxing a bit. Into slowing down.
Last year, at the first edition of this fine gathering, I ended my talk by sharing the insights of some West African elders: “The times are urgent”, they say. “Let us slow down”. I have since echoed the same words wherever I have been invited to speak – and the responses from my audiences have been somewhat similar: there is a collective sigh of recognition and appreciation, the kind that is attended by a closing of the eyes, as if to acknowledge that a deep elderly truth has walked across the room. Then later, much later, there is confusion and there are furrowed eyebrows – and this happens when people seemingly try to activate this sentiment in their lives, as is the case with my brother Tobias, the convener of this event, who wrote to me shortly after the first Summit expressing his frustrations with slowing down. ‘How do you slow down when there are so many memos to write, so many reports to put together?’ I didn’t have the clearness of mind at the time to respond convincingly to his queries. Today, however, I am going to try to honour those unvoiced and wordless feelings, the greying elephants in our rooms we are trying our hardest to avoid. In doing this, I hope not only worry the convenient binaries and orthodoxies of activism, but to deepen the conversation and weave a poetic scheme that might nurture our imaginations about a world citizens’ movement – and what that could look like.
I am not an activist – at least not in the conventional sense of the word – but in the past four years, I have increasingly found myself in the midst of conscientious people, wise people whose work and writings have inspired our shared intention (Ijeoma and I) to live an enchanted life in a wider spectrum of values.
Once safely ensconced in the academic bubble of the intelligentsia, I am awakening to a wild world that does not easily fit into the neat boxes of a questionnaire. From the stern mountain faces of the Himalayas to the tired suburban mazes of downtown Chicago, the concerns – the questions – are thematically the same: ‘what needs to happen for a more humane world to arrive?’ ‘What do we need to focus on in order to usher in a social arrangement that is conducive to our deepest aspirations as a species – a world that is home for our children?’ How can we realize the world Alethea dreamed of?
Around the globe, the responses to these questions are as varied as the stars in the sky – though there are important convergent points, constellations if you will. For most active organizations today (or those in nations caught up in the globalizing currents of economic growth), the traditional response has been to ask what ‘we’ can do, or to point out a mutual enemy to inspire collective action. The logic of this advocacy framework – in broad strokes – is to articulate a superior argument, to mobilize popular support, and try to force the hand of those with the power to make decisions on behalf of the populace. The recent large-scale climate justice march of September 21, a colossal gathering of more than 300,000 people, is a case in point.
Some of the implicit (and not so hidden) assumptions of this theory of change are that we can change the system – because the system is merely a passive epiphenomenon, a dead mesh of regulations and laws that no longer works in our favour. This assumption coincides with another – the idea that the world is out there, the problems are out there, that we are quite removed from it, and that all we need to do (as my brother, Charles Eisenstein, often says) is apply this Newtonian force of will in order to rearrange the blind billiard balls on the table. And yet another kindred postulation is the myth of human rationality: the notion that people will change if they understand the facts. The bare facts. Let’s get practical, we often insist. Hence our growing obsession with statistical reduction computational analyses and convenient expertise. With tables and spreadsheets and reports and memos. With our eternal infatuation with the correct answer.
But the final popular assumption about social transformation I emphasize here is perhaps the most invisible – and therefore, potentially, the most insidious. It is the idea that only conscious effort, more doings, can get us out of the mess we find ourselves in. It is the tyranny of human agency, the human will to power – or what Jane Bennett calls the ‘fantasy that we really are in charge of all those ‘its’’, a denial of vibrant materialities with agency and action that flow within and around us.
Maybe this partly explains the exhaustion and disenchantment I am seeing in activist circles around the planet, the themes of cynicism I am listening to in the stories of the once chivalrous army for good. I have also felt this numbing despair, this irredeemable feeling that we are doomed beyond our best efforts to save the day. More recently, in New York, I listened to a seasoned environmental activist from Brazil as she shared her insights about the shadows of the World Social Forum, about the establishment of carbon exchanges where emission credits – or the right to continue to pollute the environment – are traded. She chuckled when she noted, with a hint of despondency, that these regulations are a direct result of climate justice movements pressing for low carbon emission rates. She also noted how young, well-intentioned persons dressed like hippies infiltrate villages in Brazil to teach them how to value their forests, their trees, under a carbon metric system – thus imposing an ideological standard that is in cahoots with today’s economic monoculture of mind, and devaluing the indigenous wisdoms that taught those people the mystery of the ancestry and their affinities with the nonhuman world. As I listened to her, it became clearer to me how our best efforts often end up being coopted by the dominant logic, how continuing with the same linearity, with the same rituals, with the same presumptions – while commendable and necessary – can often be counterproductive.
I think it is also becoming commonplace knowledge that the ongoing professionalization and bureaucratization of counterculture means that our voices are losing their subversive tones. We are learning slowly that the system endorses its own critique. That the more assiduously we resist the empire, the more like the empire we become.
Where does this leave us? Where does this leave our assumptions about the world, about our dreams for fonder landscapes, about the value of the work we do to realize those dreams and urge them towards realness? I think today’s widespread despair, today’s disillusionment with change, is the amniotic chamber, the alchemical depths where our vision of what is possible is being transformed, where we are being remade…slowly. Where we are realizing that our theories of change need to change. Where we are seeing that our reality paradigms – the ones that burden us with the sole onus of transformation, with heavy halos that impel us to ‘otherize’ the enemy, the faulty logic, the wrong answer – are no longer enough to bear the weight of our multidimensionality and incredible diversity. The genius of today is that we no longer know what to ask, speak less of knowing the right answers.
And this is how the invitation to slow down makes sense. Because our notions of agency, action and vitality are being stretched – so that we cannot continue to claim that the world is a corpse graciously animated by our presence. Because we are active conspirators with, and participants in, the system we resist – and, though we might like to deny it, this!, this pageantry of exclusion, this auto-erotic quest for supremacy, is our story, our saga. And to deny it is to deny a part of ourselves that needs to be heard. Because there are many ways of knowing and being in the world, and the myth of rationality is not enough to comprise them all.
We need a different kind of politics, one that resonates with the leitmotifs of our ongoing emergence. We need a meta-movement of some sort, not one that necessarily is caught up in the highfalutin, media-enhanced, neon-lit, caricaturization of the ‘top’; not the 100 million dollar movement with a set agenda; not one that is caught up with debates about gun laws and the sins of the ‘other side’; not one that necessarily has a logo, a stringent budget and clear outcomes, but one that is based in lived experiences, one that is underlined by a lot of ‘we don’t know’ moments, and one that is dependent on the gifts, the voices, and the place-based wisdoms of people. As Chris Hedges noted, quite recently, at the launch of the International Alliance for Localization in New York, ‘politics is no longer the concern of traditional political institutions. The chatter about guns, borders, and gay rights is not politics – it is the manipulation of emotion for corporate interests.’
I call this ‘grandmother politics’ – inspired by my brother and ally, Manish Jain, whose disenchantments with global education and schooling motivated him to seek out and learn from his grandmother how to live wisely with oneself, with others, and with the world. This notion of politics suggests we adopt a ‘more’ sacred kind of activism, a big picture activism which is so called because it allows us focus on the little things more keenly.
A world citizens’ movement, activated by a ‘compass’ of shared reflection and mutual inquiry seems more in tune with my feelings about what needs to happen. By a compass, I mean a techne that facilitates local practices of inquiry, an unfurling of questions, a reluctance to govern or impose standards, a willingness to observe and listen to circles of renewal and their explorations of how to live life more fascinatingly, a scaled down trans-local sharing of plural wisdoms.
Does this mean we no longer need spreadsheets? Does this mean we must do away with macro-level advocacy practices seeking to alter exploitative policies? Does this mean that those good people involved with articulating anti-fracking laws, correcting income inequalities, fighting the monolithic superintendence of corporate power in ecological devastation, countering the upsurge of whaling and desertification, insisting that genetically modified foods be properly labeled as such, and arguing for debt relief for less industrialized nations are wrong? I cannot bring myself to think that.
We need spreadsheets and, perhaps, civic advocacy will continue in its present form for a long time to come. But they are not enough. As noted earlier, it can be counterproductive and even dangerous to continue to act out the fiction of the practical as what ‘we do’ to the ‘world’, as the conquest of the right answer, as consensus, as monologue, as a silencing of what many might call the trivial, inchoate non-issues.
A compass reinforces the wisdom of localization, and restores the confidence that people themselves – not their representatives, not lobbyists, not agencies, not policies, and certainly not corporations – can be social actors, not merely social outcomes. If such a technology beats at the heart of a citizens’ movement, it might inspire a more subversive, creative, playful, and elegant hack of our current operating system. Instead of a declaratory documentation of consensus, a compass invites participation, supports diversity, valorizes uncertainty, and initiates community.
This is, as I see it, the ‘heart’ of the matter. Of course, how we make a ‘compass’ actionable is somewhat different, but not too severe a task if we can hold the spirit of the technology close to our considerations. A world citizens’ movement or ‘big picture activism’ can be something radically different, coexisting with orthodox advocacy, but operating from different assumptions. I am led to think that even if we could win all our counterculture wars, it would matter little if we have not evolved a politics that acknowledges the little things, that helps us heal together, and that engages us in ways that trusts us to find our own way through the messiness of human sentience.
We must slow down today because running faster in a dark maze will not help us find our way out. We must slow down today because if we have to travel far, we must find comfort in each other – in all the glorious ambiguity that being in community brings. We must slow down because the correct answer is not adequate. We must slow down because trust, the emerging currency of the ‘next’ story, is not an issue of efficiency, but a creature of intimacy. We must slow down because that is the only way we will see – in a series of alliterated alphabets, smiling icons, and nonsense syllables, patched together with the enigmatic abandon only a non-adult could master – the contours of new possibilities urgently seeking to open to us.
Many people are feeling a pause, like the quiet before the storm. The huge intake of breath that is held in anticipation, with a quickening of the pulse that is the prelude to the adrenaline rush. It feels as if the world is sitting on the blade of a knife, waiting for the slightest flicker of air to ever so gently brush against it and waft it over the edge of Change. Many many people stand watching intently to see which way the breeze will blow….
And there are many people who feel the pause like a deadening emptiness that threatens to swallow them whole. They fear, they doubt, they moan. To believe in the coming winds of Change is to open themselves to the frigid hazard of being let down again, to have freedom yanked away in icy disdain…. to even hope is too much effort at the end of a very long day.
Society drills us with the admonishment that we are not worthy nor capable of freedom. Religion and politics teaches us from birth that the only way forward is to be good boys and girls and to listen to our leaders so as to not be punished. The media surrounds us with propaganda that perpetuates the stereotype of “normal”, and indoctrinates our peers to judge and bully all those in their groups to toe the line, be good, follow the leader, do not question.
But many many many people ARE questioning. They have awoken to the reality of this Matrix-like system that controls the populous with fashion, friends, fear, frenzy, factional faith and fornication. They are SEEING the real world and the real world problems, and the real world answers, and they are standing up and saying “NO MORE!!” At this moment there are literally millions upon millions of people all over this blue planet who are standing up and demanding Truth and Freedom.
One of the things I am told over and over again, is that people are not waking up or not waking up fast enough. Many rage that “nothing is happening”, even though it is happening right in front of their eyes. Many stomp because “IT” isn’t happening the way they want it to happen, nor is “IT” following the carefully well-thought-out schedule that they had arranged. “Nothing is happening” has become a litany for those that have no wish to accept that it IS happening.
People ARE waking up. People are not just waking up, they are standing up and they are standing in their power and saying “NO MORE!!” The people on this planet are taking up the mantle of NOW and are demanding the truth and demanding their freedom.
No, the mainstream media – especially in North America and in Western Europe – are not reporting what is going on all over the world. Oh, they will tell you about those events that they cannot NOT talk about, like what is happening in the Ukraine and Thailand and Venezuela, just as they did not report on Occupy until is was blatantly obvious that they were not reporting on it. But for the most part, the media is keeping the truth of what is going on very quiet. The reports are there…. you just have to look for them.
It is the same in the world of politics and finance, the truth is getting out to the people and is being laid transparently on the ground for them to see…. BUT YOU HAVE TO LOOK FOR IT!!! This is why I began Transpicuous News updates, so that I could publish daily listings of important pieces of news for people to see.
No, the world is NOT sleeping any more. The alarm clock has gone off, and it’s time to get up!
If you want CHANGE then you must be the CHANGE you wish to SEE. Does that mean you have to go out and protest? That you have to burn cars and throw rotten eggs and scream and yell? NO it doesn’t. But it DOES mean that you need to take some responsibility for those changes that you want to happen. It DOES mean that you need to be involved – in whatever way resonates with you – to CREATE CHANGE.
People in North America are under a heavy blanket of “see nothing, hear nothing, do nothing”…. yet all around them the world is being taken back by those who are STANDING in their BE-ing.
The World Is Awake!
Don’t believe me? I have spent the past few days compiling this list that shows just how awake the world has become and how many people are standing up, right NOW.
This is a list of countries where people are telling their governments “NO MORE”. This is a work in progress as it is no where near complete, but I felt compelled to get it out there for people to see RIGHT NOW. You will see that many of these places are the most highly controlled military states on the planet…. and yet, the people RISE and STAND.
YOU are not alone! All these people in ALL these “nations” are standing right beside you. They are BEing the CHANGE.
Please share this list and make it viral. Let the people know that they are not alone and that the people of the world are standing with them. This is not about fear. It is about standing together. It is about knowing that NOW is the time to BE THE CHANGE.
BC Ferries’ proposed elimination of 6,900 sailings annually on 16 routes across coastal British Colombia brought hundreds of protesters out on 18th January 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZHSHxNvrz4
Several 100 people were arrested during a peaceful protest in Washington DC after they strapped themselves to the White House fence in protest against the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline – 3rd March 2014
Students also staged a “die-in” outside the White House to say NO to the Keystone XL oil pipeline – 3rd March 2014 http://xldissent.org/
Protesters converge on the Duke Energy Centre, Charlotte North Carolina to protest against Duke Energy’s so called ”clean coal” energy – 2nd March 2014
Worldwide Wave Launch Gatherings began, honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and resurrecting his spirit of nonviolent direct action. – 4th April 2014
VOA News Khmer American protest in front of the White House against human rights violations of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen – 20th January 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb-bdKogYf0
Hundreds of people marched in Washington DC in Anonymous inspired protest against U.S. government’s policy of violating online privacy – 14th November 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xACQQzW8xFU
Over 1,000 cyclists staged a “die-in” protest outside the Transport for London Head Quarters in protest of increasing cyclist death toll – 1st December 2013
UK Independent Party’s Nigel Farage was mobbed by protesters in Edinburgh, labelling him “scum” for his sexist, racist and homophobic policies – May 17/13
Saudis protest for the release of all political prisoners, freedom of expression and assembly, and an end to widespread discrimination of government – 28th September 2013
Bakhtiaris clashed with security forces in Isfahan over the UN’s inaction regarding the plight of Iranian dissidents in Camp Liberty in Iraq – 24th February 2014
Police in Kazakhstan have detained a number of demonstrators during a protest rally against the devaluation of the country’s national currency – 3rd March 2014
Riot police were recently deployed in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh to break up anti-government protests, calls for for democratic reform – 26th January 2014
A Small Town REVOLUTION! Filettino (Italy) Declares Independence By Printing Its Own Banknotes
The man who would be king? Mayor Luca Sellari displays Filettino’s own bank currency, the “Fiorito,” which features his face, at his office in the town.
A small town in central Italy has declared its independence and started to print its own banknotes.
The authorities in Filettino, 100km (70 miles) east of Rome, are protesting against austerity measures.
It has only 550 inhabitants and under new rules aimed at cutting local administration costs it will be forced to merge with neighbouring Trevi.
Town mayor Luca Sellari, who stands to lose his job because of the eurozone crisis, came up with the idea.
He created his own currency, called the Fiorito. Banknotes have his head on the back, and they are already being used in local shops and being bought as souvenirs by tourists who have started to throng the normally quiet streets.
The mayor says there is enormous enthusiasm about declaring the independence of the new principality.
There has been such an outcry by small towns across Italy at the government move to abolish local councils and merge them with larger towns that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition may be forced to backtrack.
In the meantime the new Principality of Filettino – complete with coat of arms and website – is suddenly enjoying international fame.
TV stations from as far afield as Russia have been running news features about Filettino.
After all, the mayor says, Italy was once made up of dozens of principalities and dukedoms. As he says, the landlocked republic of San Marino still manages to survive, so why not Filettino
HOW TO BREAK THROUGH
“Hope is the most important thing that people need to regain. I just want to be one example of someone who overcame hardships—one source of hope. That’s all we need to start seeing possibilities for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.”
Henry Red Cloud
Photo by Dan Bihn.
Henry Red Cloud’s address is 1001 Solar Warrior Road on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. But the road sign hasn’t arrived. A windmill towering over the cottonwoods in the draw of White Clay Creek marks the location of Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center and his “Solar Warrior Community.”
It consists of a mud-and-straw-bale roundhouse for trainings, a whimsically painted Quonset hut factory for assembling solar air heaters, an array of solar panels from Germany, a horse trailer that doubles as a paper recycling center for making insulation, a vegetable garden, and a new concrete foundation for what will become a 20-person dormitory.
Here Red Cloud directs the work of Lakota Solar Enterprises, his American Indian-owned and operated business dedicated to providing renewable energy to some of the poorest communities in the United States.
The business has been part of a journey home for the 52-year-old Oglala Lakota man. He left the reservation to join the civil rights movement in the 1970s, then found himself working construction, walking high steel in cities around the country.
Selected by authorNaomi Klein:“Tribes are under intense pressure to allow their lands to be punctured by fossil fuel development. Red Cloud is showing that there is another path out of poverty.”
But when he returned home, he faced the reality of few jobs and little housing. He crafted teepees and took volunteer training from Trees, Water & People, which later became his partner organization.
One night, trying to sleep in the back seat of his car, Red Cloud had the vision for Lakota Solar: training people right on the reservation to build and install solar heaters so they could study at home and support the extended family, or tiospaye. Later, he added a buffalo ranching cooperative to the enterprise.
“The house, the buffalo, renewable energy: I’m not into it to become a millionaire,” Red Cloud says. “I’m just here passing it on to the next generation like the grandfathers did for us. That way surely their prophecy is going to be realized.”
Red Cloud’s 16-month-old granddaughter is the seventh generation descended from Makhpiya Luta, or Chief Red Cloud, who negotiated the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which left 60 million acres of buffalo hunting grounds to the Great Sioux Nation—until Congress later whittled it into smaller reservation parcels.
“Our ancestors made a treaty with the U.S. government,” Red Cloud recounts. But they also made “a pact with the Creator for seven generations”—hearkening to a well-known prophecy that they would suffer if they did not provide for their descendants’ future prosperity.
Red Cloud was raised by his grandparents. “You can get an education and you can live a comfortable life,” he remembers his grandfather saying, “but if you want to have a really good life, create some work for other people.”
To date, the Red Cloud Center has trained 84 people, most of whom have secured jobs based on the experience—a striking accomplishment given the staggering unemployment across Indian country.
Lakota Solar Enterprises has built and installed more than 1,200 small-scale individual solar heating systems. The heaters save low-income homeowners up to 30 percent on utility bills that, over the course of a freezing Northern Plains winter, can add up to more than $1,000. The systems are Red Cloud’s own innovation: For two years, he fiddled with a 1970s design to come up with the $2,500 unit his business produces today. “We’re using 21st century material and tweaking it Lakota-style,” he says.
Recently, Red Cloud has engaged 24 Northern Plains tribes as partners. The tribes have been spending millions of dollars of federal funding to assist tribal members with energy costs, such as propane. Now they can use some of the money for energy efficiency and to send tribal members to Red Cloud’s renewable energy courses.
Red Cloud also has contracts to install wind turbines and solar arrays atop public health clinics on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian Reservations. He hopes the projects will help topple what he considers to be a wall of skepticism about green building techniques—the legacy of failed development projects on the reservations.
“We are just getting back to the memory of the old way and becoming sustainable again,” Red Cloud says. “We have always had our Sun Dance ceremonies. We’re warriors doing our warriors’ deed in the 21st century for the seventh generation.”
Talli Nauman wrote this article for The YES! Breakthrough 15, the Winter 2012 issue of YES! Magazine. Talli is co-founder and co-director of the Aguascalientes, Mexico-based bilingual independent media project Periodismo para Elevar la Conciencia Ecológica, PECE (Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness), initiated with a MacArthur grant in 1994.
LOS ANGELES POISED TO BE THE FIRST MAJOR U.S. CITY TO CALL FOR END TO CORPORATE PERSONHOOD by David Swanson
Grassroots Momentum Builds Toward Passage of a Constitutional Amendment
LOS ANGELES, CA – Next week the Los Angeles City Council will vote on a resolution that calls on Congress to amend the Constitution to clearly establish that only living persons — not corporations — are endowed with constitutional rights and that money is not the same as free speech. If this resolution is passed, Los Angeles will be the first major city in the U.S. to call for an end to all corporate constitutional rights.
From War is a Crime.org
Posted on 01 December 2011
http://warisacrime.org/content/los-angeles-poised-be-first-major-us-city-call-end-corporate-personhoodThe campaign in Los Angeles is the latest grassroots effort by Move to Amend, a national coalition working to abolish corporate personhood. “Local resolution campaigns are an opportunity for citizens to speak up and let it be known that we won’t accept the corporate takeover of our government lying down,” said Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, a national spokesperson for Move to Amend. “We urge communities across the country to join the Move to Amend campaign and raise your voices.”
Earlier this year voters in Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin overwhelmingly approved ballot measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. In November voters in Boulder, Colorado and Missoula, Montana both passed similar initiatives with 75% support.
“We are experiencing overwhelming support for what may be a historic turning point in restoring a voice to the voters and setting an example for the rest of the country,” stated Mary Beth Fielder, Coordinator of Move To Amend LA. “This action would provide the basis for overturning the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.”
Move to Amend volunteers in dozens of communities across the country are working to place similar measures on local ballots next year, including West Allis, WI, a conservative suburb of Milwaukee where last week local residents successfully qualified a measure for their spring ballot.
Move to Amend’s strategy is to pass community resolutions across the nation through city councils and through direct vote by ballot initiative. “Our plan is build a movement that will drive this issue into Congress from the grassroots. The American people are behind us on this and these campaigns help our federal representatives see that we mean business. Our very democracy is at stake,” stated Sopoci-Belknap.
The campaign in Los Angeles is endorsed by a growing list of organizations including Common Cause, Occupy LA, LA County Federation of Labor, Physicians for Social Responsibility, The Environmental Caucus of the CA Democratic Party, Southern California Americans for Democratic Action, MoveOn LA, Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains, Democracy for America, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, AFSCME 36, LA Green Machine and California Clean Money Campaign.
In my travels across the country, I’ve been speaking about a rising generation ready to emerge from the shadows of the last decade and enter a new era of social change. Now we are seeing something emerge — a grassroots campaign has caught fire, turning out thousands of people, young and old, to create a free democratic space called Liberty Square on Wall Street.
All kinds of people are protesting that Wall Street has been rescued but there has been no help for most Americans. And city after city is joining them. Their statement:
We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we are working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.
This is what a groundswell looks like. This is a moment that could spark a broader movement that reaffirms the human dignity of all people. In a time when the top 1 percent have as much income as the bottom 60 percent — a level of inequality not seen since before the Great Depression — it’s a matter of moral imperative to help fix a broken system.
Oct. 4 was a major day of action in New York, where an estimated 15,000 people marched for reform. I’m inspired by Jesse Jackson’s editorial in the Chicago Sun-Timesabout the protesters:
“The discipline of their demonstrations, the clarity of their moral voice, has touched a chord. Occupy Wall Street is in that tradition of nonviolence with a moral voice organizing to challenge entrenched power and privilege, a movement that stands with the majority against a powerful elite.”
But let’s be clear: This isn’t about bad people, it’s about a broken system that isn’t working to encourage opportunity for all Americans and rewarding hard work with decent pay.
Last month, our country marked the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 as the end of one chapter of history and the beginning of a new one has yet to be written. At Groundswell’s teach-in at The Jerome L. Green Performance Space in September, I shared a vision of what a groundswell feels like. I said, “A groundswell is a broad swell in the sea, due to a distant storm or gale. It’s a response to something. A groundswell is not self-generated but comes out of the zeitgeist.”
We did not know what would come next or how it would happen — we only knew that we were hungry for a movement that wasn’t about a political party or a single issue, but a shared moral vision for a better world. We have taken the first steps together, now let’s keep walking.
Selected by authorNaomi Klein:“Tribes are under intense pressure to allow their lands to be punctured by fossil fuel development. Red Cloud is showing that there is another path out of poverty.”