Wall Street Occupiers prepare for a talk by Professor Wolff on Oct. 4, 2011.

Occupy Wall Street has changed the conversation about the distribution of wealth, and an economic framework which for decades, has been taken for granted.  So what now?  What policy changes and initiatives should the movement be pushing for?  On this edition, University of Massachusetts at Amherst emeritus economics professor Richard Wolff speaks about some of the roots of, and solutions to, the economic inequality that’s finally being acknowledged.

Featuring:

Richard Wolff, University of Massachusetts economics professor emeritus; Deepa Varna, housing attorney

***WEB EXCLUSIVES***

Prof. Wolff on European Economic Inequity, 8 minutes

Full length interview with economics professor Richard Wolff, conducted by Lisa Rudman in 3 parts:

Part 1 of unedited Wolff interview, 18 minutes

Part 2 of unedited Wolff interview, 24 minutes

Part 3 of unedited Wolff interview, 25 minutes

For More Information:

Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street West
Richard Wolff
Move To Amend
Eviction Defense Collaborative
Occupy For Jobs
F.D.R and the New Deal
2012 United Nations year of Co-Operatives

Articles/Blogs/Videos/Audio:

Occupy 4 Jobs Rally NYC
Decolonize/Occupy Wall St West 1.20.12
Occupy is back — with horns and glitter
Banks cancel debit card fees, but anti-bank sentiment remains palpable

MUSIC:
Deltron 3030 by Del the Funkee Homosapien
C.R.E.A.M. by Wu-Tang Clan

Transcript  Richard (Rick) Wolff interviewed by Lisa Rudman, Executive Director of Making Contact / National Radio ProjectLisa:The years 2010, 2011, and now 2012– I know it’s hard to look at a crystal ball, but give it a try.
Rick Wolff: Well, 2010 in my mind was an important year because it taught everyone who cares, which is almost everyone, that this is one of the worst economic crises the United States has every had; it’s on a scale with the Great Depression, it’s not going away real soon and people settled in 2010 to face that…didn’t know quite what to do about it, but to face it.

2011 is the great transition year in my opinion because in that year over the first two thirds of it people began to get more and more angry about what was going on, about this lasting crisis and the fact that little was being done for most people to do anything to limit the damage or to reverse the situation.

And then of course, the crucial thing which we’ll always look back to is the Occupy Wall Street movement that explodes starting in Sept. of 2011 and that really changes everything. It changes the way people feel about the economic crisis. Suddenly there’s a movement to do something. It isn’t coming from the top, it’s coming from down below. It has incredible staying power against clumsy efforts by incompetent governmental agencies to control it, which only makes it seem stronger and more durable and attracts many more people.

It’s clearly a very, very popular movement right from the beginning, thereby giving the lie to those had felt, and thought and said that there’s no left wing base in the United States, that that was all blow away. Millions of Americans who thought they were the only person who thought a certain way discovered they weren’t.

03:17
So I think 2012 will be the legacy year, the year in which a long lasting crisis and the beginning of a serious movement to do something about it that is not paid by the big corporations, not in league with the republican or democratic parties, begins to assert a new and independent political perspective. So I expect great things from 2012 that are going to build on the Occupy movement.

Whatever forms the organizations take, whether we see the revival of old radical organizations and development of new ones, a little bit of both, that will be very interesting to watch; even how old terms like capitalism and socialism, and whether they stay in circulation, what new meanings they take on, it’s gonna be a very exciting political year of change in which the major news will not be the political shenanigans around election. It’ll be around a new political constellation in this country that’s developing.

Lisa: You jumped right in to focusing on Occupy. So when you talk about Occupy, that it’s a movement to do something, what is that something?

05:00
Rick: Well, I think that the Occupy movement has been nothing short of genius in how it’s developed. I tell people that ask me that if they had ask me, they didn’t, but had they ask me early on what to do I would’ve given them awful advice, and nothing makes me happier than the fact they never asked me, so they never had to risk following my bad advice.

The first advice I would’ve given them would’ve been to be very clear about what they want. Wrong. What they needed to do was gather together all sorts of people with all sorts of agendas to teach them a fundamental lesson about politics.

If you’re going to make change you have to get people who disagree on all kinds of things to trust each other and to work together. That’s the hardest thing because that’s the way the left in the past has been splintered in this country. And to do what they did, to come up with a set of very general slogans, like 1% versus 99%, or being angry at the businesses, or questioning capitalism, or the basic themes that they developed was exactly the right thing.

It is a big tent, it allows all kind of people to get together, to work together, to get to know each other, to understand their differences, not be the threatened by them, see the differences as a very important glue that can hold them together. So I think this is a movement that has stunningly understood and incorporated fundamental political lessons about gathering people together under conditions that are very bad for that sort of thing, in a country that militates against that through its individualism, through its long history of single issue movements that have been very leery of mixing together with other people and so forth.

06:51
The second thing that Occupy does that’s a game changer and is brilliant, was its courage and determination against all kinds of advice, not just the kind I would’ve given them. To put the question of economic equality, of economic system of capitalism right out front, right at the beginning, no holds barred, we’re the 99%, our adversary is the 1%, they control the economy, they’ve bought the political system, they’re the problem, we’re gonna have to change all that…that has been something the vast majority of the left leaning movements in America have been terrified of for half a century.

Whether you call that the legacy of the Cold War or you call that the legacy of the anti-communism of the early parts of the Cold War, whatever you call it, it has immobilized and undermined left movements in this country for half a century.

And they dealt with that not beating around the bush, not hiding, not prevaricating, but putting it right out front. And instead of that being a problem of frightening people away, it had exactly the opposite effect, which is the only side of genius in politics there ever is — the proverbial you run that flag up that pole and you see who salutes.

Occupy gathered people around a whole network of vague issues, multiple issues, general principles, and it put the economic question forefront. Nobody would’ve suggested they do those two things. That’s not the way the left has in general behaved, and so they have to their credit as a movement achieved two major breakthroughs changing politics.

That’s why in such a short time everybody was talking about 1%, 99%. It wasn’t too radical to say. The president had to say it. Even some of those republican jerks had to say it. That’s a sign that you have really tapped into popular consciousness and for a left in this country to have done that so quickly, so successfully, stunning. The only answer is stunning. And a movement with that much to go for it in a few short months is a movement we’re gonna hear more about, whatever particular forms that may take.

Lisa: And when you talk about Occupy really touching a nerve, it seems like there’s some interesting variety, both in genesis and execution when you go from geographically across the country. I wonder, since you’ve visited a lot of Occupies, tell us what you’ve seen, just what you see as the variegations in this movement.

9:35
Rick:
Well, it’s enormously dispersed, you’re absolutely right. The ones I’ve talked to for example range from a small city, Bangor, in Maine to San Rafael in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and a whole bunch in between. And actually the most often I visited and spoke was at Zuccotti Park in Wall Street, since I live and work in that area.

They’re both similar and different; similar in the sense of the Occupy thematic being very meaningful to all of them across the board. The 1% – 99% everywhere, uniformly adopted as a slogan, as a focus, very, very interesting.

The differences? Well, my first reaction is they have a bit more to do with geography and the specifics of each city and locality where it was done. The cities and towns are different.

Let me give you and example. In New York City the decision of the mayor there, a non-entity named Bloomberg, who by the way is the living incarnation of a famous Peter Sellers film called Being There. If you remember that film, there’s a man in there named Chancy Gardner who becomes president of the US because he’s the right man in the right place at the right time, even though he’s clearly retarded. I’m not saying that Bloomberg is exactly the same, but it sure is similar.

So Mr. Bloomberg decides to cope with Zuccotti Park by endlessly throwing police personnel, so that they ring the park, they stand there, they make noise with their sirens, that they forbid the use of voice microphones and things like that…endless harassment because that’s the only way that the 1% know how to cope. They can’t answer any of the criticisms, they can’t deal with any of the issues, so they repress. That’s what they know.

The spectacle for example, of Mrs. Clinton celebrating freedom fighting folks demanding democracy in every other country, while systematically conniving here to repress the pale image of what’s happening there here is as stunning to everybody as you can imagine.

So in New York City it’s all about resisting repression, resisting the police, and you have a spectacle, for example, in which the mayor, Bloomberg, destroys his own political career in one act, by emptying the park violently. Taking a violent action by forcing the people to leave, taking bulldozers for example and destroying the little public library that had been erected in Zuccotti Park. And no one missed it.

You destroy a free public library as the mayor of a city. You claim this is necessary. At the same time you as the mayor of the city are cutting back public library hours and the whole thing is justified, this is stunning, by the need to clean the park. This is the mayor who presides over the filthiest subway system on earth, who has done nothing whatsoever to clean the subway system for the millions of people who risk illness by the rats, and the garbage (I live there so I know) that is in that subway system.

13:40
Every New Yorker who looked at that mayor articulating the cleanliness argument knew that he had as stunning a liar in front of him as any you’ve ever heard. It’s the end for him. It’s the end of political career. Even is billions can’t fix the damage he did to himself.

Then compare that to Marin County, San Rafael. I gave a talk in the middle of the city plaza of San Rafael. 1250-150 people gathered there, very impressive, it’s a small city, San Rafael. Heaven knows in a fairly widely dispersed county, so it’s a bit of travel for people to come.

So you have 150 people come. They come for 2-3 hours. I speak for an hour and 40 minutes, stretching my credulity and my time. There’s not a single policeman in sight. There are no policemen in the neighborhood, there’s no repression. There’s not even the vain hint of one or two to keep the traffic flowing, nor was there the slightest need for it.

And when I asked about it because it was stunning, I learned again there’s no need for it here. They have a very good relationship with the local police. They have had these…it’s all taken care of. They are exercising their free rights. They are doing it effectively. And I think the thing that most struck me was in the next day’s newspaper, The Independent Journal I think it’s called, the daily paper up there, had all I can describe, and it’s a story I might have written myself about my own talk in the sense of being friendly, and understanding and capturing the basics.

Very different from New York, in which all the major newspapers sought from the beginning to crush this by saying nothing or saying snide, dismissive kinds of reports until it became so big they couldn’t anymore, and then they split. The New York Times began to talk about it by mixing — one day a story friendly, the next day a story despicably dismissive — whereas the Post and the News, which are you know, broad side papers and scandal mongering sheets, they basically attack it all the time, but seems they attack everything left of Atilla the Hun, no one takes it all terribly seriously.

So it varies by the specific conditions. What Quan did in Oakland is obviously very different from what the police did there from what you had in Bangor, Maine. There were no police, everybody went down to the center of Bangor, Maine to talk with the people in the tents. It had exactly the effect you would want, an issue that would otherwise only have been talked about in private became a public issue.

15:55
So I think the different experiences are powerfully important. They’re teaching local activists not only that they’re not alone, not only who their friends and allies are, not only how to build a movement with people who disagree with you on this or that and agree with you on that, but they’re also teaching people what the unique conditions of their social environment are and how to deal with those.

And so I think you’re accumulating very valuable experience that as this movement matures and grow will be communicated from one Occupy to another and build up that reservoir of experience that makes all successful social movements able to move forward over time, and that’s what’s happening here.

And because they’re not coming out of the old left, because they’re not coming out of fairly defined and often quite rigid hostilities amongst little groups, they’re not held back by all that. In a peculiar way, while there are costs to that, they don’t have the accumulative experience you might have if you were part of an ongoing political party that had been around for 50 years that handed down lots of stories about past experiences with a strike or a demonstration…those are valuable. Those teach you like anything else.

That is missing. And sometimes that hurts and these people make mistakes, but you have to blend that with the enormous advantage of not having baggage to carry, being open to see and feel your way without blinders that come from history, so it’s a mixed bag. We shouldn’t be afraid of facing what the costs are, but we shouldn’t miss the advantages of kind of starting anew.

17:40
If I could say a word about that too… I’m often asked the difference between the European fighting against the austerity programs there and the Americans. And the basic difference is what I just referred to — it’s organization. In the European context there are longstanding socialist parties, many of them, green parties, communist parties, anti-capitalist parties, trade unions, different trade unions, members of different national associations of trade. All of those are dense networks of people who know each other, who’ve worked together, who understand their differences.

When one group in a place say like France, and the same is true in Italy or Norway, Germany, so forth, one group makes a decision that something is so outrageous it needs a demonstration, 500 phone calls are made in the next two hours and 10,000 show up because they’re being called by someone they’ve worked with 40 years…someone they trust, someone they know, someone they understand will be there with 10 other people. Those networks are invaluable. They’re the glue that holds together.

The fact that in the United States those political parties have been destroyed or reduced to tiny little groups, and the fact that our labor union movement is at the end of a 50 year period of continuous decline means that we don’t have those networks, and we don’t have those capacities. That’s why it has taken so much longer to mount these kind of demonstrations. That’s why it has taken longer for there to be an Occupy. So those are costly weaknesses of the American left.

But the flip side is we don’t have to inherit the hostilities of these groups to one another. We don’t have to inherit their compromises, their compromised leaders, a whole lot of baggage that comes with them.

So I think the weakness has already shown up here and that it took longer for us to react. Now the strength is going to show up, that without the baggage we’re gonna build those networks of relationships, those dense combinations of people who know and trust each other that’s already happening, happening very quickly. And I think therefore, we will show some strength in the rate of growth even though it took us longer to get going.

Lisa: So when you reflect on the growing strength of the movements around Occupy, the Occupy movements, can you talk a little about what the solutions are that people are putting forward? Because I think a lot of our listeners know about the economic system, they identify a lot of the same problems in the system as you do, but as an economist what do you think some of the incremental and long term solutions are?

20:28
Rick: Well, I think first, the Occupy movement is aware of a lot of the things I’m about to say. They’ve discussed them, they have what they call their working groups that have taken these projects on in different cities, localities and different ways. And there’s a lot of debate about a whole host of things, but I’m very heartened by the willingness of question capitalism as a system. That’s stunning more for the United States than anywhere else on earth. So I want to underscore all of that before saying what I think is the direction it has to go.

Anyway, here is my sense of what I hope will happen and what I know some of the Occupy folks are already doing since I work with them, and provide information and analysis for them.

21:16
The first is what you yourself just called or words to this effect, short term, immediate demands, solutions that could be made, and there are several of those.
The single most important one has to do with unemployment. I mean that is the number one economic problem in the United States, no matter how rarely politicians are willing to talk about it since fundamentally they have nothing to say about it, so they don’t want to talk about it. Usually it’s what’s forced on them, usually by popular polling or other mechanisms that make them understand it.

Anyway, the problem is the following: We have had between 9-10% basically unemployment. And if you do the proper numbers you use the U6 number that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses, we’re talking 15-16% unemployment in the United States — people who have no job, people who have given up looking and people who have part time jobs, but involuntarily because they want a full time job. You’re talking 1 out of 6 Americans. That’s a disaster for our economy.

22:22
It’s also the case that these people are unemployed for longer periods of time than we have any record of in the history of this country. And the longer a person is unemployed, the more devastating the effects. You use up your savings, you become a burden on your friends, and family and relatives and neighbors. You lose your skills, you lose your contacts, so the social costs of unemployment, which are enormous anyway, are made even worse when they last a long time.

And this unemployment has been in the 8, 9, 10% range for three years now. Nothing has been done. The Bush program when he was president was to stimulate and incentivize the private sector to hire people. Obama has said exactly the same thing, he said it as a campaigner, he said it as president, and the fact is that for the last three years unemployment has remained at the same level despite incentives and despite subsidies given to the private sector, would’ve lead any person not in the pocket of big business to have realized that that program doesn’t work and that another one would be necessary.

But because both parties are in the pockets of the business community who has no interest in solving this problem, that is, no interest in solving it at its expense or to allow any infringement on their freedoms, we don’t have an adequate solution.

So the first thing Occupy should do is point that out as strongly as possible. Make people aware not only is this unemployment the devastating burden on not just the people who are employed, the examples of the ramifications are countless. Unemployed people cannot maintain payments on their home. If they can’t maintain payments on their home then their homes deteriorate; they can’t paint the house and eventually they can’t stay in that house.

If you live next door to a person who can’t maintain his/her house or stay in it, the value of your house goes down too. So the social costs of unemployment on all kinds of people beyond the unemployed and their immediate families is staggering. And it exceeds the cost, here comes the punch line, of almost any program that could be conceived.

What Occupy ought to do therefore, is say the last time we had unemployment this bad, lasting this long, the 1930s, the president went on the radio, Roosevelt, and he said if the private sector cannot or will not hire the people, then the federal government is gonna do it. Between 1934 and 1941 Roosevelt created and filled 12 million jobs.

24:51
Today’s population of the United States it would be double that, and therefore that would be a major, a major solution to the unemployment problem. It’s not a solution that comes from Russia, or China, or Cuba or any of the Bugaboo places that people would like to dismiss. It’s our own history that the current crop of republican and democratic leaders chooses to forget, never bring up, never provide therefore the faintest excuse why not to do today what was the necessary thing to do the last time we had a crisis of this sort.

And the first thing Occupy ought to do is demand that. But that’s only the first. If I have time for the second, good.

The second is to learn from the mistakes that were made. The reason Roosevelt had to provide public jobs was because he had a mass movement there. He had what Occupy is now trying to build — a powerful CIO that organized more workers in the 1930s than any union wave in America had ever organized before, or ever organized since. Millions of people joined unions.

You had a powerful set of socialist parties with large memberships and a powerful communist party with large membership. And lots of overlap between the socialist party, and the unions, and the communist party and the unions, so they could work together a dense network of people. And they forced that, Roosevelt, to change.

But notwithstanding that, they made a colossal mistake and Occupy has to learn — this is the most crucial thing to get across — they have to learn from the mistake. What was the mistake? You imposed on the business community and on the rich regulations and taxes. Regulations to try and prevent another great crisis, and taxes to pay for hiring those millions of people. Someone had to pay for those workers to build the national parks, and highways and if I’m not mistaken, the Golden Gate Bridge among other things.

So when you did that, when you went after the wealthy and the businesses to tax them to pay for this solution, and to regulate the system, you made their boards of directors and their shareholders the enemy of all of this because you were hurting their profits. You were taxing their wealth, you were regulating their ability to make money, and so what they did as soon as they were able, which was usually before the ink was dry on the bills that raised the taxes and imposed the regulations, they went to work to undo the new deal that had been imposed on them.

And the mistakes of the movements then was to leave then in a position to do it. To let them gather into their hands the profits of our society, the wealth we create year in and year out, the difference between the value of what we as workers produce and what we get as wages and salary. That profit they used to undo the regulations, to reduce the taxes in order to recreate for themselves the situation they were angry at having been deprived of.

28:06
The great reform movements of the 1930s never touched the capacity of the business community to hold onto the wealth and to use it to undo the new deal. So what Occupy has to learn now, one lesson — reproduce the movements of the ’30s that won the reforms.

Second lesson: Don’t stop at reform because if you do you will simply set in motion the undoing of whatever it is we achieve this time just as the movements of the ’30s set in motion the conditions that make us now have taxes 1/3 of what they were in the 1940s, regulations that have completely disappeared. For example, the Banking Act, the Glass-Steagall Act imposed on banks in the ’30s, was undone by the late 1990s, signed by President Clinton in 1999. Eight years later the banking system collapses again. It’s like a joke.

And so Occupy has to take the bite, take the courage. You cannot leave in place the classic capitalist enterprise controlled by the major shareholders and the boards of directors because they will do what they have done — take the money they keep drawing into their hands, use the wealth of this society to undo every reform, every tax imposed on them until we’re back again in an economic system making a lot of money for them and crisis for everybody else. That’s where we were in 1929.

29:38
Lisa: So I’m gonna push you to take it a little further. If the idea is to have taxation, regulation and somehow prevent them from rolling those things back, what’s the recipe for preventing this rollback? What are the elements of that?

Rick: Okay, here’s how we would do it: First, we have to face what we’re seeing. And I want to be clear — no shying away, no drawing back, we’re gonna change. We need to change the organization of production, the way enterprises are organized. No more you and I come to work 9-5 Monday through Friday, and then we go home at the end of the week and we leave behind everything we produced. What we poured our mental and physical capabilities into producing belongs instantaneously to someone else. That’s gotta stop.

It’s gotta be the mass of people who dispose of the wealth they create so it cannot be used to create a 1% – 99% dichotomy, cannot be used to undo the reforms we worked so hard to put into place to protect ourselves. So it’s very clear we have to change the organization of production.

Lisa: People would say, oh, my God, you’re pie in the sky. You’re talking about collective workplaces, you’re talking about total transformation. Help people to bridge where we are now and this wonderful, it’s an attractive vision, but I’m just playing devil’s advocate here and saying how do you get there.

Rick: Here’s the way you institutionalize it. We now have depending on how you count, 20-25 million people without work or without the kind of work that they want. That’s one fifth of our total labor force in this country, so we’re talking about a major jump.

31:25
What we need and what I would hope Occupy demands is a federal employment program, but radically different from what was in the 1930s. Here’s the demand — the government will provide the capital and the technical assistance for these 25 million people to go back to work in enterprises that they themselves control.

And let me give you an example of how practical this is. And the best way I know how to do that is to give you the name of a law in a country which does it. In Italy right now there’s a law, I believe it’s called the Marcona law, but it may be a slightly different name, named after the legislator who pushed it through.

It’s been on the books for at least 20 years and here’s what it does. If you are unemployed in Italy you have a choice. You can either get on the dole the way we do here in this country. You get so much money per week depending on the job you had before for so many weeks to see you through the unemployment time. Or, in Italy you get a choice. The government will give you three years worth of your weekly unemployment payments upfront in a lump on the following condition:

You must get, I believe it’s at least 8 or more other workers, unemployed, to make this same choice you do. Each of them will get the upfront money on condition that you begin and operate a collective enterprise on your own. And the stick if you like together with the carrot is this — if the enterprise goes belly up you don’t get any unemployment. This is your unemployment.

So you’re gonna see a dozen workers, two dozen, 100, 200 getting together working as hard as they can because this is their own future. This is their long term and short term. This is their solution.

It has worked very well in Italy and I think here in the United States it would work because here’s what would happen. We would have for the first time in America a real choice for workers, between the top down old style capitalist enterprise, and these millions of people forming the other kind of enterprise with government support and government money up front as an alternative to the old unemployment system.

We would allow people to be able to go into a store and buy a product that had on its label, not just the country from which it came and maybe not just even the Fair Trade it might’ve come through, but for the first time the labels will be required to say this business was made in a capitalist enterprise, this business was made in an enterprise where the workers are their own bosses.

And I’ve news for you — every poll of the American people taken in the last 50 years says that the American people would love to be able to buy goods that were produced by workers that were their own bosses, since the overwhelming majority of American workers want to be their own bosses.

34:39
Lisa: But when you say there’s popular support for this and polls show people want to be their own bosses, there is the element of class consciousness, of understanding that it’s actually a little bit more than running your own business. It is this structural issues you were talking about earlier as far as the capitalist system, because if they just recreate the same profit model then it’s kind of another way to the same end that you find problematic.
So I guess my question is maybe you can break down the barriers to class consciousness in the US, if you think that’s a precursor to this new types of formation, made in the USA by armies of unemployed, right? Maybe there is some historical or international examples you can give, how movements have helped to stimulate, and highlight and develop this way of thinking because there’s a mental shift that happens, not just the pragmatism of “I need a job”, ..or ”I’m getting money to go setup a collective.”

There’s a little bit more shift of consciousness and I think some people have identified the need for class consciousness as sort of part of this recipe. So let me rephrase it as a shorter question.

35:51
Rick: I was expressing that people would support this.

Lisa: Right, so since you’re saying polls show that people want to be their own bosses, what are the other mental shifts that people need to do around their understanding of these systems and class consciousness. How do you see that fitting in?

36:06
Rick: The way I answer that when it comes up in my talks is to be as practical and concrete as I know how in my answers. And rather than articulate an abstract principle, to give a concrete example, and here’s how it would go. And this would come, for example, easily out of the Occupy 1% – 99%. I would explain that if workers ran their own enterprises, here’s what they would never do:

They would never give managers, even the top managers in their enterprise, on average, 350 times the average wage of the worker. That would never happen if workers made these decisions collectively. And that’s the single most important decision that shapes the gap between the 99% and the 1%.

So if you’re concerned about inequality of income in this country as the polls show the majority of Americans are, then here is a concrete way to finally do something about it by changing the organization of the enterprise, you put the decision makers as the mass of people and they would never articulate, they would never support, they would never continue a level of inequality anything like what we have in the United States today.

We even have examples in places like Mondragon in Spain where there are workers who make these decisions; the average rate is between 8 and 10 times is the gap between the highest paid worker at the top of a hierarchy and everybody else. And even that is disputed, but nothing remotely like we have in the United States.

So if you want a movement toward equality this kind of transformation of the enterprise is a concrete step and I don’t know of any other movement in this country that articulates any other way halfway as practical as this one to get what they even claim they want in the way of greater equality.

But there’s more: If workers made the decisions collectively they wouldn’t move the factories to China. I hate to be blunt about this, but the whole exodus of enterprise out of the United States would come to a massive grinding halt. Now, that would incur all kinds of costs and problems, of course it would, just like what we do now which is allow them to leave (costs us massively as a society). And we would have to work on that, but if that’s a concern, the loss of jobs and the loss therefore, of the bargaining power of the working people because there aren’t jobs and therefore, there’s not the need for them, then one way to handle this is to stop the movement of jobs because workers are not going to eradicate their own employment.

38:44
And finally, another example: An awful lot of people are concerned about the destruction of the environment, whether it’s the air, the water, etc. Well, we have a situation in which the single most important pollution in our society has to do with how we organize production, whether it’s what comes out of the smoke stack of a factory, whether it’s what comes out of, what cleanser is used to keep the toilets clean, whatever it is…

Well, the problem is in most cases that the decision what to produce, how to produce, where to produce is made by a board of directors, 10 or 15 people selected by major shareholders, another 10 or 15 people who sit often thousands of miles away, and who make the decision what you’re gonna use in your enterprise. All that’s gone if the workers themselves are making these decisions because they and their husbands, and their wives and their children and their neighbors are gonna have to breathe what goes on in that factory, live with consequences.

If you want to make a major move in the direction of a green United States, a greening of our disastrous interaction with nature, then put the people who have to live with the consequences in the decision making position.

40:04
I mean democracy calls for no less anyway, but here are three practical ways — drastically reduce the inequality of income and therefore wealth, drastically stop the destruction of our unions and our working people by the exodus of jobs, and drastically reorganize the production process in the interest of a better relationship with nature. All of those could be given quantum steps forward by this change.

And I think because people support a narrowing in equality. People support keeping jobs here, and people support an environmentally successful program, we can teach the American people that this transformation beyond capitalism is the way to move forward in those areas where their support is already assured.

Lisa: It strikes me that in those three areas you’ve outlined there’s a scale issue. And again, devil’s advocate, naysayers would say that kind of decentralized and small scale localized solutions and localized worker control production, it’s not possible in the US. So how do you respond to that?

41:13
Rick: Every system that has every existed in the human race in the way of producing goods and service, in other words, any economic system, has always had this kind of problem to solve. Let me remind you, nothing is more central to the history of the United States and its capitalist system, to its successes and its failures, to its bloodbaths as well as to its achievements, than the continuing struggle from the beginning to this moment between big business and small business.

Little businesses are bitterly complaining all the time that big business destroys their ability to function, imposes on them absurd costs. In every community in America over the last 30 years the great anxiety of every storekeeper is the arrival of the Walmart store which is gonna wipe them out, destroy all their relationships, take away from local people the ability to have credit when they need it because they know the locals…

You know the story because it’s part of our folklore of American history. So when people say to me gee, it’s gonna be a problem of how little companies get, that’s always a problem. And you’re absolutely right. When workers run their own enterprises, if the enterprise has got 50 people in it it’s in a different social situation from an enterprise that has 5,000 people in it. An enterprise that is only existing in one locale will have a different set of problems than an enterprise that has units in 10 locales, especially if they’re far way and have different sizes.

42:42
Those problems have to be worked out and they will be worked out. The difference is the relationship among the enterprises on the one hand, and between them and the public that buys the output on the other, will be mediated by democratically run enterprises who are gonna have to work this out in ways that are consistent with democracy because that’s what they are.

The reason we don’t have a democratic solution to those problems now is that the agent at the center who makes the decisions is the modern capitalist corporation which is a fundamentally undemocratic system since the majority of people who depend on the corporation, its employees number one, and its customers number two, are not the decision makers. The decision makers are a tiny group of people who own the shares and who sit on the board of directors.

And that means they make decisions about how big business and small business interact, the scale of decisions, the scale of business. They make those decisions in order to reproduce their capitalist system. We would make it in order to reproduce a democratically organized workplace and that would be all the difference in the world.

43:53
Lisa: Here’s a four word question: military and our economy?

Rick: We have long accumulated vested interests in the United States economy. All economies have that. We have, for example, the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about so many years ago. We have long built up interdependencies between those states, for example, where military production is concentrated, California, the American south and so on.

We have likewise interdependencies of all kinds with what we might call the medical-pharmaceutical complex which in its way is just as important as the military complex. Government is involved with private enterprise and so forth.

Absolutely, we have to take into account as any reasonable, rational person would have to, that if we want to move away from dependence on these vested interests, that has to be done carefully, cautiously. The jobs of people who depend on them through no fault of their own have to be protected.

To same the same thing in plain English, if you want to get out of a dependency you don’t think is healthy, you need a lot of help and a lot of professional planning to get that job done. It’s just like having a person who becomes dependent in an unhealthy way on a substance they need to disconnect from, on another person, another community or whatever.

And the irony is the only way to get out of a dependence on the military, or the only way to get out dependence on a pharmaceutical industry that basically extorts higher prices from Americans to pay for medicine that any other people in any other country on earth have to pay (and that is the case), would be through what used to be called socialist planning.

You have to get together and say okay, we’re now gonna use these factories for something else. We’re gonna redesign the equipment. We’re gonna retrain the labor force. We’re gonna pay people so they don’t suffer during this transition. It’s worth it to us because to have millions of people dependent, for example, on an industry that gleans America is a much better kind of dependency than having them focus on making profits for pharmaceutical companies or weapons of mass destruction, which we have now.

46:26
So if we want that, it is a technical problem and a political problem that we can solve, but there has to be the political muscle, the movement, the support to get it done. And we can’t let the demand of the companies involved for their private profit to stand in the way.

You know the irony is if you talk to leaders of those companies that are involved in military production or the pharmaceutical health complex they’ll tell you in private the following: If the government, because they know like we do that no one else is in a position to do this, if the government could guarantee to us ironclad that after the transition from what we have now to the future we would be in the same economic position of profit then we would be in favor; we don’t care, we’re not in business to produce this thing or that thing. We’re in business to make money. And if you can guarantee we can make money under a different regime we’ll do it.

I’ve had conversations with people, for example, in the military who say if you can guarantee to me that making vehicles that are collective transport, buses and vans, will be as profitable for this company as is currently making luxury automobiles for a tiny pop–, we’ll do it. We don’t care what we produce, we care how profitable. We get rid of things that are unprofitable and move to others, not because it’s moral or noble, but because it’s more profit. You create for us profitability.

And let me tell you something, let me use the automobile example. The only reason the car companies make cars is because it’s profitable. And the only reason, and I’m really only exaggerating very slightly here, the only reason it’s profitable to make cars is that the car company does not have to produce the road upon which the car moves.

If the car company had to sell you a car that included not only the cost of making the car, but making and maintaining the road on which the car runs, the cost of the car would put it out of reach for everybody and we’d have a public transportation because none other is produced.

Suppose the government said we’re ending the subsidy for cars, but we’re gonna give you a big subsidy for producing vans that will carry 20 people at a time, guess what, we’d have this thing that everybody claims we can’t have and we’d have it overnight. But there has to be the political will. But that’s what Occupy’s job is — to build that will.

49:00
Lisa: So you’ve just touched upon something I want you to go deeper on. What’s in it for the one percent? You talked about the dreams, the aspirations, the possible new structures that the 99 percent could promote. What in it for the one percent?

Rick: The job of Occupy is to split the one percent. To appeal to those within that who understand in the long run that this is what’s best for the people of this world, of whom they are a part.

You know, the one percent too in the end depend on the other 99. You can’t make money if you do not have people to buy what you sell. You keep squeezing the mass of your own workers under the deluded idea that the less I pay them the more that’s left for me, you will come against the following limit — that if you pay your workers less and less, they have less and less to spend on what you’re trying to sell them.

[phone call interruption]

Lisa: 51:36 Just so there’s an edit point, so Rick you’ve talked a lot about the aspirations, the possible solutions that would help solve things for the 99 percent. What’s in it for the one percent, what about them?

Rick: I think the issue is to understand that it is both possible and necessary to split the one percent. And let me do it this way: In the 1930s when the CIO, the socialists and the communists put all that pressure on Roosevelt that I spoke about earlier, Roosevelt used that pressure to go to the rich and to the corporations from whom he came given who he was and his family.

52:13
And he said to them you better give me the money to provide the jobs for the unemployed, to create the Social Security system, which he did; to create the unemployment insurance system of America, which he did…you better give me the money to do it because if you don’t it won’t be me that you’re dealing with, it will be the unions and the socialists and communists, and they’re gonna make a much worse deal for you than I will.

He split them. That’s the only was the New Deal got passed. He split the business community; half of them went with him and bought his argument, the other were implacable enemies of his and went to work to undo the New Deal and those are the republicans then and those are the republicans today who undo everything as fast as they can because they’re serving the angry part of the business community that were never won over.

53:03
But the point is Roosevelt split them. We can split them again. We have to split them and say look, come across and make a deal with us as far as you can because it’s in the interest of equity, it’s in the interest of democracy, it’s in the interest of the long term viability of the United States, it’s in the interest of avoiding civil conflict on a scale that is scary to contemplate. And for all those reasons here’s a deal that we can work out and live with.

I don’t know how successful that’ll be. It worked for Roosevelt, which is enough of a reason for it to be tried again, but it may not work and then we’ll have to struggle the 99 against the one percent, but even that is a kind of an open question.

No one thought in the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union that it would collapse. No one thought that Mr. Mubarak in Egypt would be hounded out of office. I’ll finish the point…no one thinks it can happen in the United States. It’s the same mistake. You build up the contradictions of a system long enough and they blow up in your face.

54:00
For 50 years, for the last half century in the United States we have debated as a nation our transportation system, our education system, our health system. All the basic institutions of this society have been criticized, and debated and changed, as should happen in a healthy society.

One institution could not be criticized, could not be subject to national debate, could not be changed — that’s called capitalism. It’s our economic system and it was taboo in this country. And you know what, if you have an institution central to your society that cannot be criticized, cannot be debated, we’re all politicians struggle with one another to be the bigger cheerleader for the system, what you have is a system that behind that wall of protection rots, breaks down, becomes dysfunctional because it’s never had its warts and its blemishes identified. There’s been no change.

55:05
All of the Occupy is doing is correcting a sad 50 year history by forcing us finally to put our economic system where it should’ve been — upfront, personal, as an object to be criticized and debated. And if, as some of us believe, and I’m one of them, that this is a system whose historical justification is now over, then it’s time to move on. The United States can do better than capitalism.

55:35
Lisa: And you were just talking about politicians and cheerleaders. My one last question is: please talk a little about elections in broad strokes. I don’t know when this is going to air, but Please speak about elections and the discourse about the economy during the elections—-whether that’s focus on taxes or what have you, but you just mentioned how the politicians are key cornerstones of propping up capitalism at least mentally as well as materially.

56:00
Rick: Politics in the United States long ago stopped being about a serious conversation about the basic system because this basic system, capitalism, is a taboo subject. All we have is cheerleading.

If you go to the website of President Obama before he won the election last time, on the economics page, the first homepage quotation from President Obama, then candidate Obama had to do with the wonders of the private enterprise system in bringing us peace and prosperity, etc.

As long as that’s the governing ethos for both parties what we have are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Two different parties that are two different ways of celebrating capitalism. Look for example, occasionally Obama, who has been unable to tax the rich at all so far in his first term makes noises about not extending the Bush tax cuts to the top few percent, those earning over $250,000 a year.

What people don’t understand is if he wins his way, Mr. Obama, he will raise the level of taxes for the richest Americans from the current rate 35% to the pre-Bush tax cut rate of, ready, 39 percent. That’s not a significant contribution of the rich, especially when you remember that in the 1950s and ’60s, the same top rate of the richest Americans was 91 percent. You’re playing silly games. Neither party is prepared to do it.

57:44
That’s why you need a new political movement. That’s why Occupy is not within the republican party or within the democratic party. That’s a crucial distinction between the Occupy movement for example, and the Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party movement is well-located inside the republican party. It doesn’t want to go outside, it doesn’t need to. It wants to capture a republican party for which it believes it is already the major base. That’s a crucial difference, that Occupy knows that the political system here has been derelict in its duty, both parties, by being part of rather than a critic of the cheerleading for a system that doesn’t work, that’s produced the 99 and 1 percent, and therefore, needs a complete overhaul if it is ever again gonna play the role of being a force for equality and democracy.

Lisa: Let’s get this last part on mic.

59:40
Rick: The problem with our capitalist system is this: that when in the United States you’re successful as American capitalism has been since the 1970s in keeping wages basically flat and allowing the mass of Americans only to continue consuming since the 1970s, by borrowing the money to pay for these things, which you can no longer do because the level of debt being carried by the American people is not serviceable. That is, they can’t carry the debt already, as an idiot could tell you, if you keep increasing the level of debt on a basically flat or stagnant wage base there comes a time when you can’t pay for it.

That time is called 2007. And that’s why we’re in the enduring crisis now because the mass of Americans cannot continue to buy the way they have and that is hurting the American economy.

Well, the answer then comes back, American corporations don’t care; what they can’t sell in the United States they will go and sell someplace else. Now, that is partly true and that is indeed happening. Every major American corporation, almost without exception, will tell you that the growth it foresees over the next 5-15 years is in markets overseas that the United States is what they call “a mature economy.”

01:00:58
And what that word often means, if hides dead or dying, or uninteresting, or over the hill or so forth. That’s a very bad prognosis for the United States. It means the corporations, having rung the profits out of America that the last 100 years committed them, are now moving on to other pastures leaving the United States a place where little investment will be undertaken, where the quality of the housing stock, and the transportation and the infrastructure will be allowed to deteriorate, which you can see everywhere going on anyway. That’s a very bad thing.

But in the long run it doesn’t work because the same problem is reproduced elsewhere in the world. One of the things holding back the rest of the world from picking up what Americans can no longer buy is that the wages paid, for example, to the workers in China and India are so abysmally low that they are growing areas, but they cannot grow and will not in the foreseeable future on a scale to compensate for what was the world’s number one consuming market, the United States, which can’t play that role anymore. And that’s part of the reasons we have an enduring crisis.

01:02:08
I’ll give you one concrete example: economists estimate that the capacity to produce automobiles in the world is two to three times what can be afforded by the people of the world to buy cars…the Chinese, the Indians are building car producing factories while the ones we have here are sitting in Detroit and elsewhere dying, vacant, weeds growing in the parking lot.

Capitalism has overproduced the capacity for making cars now on a global scale, replicating what it did before on a national scale. That is a system that isn’t working very well. The world doesn’t need empty, unutilizable car factories that were expensive to build and should never have been built.

Lisa: Or the world may not need more cars, some people would say, so then it’s about reexamining…

01:03:02
Rick: Then if you add that dimension that the car itself is in question, then the overcapacity is even greater because we shouldn’t be doing that. We should be producing collective transportation mechanisms, etc.

Lisa: I know you go back and forth to France. You have family there, etc. There’s the example of Germany that is not behaving the way that economists would model it to be. I mean that’s the fun thing about economies is that people don’t always behave the way they think they will. A little bit more about Europe because I think sometimes in the US, and you speak a lot about the US economy, but I think you’ve got something to offer us about cars or anything else when it comes to some of the European economies.

01:03:40
Rick: Well, the Europeans are an amazing story to tell. It’s almost as though the Europeans haven’t learned the lessons of their own history, and it’s kind of sad and frightening to watch. Let me give you an example:

After much struggle over the last century, the Europeans understood that having slaughtered one another on a scale the world had never seen before in two consecutive world wars, WWI and WWII. And having seen that those wars were fought by intense nationalisms in which Germans slaughtered French, and the British slaughtered the Germans, and so on and so on, they decided to try and build a unity, a unified Europe.

And which now has to its credit a common European community and for a subset of those countries, a common currency called the euro. Those are steps towards a United States of Europe in a sense comparable to a United States of America.

01:04;50
They had to have understood that simply creating a unified geographic area, and even creating a unified currency, they still had to deal with the differences between the different parts of Europe in terms of their politics, but even more important, in terms of their economics.

What brought Europe to world war were economic conflicts. They now admit that. Whether they were around Colonialsim and Imperialism before WWI, or whether they were around the struggle against the Soviet Union, which had a lot to do with WWII, and also colonial struggles in those days.

The bottom line is you’re not gonna survive, you’re not gonna achieve your goal of avoiding slaughtering one another if you do not take the time to create the equality, roughly, and the democracy, without which people do not live in peace with one another.

It’s a sense being learned as a lesson here in the United States too. That’s why the issue of one percent versus 99 has come to the floor. Europe has the same issue, not only between rich and poor, but even more dangerously between developed, relatively well-off economies and those that aren’t.

In order to make European unity succeed therefore, the richest countries, those in the north of Europe (France and Germany), and the low countries, to be blunt, and those in the east and south of Europe (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Poland on down to Romania and Bulgaria), there had to be some equilibration here. You had to do a little extra for the poor ones so that they were raised, and that might have to cost a little bit, the rich ones, in the interest of unity.

01:06:53
It’s a little bit like in the United States. We require more taxes to be paid by the richer states than t hey get back in government money, and we deliver more money to the poorer states compared to what they pay in taxes — something that their politicians conveniently forget when they beat up on the federal government, the Mississippi politicians being the grossest example practically on the planet of this sort of behavior, republicans all over, but the democrats did the same before.

So anyway, in Europe you failed to do that. In the 10 years roughly since the euro became the common currency, a little more than 10 years, you’ve had two countries, Germany and France, do relatively well. Germany, by the way, much better than France. And a whole bunch of countries do disastrously in the South. And now you are punishing the ones who didn’t get the help they needed for being poor and having borrowed money which the rich countries lent them. And you’re getting this crazy conversation in Europe in which Germans refuse to help the Greeks, telling the Greeks they’re lazy and don’t work hard, whereas we Germans…this smells, tastes and sounds like what we used to call fascism or naziism.

01:08:17
It has terrible reverberations in the south of Europe. It makes Greeks and Italians hostile to the Germans in a way where you have to scratch your head to believe what’s going on there. And what does it all come from? Here’s the answer, and it’s the same situation in the United States…

In Europe you have allowed a capitalism to develop that polarizes rich and poor, within countries and across countries. This has now gone to a point where it’s intolerable, where you are undermining the living conditions of a mass of people who can sit and look down the street at the other extreme, the one percent, who are living the life of Riley, imagining that this situation is not all going to collapse around them.

This is the sign of decadence. It’s the sign of empires toward the end, the twilight of their existence. This is the time in Europe and the United States to which historians will look back as they do to the last years of every empire wondering how in the world the people couldn’t see the handwriting on the wall. You cannot have rich people and poor people living together in this way with the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming ever more desperate.

01:09:42
The only way to keep the lid on that situation is with a level of repression that makes life unbearable in the end for everybody. And that’s when these systems collapse. Then what’s left of those of us who see it is to say my God, before it all hits the fan can’t we reasonably sit down, not just those of us at the short end of the stick, but even those who think they’re living the life of Riley, and to discover it’s in your interest too to bring this system to a peaceful conclusion and setup a different one that works better.

You know, in the days of slavery the slave masters were very rich right until the end, and the slaves were in deep trouble. But eventually those communities, sometimes in bloody ways, sometimes not, were able to realize that system had to go. No more masters, no more slaves.

01:10:45
Likewise, in capitalism, eventually, no more serfs, no more lords. We are at a point in our history where we have to ask at least the question, is the difference between the employer class and the employee class about done? It’s not working well, there’s not a rising tide, it’s not lifting all the boats, time to move on.

We can thank capitalism for what it contributed — a rate of technical advance that is remarkable in human history, a whole set of progressive steps for a while. But the negatives, the costs have caught up. America can do better than capitalism.

Tariq Ali in Madrid, Spain. Image by Flickr user Cordoba 2016.

It’s 2012, the world is calling for change, and in the U.S another presidential election is looming.  But, journalist Tariq Ali says the American public’s so-called ‘choices’ don’t present much in the way of options. On this edition, Ali speaks about the ‘extreme center’ and how Occupy and other emerging social movements are challenging the status quo.

Special thanks to the Lannan Foundation.

Featuring:

Longtime journalist and activist Tariq Ali, author of more than 20 books, including The Obama Syndrome, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, and Bush in Babylon: The Reconciliation of Iraq.

***WEB EXCLUSIVES***

Full speech by Tariq Ali with an introduction by Avi Lewis, a Canadian television journalist.

For More Information:

Tariq Ali
Lannan Foundation
The Guardian
New Left Review

Books/Articles:

Tariq Ali speaks about his book, “The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad” on Democracy Now

Music:

“Nefsi Atoub” by Lefty-M

'Five Till Midnight or Almost Time for Lunch' by Flickr (cc) user bitzcelt.

From Egypt to Wisconsin, and from Wall Street to any town USA, 2011 was a year in which people raised their voices to call for justice. As we head into 2012, there’s optimism about the possibilities for change. On this edition, we look back at some the most important issues of 2011: attacks on organized labor, the Egyptian revolution, and the struggle to address climate change. We’ll hear highlights from some of the best programs we’ve brought you this year, and get some updates on where those stories stand now.

Shows featured in this program include:

Who Won the Egyptian Revolution?

The Wisconsin Workers Uprising   (Part 1)  (Part 2)

Battle for Workers Rights on the Ballot in Ohio

Climate Change Gridlock: Where Do We Go From Here? (Part 1)  (Part 2)

Featuring:

Shimaa Helmy, Egyptian human rights activist; Pedro De Sa, ILWU local 6 Rank and File organizer; Kris Hirsh, Stand up For Ohio spokesman; Melissa Fezekas, We Are Ohio spokesperson; Larry Cohen, Communications Workers of America President; Rich Trumka, AFL-CIO President; Fred Risser, Wisconsin State Senator; Khalid Shalid, Tahrir square protestor; Salma Shukrallah, Al Ahram Online journalist; Tarek Shalaby, Tahrir Square leader; James Inhofe, US Senator from Oklahoma; Bernaditas Mueller, South Centre climate change special advisor; Patrick Bond, Center for Civil Society Director at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa; Mike Ludwig, Truthout reporter; Brian Edwards-Tiekert, journalist.

***WEB EXCLUSIVES***

What Happened in Durban?

Interview with reporter Brian Edwards Tiekert about the 2011 climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa.

How are Occupy and organized labor Working together?

Interview With ILWU Local 6 rank and file organizer Pedro De Sa about the state of labor in the U.S., and how the Occupy movement is working with unions.

1 year later—what has the Egyptian revolution achieved?

An interview with Egyptian human rights activist Shimaa Helmy.

For More Information:

No Military Trials For Civilians
Shimaa Tahrir
Al-Ahram Online
Muslim Brotherhood
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
ILWU
Occupy Wall Street
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Workers Independent News
WORT Community Radio-Madison, WI
Wisconsin AFL-CIO
Communications Workers of America
We the People Campaign
Campaign Cash
Stand Up For Ohio
We Are Ohio
ALEC exposed
Truthout
The Media Consortium
Durban Platform
Climate Signals-An Inventory of Climate Change Impact Reports
Skeptical Science
Mobilization for Climate Justice
Center for Civil Society, University of Kwazulu-Natal
Indigenous Environmental Network
The South Centre
COP17 in Durban, South Africa

Books/Articles:

Tina Gerhardt: Get It Done! Youth to UN on Internationally Binding Climate Treaty
Scenes From a Revolution

Music:

“Hurt Me Soul” by Lupe Fiasco
“The Coolest” by Lupe Fiasco

Students listen to Angela Davis during a rally against gang Injunctions. Photo by Eric K Arnold courtesy of (cc) Flickr user OaklandLocal.

It’s called a gang injunction.  A controversial crime tool strategy that some people say should be illegal, and others say is a necessary last resort for communities plagued by violence.

On this edition, we go from the birthplace of gang injunctions in Los Angeles, to their newest use in London, England.  Almost 30 years later, communities remain divided about the best way to address youth violence and crime.

This program was crowd-funded on spot.us, a community supported journalism project. 89 individuals contributed micro-donations. At the over $10 level we thank: Annuana Smith, Amy Read, Lyn Headley, Patricia-Anne WinterSun, Maralyn Fisher, Sally Sommer, Renee Feltz, Molly Mitoma, Lauren Cohn, and Panafricanist Sound System. Special thanks to Omnia Foundation, stalwart supporters of our Prison Desk.

Featuring:

Angela Davis, Critical resistance founder; Freddie Hamilton, Oakland police lieutenant; Michael Muscadine, man named in Fruitvale Gang Injunction; Scott Peterson, Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce public policy director; Danielle Rocha, Youth Empowerment School senior; K.E.V., Oakland-based MC; Sagnicthe Salazar, Youth Together organizer; Cesar Cruz, Homies Empowerment program co-founder; Kim McGill, Youth Justice Coalition organizer; Rocio Fierro, attorney for the City of Oakland; Kwame Nitoto, Oakland Parents Together parent education project director; Meriea Jones, Cory Jenkins, Destiny McNeil, Mohammad El-Zafri, Santa Fe Elementary School students; Jonathan Toy, Southwark Council head of community safety; Emeka Egbuonu, youth worker at The Crib; Michael Bailey, young person at The Crib; Russell Higgs, Pembury Estate resident.

*** Segments ***

Gang Injunctions in London 

As part of our investigation into how and whether gang injunctions effectively fight crime, we looked to one of the newest places where the crime fighting strategy is being rolled out: London, England Making Contact reporter Daniel Gordon filed this report from London, where the first gang injunctions went into effect earlier this year. The story explores how economics and race are major factors in how society treats crime in England, just as in the US. And just as in Oakland, CA, many advocates and young people themselves say there are better solutions to be found.

This program is reader supported, thanks to spot.us

The History of Gang Injunction in Los Angeles

Interview with The Youth Justice Coalition’s Kim McGill, about the history of gang injunctions in Los Angeles, and the effect they’ve had on low income neighborhoods and communities of color.

The Battle over Gang Injunctions in Oakland

The city of Oakland is divided over whether gang injunctions will help reduce a long-standing problem of street violence.  Making Contact’s Andrew Stelzer reports on a grassroots campaign, aiming to stop what many activists say is a problematic policy of racial profiling, that won’t help make the community any safer.

For More Information:

Youth Justice Coalition
Critical Resistance
Stop the Injunctions Coalition
Homies Empowerment Program-Oakland, CA
All of Us or None
Youth Together
Homies Unidos
Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce
Southwark Council
Spot.us crowd-funded journalism

Articles, Blogs, Reports and Videos:

Map of North Oakland gang Injunction
LAPD map of Gang Injunctions
North Side Oakland injunction report November 2011

Music:

“Colors” by Ice-T

Occupy Milwaukee protester. Credit: wisaflcio/ Flickr Creative Commons

The people of the United States have seemingly awakened.  People are out in the streets, demanding changes to a system in which money controls politics.  Some complain the masses have no clear demands.  But with little transparency, it’s often unclear exactly where to point the blame.  On this edition, corporations, elections and the emerging movement to reclaim democracy.  In a post-Citizens United world, is it too late to save our political system?
PART ONE: Voices from the occupy front — 2:20

Featuring:

Noam Chomsky, MIT professor; Mike Gillis, Ohio AFL-CIO communications director; Melissa Fezekas, We Are Ohio spokesperson; Tim Burga, Ohio AFL-CIO president; Marlene Quinn, Cincinnati grandmother; Doug Stern, Cincinnati firefighter Kris Hirsh, Stand up For Ohio spokesman; Larry Cohen, Communications Workers of America president; Laura Spicer, Boulder County Democratic party chair and 2H campaign manager; Judy Lubow, 2H campaign organizer; Elena Nunez, Colorado Common Cause program director; K.C Becker, Macon Cowles & Matt Applebaum, Boulder City Council members; Mark Lowenstein, University of Colorado at Boulder law professor.

***Segments and Scripts for Above Program***

PART ONE: Voices from the occupy front — 2:20

PART TWO: Battle for Workers Rights on the Ballot in Ohio — 10:15

This election day, voters in the state of Ohio will be deciding whether to veto a bill which could decimate workers in one of the strongest remaining union states. In a special collaboration with Truthout, reporter Mike Ludwig went to Ohio, where he found a historic community organizing effort, facing off against record amounts of campaign contributions from increasingly faceless corporate donors. This story was a special collaboration with Truthout. Read the print version.

CHANTING: “We are the 99 percent!  We are the 99 percent!”

Host: The overabundance of money in politics has emerged as central to the Occupy Wall Street movement.  It’s a growing recognition that those campaign contributors are grooming candidates, writing legislation, and setting the agenda for entire state legislatures—all to further their interests of maximum profit.  One of the clearest ways this process is playing out is with legislation limiting workers rights, conceived and bankrolled by anti-union companies.  The stakes are high for increasingly endangered American unions…and the result is that they have to spend millions as well to defend their very existence.  This election day, voters in the state of Ohio will be deciding whether to veto a bill which could decimate workers in one of the strongest remaining union states.  In a special collaboration with Truthout, reporter Mike Ludwig went to Ohio, where he found a historic community organizing effort, facing off against record amounts of campaign contributions from increasingly faceless corporate donors.

SOUNDS OF PEOPLE IN OFFICE

Mike Ludwig:   It’s a sunny Friday evening in Columbus, Ohio.  About 60 people—mostly dressed in union t-shirts and jeans, are milling around the offices of the AFL-CIO.  Many of these folks came here after a long week on the job….but there’s more work to be done tonight…With only 5 weeks to go before election day, the order of the evening is phone banking, and door knocking—talking to as many potential voters as possible, to warn them about what’s being seen as a threat to the very existence of Ohio’ working class.

Gillis: “Nobody is fooled, everyone knows what this is, and it’s an attack on working people…”

Ludwig: Mike Gillis is communications officer for the Ohio AFL-CIO.  He says opposition to Senate Bill 5 has united private and public sector unions in a way never seen before.

Gillis:  “…it’s trying to limit their ability to collectively bargain and organize as working people. So it would diminish their ability to fight for their interests in the elections and elsewhere.”

Ludwig: The volunteers organized tonight will be asking Ohioans to vote “No” on issue 2; that’s the referendum in question which would veto Senate Bill 5.  SB5 would limit collective bargaining rights of more than 350,000 public workers, and force some to pay more in pension and healthcare costs. After Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature passed SB 5 by a single vote in March, volunteers took to the streets and collected an unprecedented 1.3 million signatures to put a veto of the bill on the ballot—almost 5 times the number of signatures needed.

Fazekas: “As soon as this bill came out of the governor’s signature, people were already engaged in saying, “What can we do — how can we stop this?” And so we had more than 10,000 volunteers out on the ground with petition booklets and getting people to sign….”

Ludwig:   Melissa Fazekas is a spokesperson for We Are Ohio, the labor movement’s main group campaigning for a veto.

Fazekas: “We turned in all these signatures and literally the next day I started getting emails and phone calls, because of my information on the Internet, from people saying, “All right, I collected signatures. Now what do I do?” And it was July…people just couldn’t wait.”

Ludwig:   Senate Bill 5 proponents claim the law will help city governments use funds more efficiently, and put public worker’s healthcare and pension costs in line with private-sector workers.  If this sounds a lot like the battle that took place in Wisconsin earlier this year…that’s because it is.  The legislation would have similar ramifications. The ideology comes from a like-minded, conservative governor—in Wisconsin it was Scott Walker, in Ohio, it’s newly elected John Kasich.  And the money to fund the ‘yes on 5’ campaign itself is also coming from similar sources.

Fazekas: “Ohioans deserve to know who’s paying for these battles, and when they see a TV commercial they should know — OK, who’s behind this and what’s their agenda? …And they don’t.”

Ludwig:  Building a Better Ohio, a GOP-linked group spearheading the campaign in support of SB5, set itself up as a non-profit fundraising arm to avoid revealing its contributors and finances.   In one of their more controversial ads, they used video of Cincinnati resident Marlene Quinn talking about how fire fighters saved her granddaughter Zoey.

SOUND FROM AD: “If not for the firefighters, we wouldn’t have our Zoey today…NARRATOR: She’s right.  By voting no on issue 2, our safety will be threatened.  Without issue 2, communities will need to lay off hardworking firefighters, to pay for the excessive benefits of other government employees…”

Ludwig:  But that video of Grandmother Marlene Quinn had actually been taken from a “We are Ohio” ad opposing Senate Bill 2, and edited to make the opposite case.  Here’s the original.

SOUND  FROM AD “If not for the firefighters, we wouldn’t have our Zoey today.   That’s why it is so important to vote no on issue 2.”

Ludwig:  Another recent ad featuring Governor Kasich doesn’t specifically mention issue 2 in the ad,.  As a result, ‘Make Ohio Great’ the group funding the ad, doesn’t have to disclose information about their finances to the secretary of state’s office.  Turns out, ‘Make Ohio Great’ is a non-profit project of the Republican Governors Association, or RGA.
Neither Building a Better Ohio, or the RGA responded to several requests for comment.  But even with the numbers that are known, the intertwining paths of money and influence aren’t too hard to trace.
The RGA spent millions of dollars in 2010 on TV ads and mailers to help elect both Kasich in Ohio, and Governor Walker in Wisconsin. This came only months after the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in a case known as Citizens United, which opened the doors for corporations and unions to directly spend unlimited amounts both for and against political candidates.
Corporations have been able to use the RGA as a kind of campaign contribution proxy.  Consider Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart, both companies with a record of opposing unions. During the 2010 election, Coca-Cola donated seven thousand dollars directly to Kasich’s campaign and ten thousand to his transition fund, but gave seventy five thousand to the RGA.  Wal-Mart donated ninety thousand dollars to the RGA but nothing to Kasich directly. The RGA then used those contributions to pay for ads against Democratic incumbent Governor Ted Strickland, who Kasich defeated by a narrow margin.

Sound from anti-Strickland Attack Ad: “…seems like he pulled a Strickland and got busted. Newspapers said it was accounting errors, gimmicks. Hm, pulled a Strickland.”

Ludwig:  Private healthcare, pharmaceutical companies, and other corporations also contributed tens of thousands of dollars to support ads attacking Strickland.  Speaking at a rally in October Tim Burga with the Ohio AFL-CIO said the agenda is to eliminate the middle class.

Burga: “…this is an opportunity for the other side to completely cripple organized labor, so wall street the super wealthy, corporate CEOs, can have complete control of the public policy agenda, to create a permanent low wage work force,  That’s what’s at stake here,.”

Ludwig:  Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, abbreviated ALEC.  ALEC brings together state legislators and corporate leaders from companies like Bayer, Pfizer, and Exxon-Mobile to draft model bills for state legislators seeking to advance a conservative, pro-business agenda. Governor Kasich is an alumni of ALEC, and in 2010 ALEC companies donated more than half a million dollars to him and other Republican legislators that supported SB 5.  Mike Gillis from the AFL-CIO says legislation like SB5 is part of what the bang companies get for their campaign bucks.

Gillis : “It’s no coincidence that all these attacks come at exactly the same time and across a bunch of battleground states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and others.  They’re seeing the same types of laws being passed in the state legislatures and signed by their governors who are often in the pocket of the same people.”

Ludwig:  But the Ohio bill’s authors may have made a fatal misstep in their political calculus. While Wisconsin’s now infamous anti-union law exempted police and firefighters, those first responders are included in the Ohio bill—and they’re not happy about the idea of losing their right to negotiate on their own working conditions.  Cincinnati firefighter Doug Stern has been speaking at rallies across the state.
Doug Stern, Cincinnati firefighter: “Senate Bill 5, now Issue 2, is unfair, is an unsafe attack on Ohio’s first responders like myself, to put every man woman and child in this state at risk.  I’m a firefighter and let me tell you what I know:  I know how many fire fighters we need on the fire truck.  I know how many firefighters it takes to put out a fire, and to rescue someone when time is critical. Any law that takes away the professional voice of firefighters…it’s unsafe to the community, and we won’t stand by and let it happen.”

Hirsh: “There’s a traditional understanding of Ohio that there’s about eight or nine blue counties and about 80 red counties, but when the republican legislature passed Senate Bill 5, they really started cannibalizing their own base.”
Ludwig:  Kris Hirsh is with Stand Up For Ohio, a group leading the grassroots campaign to veto Senate Bill 5.

Hirsh: “They started going after the policemen and the firemen and the teachers in those rural areas that by traditional analysis had voted 1/3 republican. There’s always a strong sense that your corrections officers and your highway patrol’s and your police officers had a significant right-wing within their union, and when the Republican Party targeted them as the cause of our economic problems, they really stepped on their own foot.”

CHANTING:  “The people united will never be defeated.”

Ludwig:  Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, told volunteers preparing to go knock on doors, that the grassroots movement in Ohio is part of something bigger.
Cohen“You’re leading a movement here! You’re not just fighting back; we’re building a movement.  Those students in Madison?  They’re building a movement, and we followed em.  Those young workers that are in the park on Wall Street, fighting Wall Street? Occupying Wall Street> They’re fighting back.”(Applause)

Ludwig:  Many Ohioans have clearly been energized, and the ‘no’ side has been ahead in the polls for months.  But money has also been a major factor.  With almost 4 million dollars coming from national union offices to We Are Ohio, as of mid-October, the pro-union campaign had actually spent more on TV ads than their corporate-funded opponents. But labor activists are expected to be outspent in the next 2 weeks. Experts estimate the total cost of the Issue 2 campaigns could total between $33 and $40 million dollars. Whichever side prevails, there are likely to be many more expensive campaign battles in Ohio and across the country in the years to come; meaning the ultimate loser will be democracy itself.For Making Contact, in partnership with Truthout, I’m Mike Ludwig in Columbus, Ohio.

Host: As election day approaches, you can go to our website for updates on the battle over issue 2 in Ohio, including Truthout articles and an interview with reporter Mike Ludwig on campaign finance reports.  That’s all at our website, radioproject dot org. We’ll be right back.

PART THREE: Noam Chomsky on corporate personhood 

Watch: Noam Chomsky on corporate personhood
PART FOUR: Grassroots Movement to Eliminate Corporate Personhood hits Boulder, CO.  — 10:03

Host: …so what can be done about Corporate Personhood?  Well, it would take a constitutional Amendment to change federal law—and that has to be ratified by three quarters of the states.  It’s a tough hill to climb…but there’s a growing movement in local communities across the country.  In April, voters in Madison Wisconsin approved a city referendum calling for amending the U.S. Constitution to establish that “only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights”. This November, voters in Boulder Colorado will be asked to vote on the same question.  From Boulder, Maeve Conran has the story.

Ambient sound of a party… background chatter

Maeve Conran: On a late September evening, supporters of the 2H ballot measure gather at a Boulder restaurant to officially launch their campaign.

Spicer: “My name is Laura Spicer , and I’m the vice chair of the Boulder County Democratic Party and one of the campaign managers of  2 H. We can’t match corporate billionaire dominance when it comes to elections and governments.    It’s a government by for and of the people not by for and of corporations.” Conran:   This November, voters in Boulder will be asked to approve a measure that states that only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights, and that money is not speech, and therefore regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech.  Judy Lubow, one of the original organizers of the 2 H campaign, said she became alarmed at the state of the democracy following the Citizen’s United ruling – and that’s what prompted her to act locally. Lubow: “In my opinion, Congress is bought and the presidency is almost fatally compromised.  We can’t seem to get real change no matter who is elected.  And that being so, one of the few places where we can impact anything is locally.  Because in comparison there is a lot of us to local government, as opposed to so few of us in regard to the national government. So we can make an impact in local government and that is why Move to Amend is choosing to do local actions.”Conran: That group Lubow referred to, Move to Amend, is pushing similar measures across the country including one that passed in  Madison, Wisconsin this past April. These local measures like this are part of a national movement whose ultimate goal is to amend the U.S. constitution to state that corporations are not entitled to the same rights as people. Elena Nunez with Colorado Common Cause says that one of the local measures won’t actually change any laws, they’ll send a message to Congress that the people are demanding a change.Nunez: “Well, I think it’s important to realize that the Constitutional Amendment Strategy, it’s a long term movement. And the only way its going to happen is by having citizens in local communities, like Boulder, take a stand and say that it’s important. We’re not going to see the change trickle down from Washington DC. Anyone who’s watched any of the recent debates, whether it’s healthcare or the environment or climate change, knows that change isn’t going to happen in Washington DC.” Conran: In August, the Boulder City Council voted 6-3 to put the issue on November’s ballot. Council member Casey Becker and the other two dissenters cited unintended consequences of what they cited as “language that was too broad.” Becker: “Ninety-nine percent of corporations are less than 5 people. And corporations include non-profits and associations and labor unions and a lot of folks that do really good work.”

Conran:  The initiative supporters reject this criticism saying they are simply calling for an amendment and not articulating what the language of that amendment would be. Macon Cowles was the first Boulder council member to say yes to the ballot initiative.

Cowles:  “The thing that gives me hope with a measure like this is that shouting in the dark at first, but our voice will be joined with that of Madison and that of other people around the country.  It is a shout to our leaders at the state level and the federal level that we have to change the way in which we treat corporations in this country. They have so invaded the public space, they’ve so corrupted the political process, the body politic at the state and federal level that really our politics are in a shamble. I think of Wallace Stevens and what he said and that is ‘after the final no, there comes a yes, and on that yes the future of the world depends,’ that’s where we are now.” Applause… fades out…Mark Lowenstein: I don’t think it’s well thought out and I don’t think it’s a well considered amendment and I don’t think that reflects well on the city council.Conran:  Mark Lowenstein, is a Professor of Law at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Lowenstein: I don’t think it reflects well on the city of Boulder and I don’t think it reflects well on the state of Colorado in terms of attracting businesses to make an investment if there’s hostility to corporations and I think this is what it’s all about – Hostility to corporations.

Conran: There’s one corporation in particular that Lowenstein feels is being singled out locally… Xcel energy.  Two other initiatives also on this year’s ballot will ask Boulder voters if they want to form a municipal utility company and break away from the energy giant.

Lowenstein: I think there’s a connection between this and the municipalization of Xcel energy… I think there too there is a great distrust of Xcel energy, in part because it is a corporation.  So I think if you want to have a vibrant economy the last thing you want to do is discourage people from investing in your economy, in a small part, that’s what this does as well.

Conran: The connection between the ballot issues is not lost on the 2 H supporters.  Judy Lubow says the example of Xcel energy make clear why corporate personhood is wrong.

Lubow: But we’re also seeing now in the city of Boulder itself, there’s this wonderful new issue that’s called municipalization, where the city is trying to and is asking citizens for the right to be able to create and sell its own electricity and to take that right away from the corporations, but to do it themselves.  And there’s a huge amount of money being spent against that campaign, much more than local citizens could raise.

Conran: In fact, Xcel has spent half a million dollars campaigning against municipalization, including a 250,000 donation to a citizen fronted campaign. This is ten times the amount that four groups campaigning against municipalization have spent. But law Professor Mark Lowenstein says critics of the Citizen’s United ruling, largely misunderstand the ruling by focusing on corporate spending in elections.  Rather he says it’s really about speech.  Lowenstein:   Interestingly, Citizens United itself involved a non-profit corporation that wanted to pay for the running of a film that they thought would influence voters.  So I suppose what people are saying who oppose citizens united is “we don’t want that information to get into the hands of voters, we don’t want people to see that film”.  Isn’t that a frightening thought? Conran:   But the Citizen’s United ruling has galvanized communities around the country.  And in Boulder, Move to Amend has chapters in at least 17 states and nearly 136,000 people have signed their online petition calling for a constitutional amendment eliminating corporate personhood.

Conran: Back in Boulder at the 2H launch party, people are confident of a win in November. The measure has been endorsed by 18 local organizations including local chapters of the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO. Six council members have also officially endorsed the campaign, including Matt Applebaum who says he was initially skeptical.

Applebaum: We get asked to put a lot of things on the ballot and you have to do it very carefully, especially when it doesn’t seem to be a local issue and I had all the concerns other people did too about well… this isn’t going to change anything after all, you can’t expect to have a constitutional change at least not in my life time.  But the more I thought about it, what became obvious to me and what is obviously clear to all of you in this room, is that it’s really hard to think of a more important issue… this is kind of fundamental to democracy at all levels, so it is a local issue… and it’s a state issue and it’s a national issue…and when I realized that, it became obvious that the right thing to do was to put it on the ballot.  Conran: Colorado Common Cause’s Nunez, says she’s confident of a win this November because Colorado voters have already shown support forgetting money out of politics.

Nunez: ..in Colorado we have a strong history of fighting for strong campaign finance laws. Boulder has a strong public financing law. Statewide, we passed Amendment 27, which is the Campaign Finance Law, with 66% of the vote. So Colorado voters, both locally in Boulder and state-wide, have said time and again that they want to reduce the influence of money in politics. And what the Supreme Court has said is that those decisions that these communities have made no longer carry adequate weight, and they’ve overturned parts of the law, so now you can see corporations spending unlimited amounts on independent ads in support or opposition to a candidate. So even though Colorado voters have said we don’t want corporations and labor unions to make direct contributions or independent expenditures; the Supreme Court overruled their individual voice.
Conran:  Supporters of 2 H say they want the measure to pass by a huge margin, to send a strong message to other communities across the country that local action can make a difference nationally.

CHANTING: Yes on 2H…Ready people?…Yes on 2 H!

Conran: Along with Boulder, Missoula Montana will have an anti corporate personhood measure on this year’s ballot and citizens in Eugene, Oregon and Marina, California are in the early stages of a similar campaign. This comes on top of the 30 municipalities that have already passed resolutions and ordinances abolishing corporate personhood since the Citizens United decision.
For Making Contact, I’m Maeve Conran, in Boulder, Colorado.

For More Information:

We The People Campaign
Campaign Cash
Move To Amend
Proud Ohio Workers
Working America
Stand Up For Ohio
We Are Ohio
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
ALEC Exposed
Republican Governors Association
KGNU radio
Truthout
The Media Consortium
Public Citizen
Jamie Raskin
Professor of constitutional law at American University, a Maryland State Senator and a Senior Fellow at People for the American Way
People for the American Way report “CitizensBlindsided: Secret Corporate Money in the 2010 Elections and America’s New Shadow Democracy.”
Center for Media and Democracy (and ALEC Exposed)
Common Cause
Demos Ideas and ACtrion to Promote the Common Good
Public Campaign
Free Speech fro People
Public Campaign Action Fund
Campaign Cash is part of an investigative effort to expose the influence of corporate money on the political process.

Articles/Blogs/Videos/Audio:

Republican Governor’s Association Congratulates Governor – Elect Jon Kasich
Building A Better Ohio Illegally Uses We Are Ohio’s Ad “Zoey”
Noam Chomsky on Corporate Personhood
The Corporation film excerpt
Dave Rovix on why Corporations are not people
Music Video (staring Mitt Romney) by Janice Leber
Noam Chomsky the rights of corps and undocumented immigrants, and how “money is speech.”

Music:

‘Original Music’ by Aylan Mello
‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ by The Flying Lizards

Honey Bee on Winter Aconite. Credit: Tie Guy II/ flickr

Honey bees help pollinate 1 in every 3 bites that we eat… They are vital in our agricultural industry and essential for the survival of the almost 7 billion people who inhabit this planet. And, as the world’s population continues to grow, so does our reliance on honey bees. Unfortunately, most pollinating insects throughout the world are endangered today, including the honey bee. On this edition, we’ll discuss the honey bee’s fight to survive amidst a rapidly changing landscape filled with pesticides and parasites. We will also learn the latest about colony collapse disorder and hear from beekeepers, researchers, and gardeners who are trying to protect them.

Featuring:

Hannah Nordhaus, author of the Beekeepers Lament- How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed the World; Gretchen Lebuhn, San Francisco State University professor & founder of The Great Sunflower Project; John Miller, migratory beekeeper; Brian Johnson, University of California, Davis’s entomology professor; Bill Rhodes, David Hackenberg, beekeepers; Dee Lusby, Organic Beekeeping discussion group founder; Dennis Van Engelsdorp,  Penn State University entomology scientist; Vince Rosato, Great Sunflower project participant; Khaled Almaghafi, beekeeper & Bee Healthy Honey Shop owner.

Special thanks to the producers of Vanishing of The Bees and Claire Schoen.

—WEB SEGMENTS—

The Great Sunflower Project

Esther Manilla reports on a citizen-led effort to count bees, in order to assess the health of our local environments.

Bee Rescue Service Makes a Housecall

Khaled Almaghafi is not only a beekeeper, he rescues bees when other people want to have them removed. 

For More Information:

Vanishing of the Bees
The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America
XERCES Society 
Bee Healthy Honey Shop
Harry Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at the University of California at Davis
The Great Sunflower Project
Organic Beekeeping Society
Attracting Native Pollinators
Hannah Nordhaus
Gretchen Lebuhn
Dee Lusby

Articles, Blogs, Reports and Videos:

EU bans GM-contaminated honey from general sale
Globalisation and agriculture industry exacerbating bee decline, says UN
As bee colonies die, beekeepers face challenge finding replacements
Asian Honey, Banned in Europe, Is Flooding U.S. Grocery Shelves
A STICKY BUSINESS: Dakota’s Busy Beekeepers 
The Almond and the Bee
As honeybees decline, beekeeping booms By Candace Krebs
Forget climate change – the bees are buzzing off
How sweet it is – The economics of beekeeping in Oakland
The Silence of the Bees

Music:

Everybody Loves the Sunshine – Roy Ayers

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War present at the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, GA. Photo by flickr user Brooke Anderson.

Almost 4,500 American soldiers and more than 100,000 Iraqis have died since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. Although President Obama officially declared the end of U.S. combat in August 2010, fifty thousand U.S. troops still occupy Iraqi soil. Thus far, the estimated cost is $750 billion dollars.

Eight years after the U.S. began its “Shock and Awe” campaign, we look back and assess the consequences of the war. On this edition, we hear an audio documentary, “The Cost of War: A Reflection on Eight Years in Iraq” produced by KALW News in San Francisco.

Special thanks to KALW News in San Francisco.

Featuring:

George W. Bush, former U.S. President; Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense; Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State; Yara Badday, Iraqi-American; Paul Bremer, former U.S. Administrator to Iraq; Richard Becker, West Coast Coordinator for ANSWER Coalition; Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of Defense; Ghazwan Al-sharif, Iraqi translator; Ryan Berg, U.S. Marine; Starlyn Lara, U.S. Army; Jordan Towers, U.S. Marine; Barack Obama, U.S. President; Aaron Glantz, journalist.

For more information:

KALW News
Aaron Glantz, reporter and author of The War Comes Home
Answer Coalition
Iraq Veterans Against the War
Swords to Plowshares
Coalition for Iraq + Afghanistan
Veterans for Peace
Civilian-Soldier Alliance
War Resisters League
Veteran Artists

Articles and Books:
Happy anniversary, Iraq War by Matthew Duss, Michael Cohen, Foreign Policy
Clamor, by Elise Fenton, Cleveland State University Poetry Center
War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War with Iraq ed. Milan Rai, Verso
Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations by Iraqi Veterans Against the War & Aaron Glantz, Haymarket Books
The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan by Dahr Jamail, Haymarket Books

MUSIC: Intro by The XX

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks Source: www.globalcrisisnews.com

The controversy over WikiLeaks has deep implications for the future of free speech in the Internet era. Beyond journalistic and national security issues that stem from the website, other concerns need to be considered as well.

On this edition, we take you to a panel discussion focused on the importance of WikiLeaks within a legal, business and technology framework. Does the public have the right to know the secrets of its government? Should private companies keep commercial interests ahead of public interest? What role does the Internet hold for whistleblowers?

Special thanks to the Real News Network

Featuring:

Daniel Ellsburg, former State and Defense Department official prosecuted for releasing the Pentagon Papers; Clay Shirky, independent Internet professional and Adjunct Professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University; Roy Singham, Founder and Chairman of ThoughtWorks; Peter Thiel, President of Clarium Capital and Managing Partner of Founder’s Fund; Jonathon Zittrain, Law and Computer Science Professor at Harvard University, Co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society; Paul Jay, CEO and Senior Editor of the Real News Network.

For more information:

Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Bradley Manning Support Network

Center for Democracy and Technology

Daniel Ellsberg’s website

Jonathon Zittrain’s Future of the Internet

The Real News Network

WikiLeaks

Women next to an oil wellhead that has been spilling crude oil near the community of Ikot Ada Udo, the Niger Delta, since 2004 © Kadir van Lohuizen/NOOR

The oil industry is dirty business. From the Niger Delta to California, to the recent gulf coast oil spill, the legacy of contamination and human rights abuse goes back decades. But some folks are standing up to big oil.

On this edition, we take a look at how citizen groups around the world are holding oil businesses accountable, from courtroom battles to government regulation.

—

Challenging Chevron in Nigeria

In recent years, communities worldwide have protested the presence of big oil. One of the longest-running and bloody oil conflicts in the world is with the Chevron Corporation in Nigeria. Freelance Producer Lynn Feinerman has more about the Niger Delta and how grassroots groups and non-profits are taking the oil business to the courtroom.

—

Chevron in Richmond

The Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, California is one of the oldest and largest in the United States. Locals have welcomed the company’s boost to employment – some three thousand jobs – and sizable tax contributions. But Chevron is also the number one greenhouse gas emitter in California; and has contributed to the degradation of water, soil and air quality in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the past decade, the city and residents of Richmond, have forced the company to curb its impact.  Making Contact producer Kyung Jin Lee has more about the ongoing efforts to make the company serve the community.

—WEB EXCLUSIVES—

Nigerian women’s rights advocate Emem Okon, speaking at the 2010 United States Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan.

Featuring:

Mundey Omoshaye, activist and member of Ilaje tribe in Nigeria; Suwanu Bere, Ogoni villager, Nigeria; Scott Gilmore, law student and journalist; Patti Goldman, Vice President of Litigation, Earthjustice; Sandy Saeturn, organizer, Asian Pacific Environmental Network; Jessica Tovar, organizer, Communities for a Better Environment; Gayle McLaughlin, Mayor of Richmond, California; Greg Karras, senior scientist, Communities for a Better Environment; Reverend Ken Davis, resident of Richmond, California

For More Information

Asian-Pacific Environmental Network
Oakland, CA

Chevwrong.org

Clean the Niger Delta Campaign

Communities for a Better Environment
Oakland, CA

Earthjustice
Oakland, CA

Justice In Nigeria Now

Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People
Niger Delta, Nigeria

The True Cost of Chevron

Articles, Blogs, Film Reports and Other:

Bowoto vs. Chevron Blog

‘Chevron in Richmond’ in the Race, Poverty and the Environment Journal
By Ellen Choy and Ana Orozco

Independent Journalist Dahr Jamail’s Dispatches from the Gulf Coast

Mother Jones’ BP Oil Spill Coverage:

‘The True Cost of Chevron: An Alternative Annual Report’

Related Programs:

Oil and Outrage Flare: An Audio Journey Through the Niger Delta

Delta on Fire: Nigerian Women’s Resistance

Fuel to the Fire: Oil and Indigenous People in Colombia

Beyond BP: A Future Without Oil

Exxon’s Oil to Tennessee’s Coal

Transcript: Whose Wealth: Indigenous Resources and Corporate Greed

Transcript: Global Warming and Corporate Interests

Oil and Outrage Flare: An Audio Journey Through the Niger Delta

Inside Capital

Oil Slick: Bechtel, Halliburton, and the White House

Deadly Extractions: Oil and Mining interests in Africa

No ‘Fracking’ Way: The Perils of Natural Gas Drilling

Music:

‘Rain in the Dust’ – Robert Tree Cody and Will Clipman

‘Suffering’ – Hossam Ramzy

‘Abudeo’ – Calinambe

‘Yoky’ – Fatala

‘Sorry Sorry’ – Femi Kuti