As we celebrate the dawn of a new day in Washington, change is happening in other places as well. One – Vancouver, BC – elected a new mayor just days after President Obama was elected. I think you will find his Inaugural Address, copied below, deeply inspiring.
Gregor Robertson stepped down two years ago from the Tides Canada Board before running for the Provincial Legislature, prior to the Mayoral race, but he is an honored friend and great supporter. Like Obama, he is a confirmed and deeply committed family man, and he shares an openness to new ideas, many traditions, and fresh approaches. It’s really worth a read….
“Deep Local
Welcome. We’re gathered today in the traditional territory of the Coast Salish people, and I want to begin by thanking them.
As we honour one tradition, we renew another: bringing the inauguration out of City Hall and into the community.
I want to thank the residents of South Vancouver for welcoming us all to the Sunset Community Centre. This is one of my favourite places in the city, beautifully designed by Vancouver architect Bing Thom. His design draws on our farming history, as well as our cultural diversity and the grid of our streets and avenues today. But it’s also open: to the people, to the community, to the future. It’s one of Vancouver’s greenest buildings. I can’t imagine a better place to begin this new chapter in our city’s story. (more…)
There was a most intriguing article in the NY Times Business section last Friday, just below the fold. It recounted the story of what happened in Sweden when they hit a major banking fiasco in the early 90’s. The go-go 1980’s had precipitated the crisis, but their solution – advanced and executed by right of center political leaders – was to nationalize the banks, wiping out the shareholders, and to put the “toxic” assets into what they called the “bad bank” (later named Securum) to hold until economic conditions changed enabling a sale. Portions of this strategy were borrowed from the US when we hit that terrible crisis in the S&L industry in the late 1980’s. Instead of calling it a “bad bank” we called it the RTC (Resolution Trust Corporation). Defunct S&L’s were placed under the control of the RTC, and their assets sold off to bargain-hunters. A very large part of the “bailout” was repaid through these sales. As important, the equity of the risk-taking shareholders of the S&L’s was wiped out.
In the Swedish case, Securum took over nearly $3 bn of assets and ended up repaying the national treasury nearly 60% of what had been invested. Importantly, the creation of the “bad bank” instilled fear among some of the large banks that didn’t want to fall under government control. SEB, one of the larger banks that was controlled by the Wallenberg family, set up their own “bad bank” into which they placed the bad assets, allowing the remaining parts of the bank to recover and thrive. This private bank did the same as the government enterprise and sustained losses, to be sure, but it was done entirely outside of the government’s program.
So far, as Paul Krugman has been arguing, neither the Congress nor the Obama administration has indicated much interest in this alternative, though George Soros and other observers have been increasingly vociferous that this will be a necessary part of a successful intervention. The fear that he and others have is that the more centrist economic appointments (Summers, Geitner, Furman) may not be willing to stare down their friends and colleagues in the financial world and wipe out the shareholders of the likes of Citibank. If they don’t, however, we may end up in the mire for a good deal longer.
Also of interest:
“George Soros on America’s New Engines of Growth” (2:24):
Like vast numbers of Americans, I watched with awe and tears this morning as President Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. It is a remarkable event I never expected to see in my lifetime. I was an adolescent when the Civil Rights movement came of age. I watched television news of non-violent protesters being attacked with Police dogs and fire hoses. I was horrified when the FBI was sent to Mississippi to find, and then confirm the deaths of, 3 young civil rights workers – none older than my brother who had signed up for a “freedom ride.” And, I watched the triumph of one of the greatest legislators the US presidency has ever known – Lyndon Johnson – in passing the Civil Rights Act and, later, the Voting Rights Act. But I have also watched the grinding poverty of inner city communities and the intentional ignorance that nearly 30 years of conservative rule has fostered, only making things largely worse for young African Americans. Rhetorical flourishes such as “No Child Left Behind” give the lie to the slow, inexorable dismantling of government programs intended to address structural inequities resulting from the centuries of slavery and discrimination that is our history. And yet, here we sit with a new President whose parents literally could not have lived in many states at the time of his birth because of their different races. It is truly amazing. But, as Martin Luther King III said just yesterday, his father’s dream has not now been realized. It is still a dream. But it is a dream that now has legs. It is more than an abstraction to say that opportunity to attain the highest office in the land is a real thing. Barack did achieve it, so others can follow in his example. But the obstacles are still huge and will remain so for the next person to attempt what he has achieved. There is so much more to be done, and I can’t think of anyone who is not inspired to redouble our efforts, recommit to our goals, and rekindle our dreams of a world that we would be proud to call our own – just, righteous, compassionate, and peaceful. It is closer today than it was yesterday, and tomorrow, we need to get back to work to help realize that dream.
Also, of interest:
“In Honor of Madelyn Dunham: To Dream from MLK to Obama Inauguration”:
Today, I write about the interrelated topics of justice and compassion. First, justice. Normally, I find myself railing about the plight of the disenfranchised and the powerless, but this piece is about the powerful and how remarkably unjustly they are being treated – the leaders of the great financial and now auto companies whose collective imminent demise is being prevented by the intervention of the federal government that is infusing, or considering the infusion of, public tax dollars to prop up their enterprises. Without argument, almost all of the managers still in charge of these failing institutions remain in charge, and tax dollars in the now famous TARP program are all that may prevent a disastrous devolution of the economy into depression and massive unemployment that will drag down the global economy as well. What is unjust about all of this is that they are NOT being held to account; they are not being dismissed for having failed the interests of their shareholders or employees; and they are not being permitted to learn the lessons of their terrible decisions.
Like a child caught cheating on his or her homework, failure to apply sanctions may consign them to a future of many more bad decisions. It’s a terrible thing to miss the important lessons of life, and the heads of Goldman Sachs and General Motors should be permitted to miss the experience. After lifetimes of espousing the wisdom of free markets, they rode that wisdom to the brink of social disaster. Wouldn’t it also be a fine thing to have them realize that free markets need to be checked by appropriate governmental regulation? It is not a minor matter that taxpayers will end up getting the short end of things as well if these people remain in power. Shouldn’t bailout funding of these failed enterprises be driven not only appropriate public ownership, but also by enterprise based commitments to social goals: the financing of renewable energy or the development of highly efficient vehicles that must be developed for our climate’s future if humans are to survive? But I digress. In part, my plea for more just treatment of mega-failed managements of these mega-businesses – such as firing them lock, stock, and barrel – is, oddly enough, born of compassion. Without such treatment, they risk a future where their moral compasses and analytical tools will not connect the dots between their failed judgments and their failed institutions.
If they were in high school, it would never be possible to escape that connection between behavior and outcomes. In the words of a classical parent, they will be better for the experience. Speaking of compassion, I must refer you to a most remarkable 3 minute video on the internet inspired by one of the TED prize winners from this past year, Karen Armstrong. It could, and hopefully will, change your life: http://charterforcompassion.com/.
Organizing and advocacy for social justice causes is hard. We all know that, and those of us who work to support such things often tire of the uphill battles. Even when we are winning, it feels so fragile. But then, every once in a while, you run across a story about how people dealt with something that just amazes you. Here’s one.
I just returned from Australia where I was with a delegation from the Organizer’s Forum, a project of Tides Center. Barbara Bowen has been working with this project for years. They get together groups of organizers – labor and community – and have 2 dialogs each year, one overseas. So this time around, our motley crew from Gamaliel Foundation, ACORN (US & Canada), British Columbia Government Employees Union, SEIU, Amalgamated Transit Union, and a Chicago group called Albany Park Neighborhood Council spend a full week in Sydney and Melbourne meeting with labour (Aussie spelling!) and community groups. Early on, we met with two women – Amanda Tattersall with Unions New South Wales and Verity Burgmann, Chair of Politics, Melbourne University – who briefed us on the history and general state of social movements in Australia in a somewhat dizzying, and brilliant, barrage on our jetlagged brains. It was in this process that we first learned about the remarkable Jack Mundey.
Born in the hot northern stretches of Australia, Mundey arrived in Sydney in the early 50’s, having left school at the age of 19. He soon became a metal worker and then a “builders’ labourer” working on the large scale construction projects in the fast growing city. He also became an ardent unionist. By 1968, this bright energetic unionist had led efforts to get the union involved in both workplace and broader social issues, including the war. Though still a young man, he was elected Secretary (leader) of the New South Wales Builder’s Labourers Federation, the major construction union based in Sydney, the largest city in Australia. By all reports, he broke the mold for union leaders, quite readily taking on issues from gay rights to feminism.
Before Earth Day 1970 put environmental issues on the public agenda in the US, Jack Mundey had developed the idea that labor unions should consider all the aspects of projects on which they worked, that, in the case of the BLF, they should consider whether buildings they were constructing would benefit the entire community and were otherwise environmentally friendly. It was a truly radical idea, and an opportunity to test it arose in 1971.
An area called Kelly’s Bush where the Parramatta River met Sydney Harbour had remained undeveloped open space between a middle class neighborhood (Hunter’s Hill) and an industrial area that had been abandoned for the suburbs in the mid-sixties. While under company control, the community had permission to access the shoreline and they had built a cricket pitch and community center. A developer, A.V. Jennings, purchased the land and proposed a massive development causing an outcry in the community. The local council rejected several designs and proposals and was under massive pressure. This led to about half of the site being purchased as a park by the State government, but increasingly scaled down plans kept appearing. Finally, with the high-rises gone, replaced by 2 dozen townhouses, public pressure ceased. All, that is, but for thirteen women who formed Friends of Kelly’s Bush. To them, all the open space should be public park.
They were active in every respect, approaching everyone from Prince Phillip, the Governor-General, the Premier, and any member of parliament they could access. Finally, they approached this young, very different, labor leader whose members would actually build the project. In classic sixties fashion, they called a community meeting to understand the depth and breadth of sentiment and learned just how strongly the neighbors still felt, even though their advocacy efforts were flagging. What happened next changed the skyline of Sydney forever, and deeply affected the evolution of civil society in Australia. Jack Mundey declared the first Green Ban. No Builders’ Labourers Federation member would work on the project because the union decided the project shouldn’t be built. Period.
The builder, of course, would have none of it. They’d bring in non-union labor and get those 25 townhouses built, union or no union. Fences went up and preparations continued, but then a funny thing happened. The BLF members working on all the other A.V. Jennings projects threatened to strike if Kelly’s Bush was plowed under for townhouses. It didn’t really take Jennings all that long to do the math, and they caved in. Finally, in 1977, the incoming Premier of NSW named Neville Wran proposed purchasing the rest of the site and declaring it a ‘State Recreation Area’ which serves the entire community to this day.
Green Bans continue to be a rarely used tool in the pocket of labor to this day. Dozens were declared in the early 70’s, though the brilliant Mundey was expelled from his union by the national leadership, to great celebration among developers and others. And many even now credit Mundey and his BLF rank and file for having preserved hundreds of historic buildings and a number of neighborhoods including the Rocks, where the city was first settled by the British displacing the many Aboriginal people whose home it had been for centuries.
The national BLF union leaders who drove Mundey and his allies out of the union were eventually convicted of corruption involving developers, though the case was later over-turned. But once sent packing, Mundey and friends never returned to power, and the Green Ban movement faltered. This was a remarkable period when labor groups forged the ability to use their considerable power for larger, non-workplace issues. Had they had a longer period in which to consolidate this ‘new way’ about thinking, organizing, and acting, it is quite possible – even probable – that labor would have developed differently in Australia in ensuing years. And, if successful there, who knows what effect it may have had internationally. Many in the US labor movement are struggling to reach out to community-based organizations to support their work. Blue Green dialogs and alliances are springing up ever since the Battle in Seattle. Apollo Alliance – an explicit green infrastructure strategy backed by both labor and the environmental community – is gaining traction and political recognition, so maybe there is hope that the lessons of the Green Ban movement can once again inform the movement for social justice.
The critical element, it seems to me, was the willingness of labor to take risks of its own rather than simply asking for support of others. In the now decades long period of shrinking union “density,” or percent of the workforce covered by collective bargaining, this may seem daunting to labor organizers. It’s hard enough to recruit members as it is. On the other hand, this could also be the key to a revitalized labor movement and a very different public profile or narrative. Unions seen as not just out for their own collective benefit, but rather committed to the welfare of the broader community, could play a very different role. Sydney’s BLF refused to work on projects they deemed against the broader interests of the community. Let’s try to imagine what that could look like here.
Note: thanks to Wikipedia’s article on Green Bans, and several papers by Verity Burgmann from the University of Melbourne: “Labour and the new social movements: the Australian story” and “a perspective on Sydney’s green ban campaign, 1970?74,” Burgmann, V. Power and Protest 1993.
I’m a good way into Timothy Egan’s excellent The Worst Hard Time, a history of the Dust Bowl and its survivors, those gritty people who hung on and lived through one of the worst man-made disasters of all time. It truly is an amazing tale. First, how the boom in wheat prices drove speculators and real estate sharpies to plow up the prairie for perceived short term profits, and then kept plowing up more ground to compensate for falling prices as the market got saturated. Banks, largely unregulated at the time, took depositors’ funds and invested them in the frenzy, leading to the failure of thousands of banks. And then, the drought hit and went on for 6 years. No rain and scant snow across vast areas of northern Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. And the land just blew away. Dust storms were so thick, drivers had to navigate from one telephone pole to the next. In less than a decade, people in the mid-west subdivided cattle ranches into homesteads, ripped up the grass for wheat, briefly made huge profits, and then sank into inexorable poverty as the rains deserted them, and the soil took flight.
Though Egan doesn’t focus on politics much, it is interesting when he does. Hoover, elected in 1928, declared in an early address, “Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land.” Then, as the Dust Bowl and collapse of the stock market took their toll, Hoover was forever saying that we are about to turn the corner back to prosperity, as though his wish for it would make it so. “All the evidences indicate that the worst effects of the crash on unemployment will have passed during the next sixty days,” he declared on March 3, 1930 (p. 95). Egan goes on, “By the end of that year, eight million people were out of work. The banking system was in chaos. The big financial institutions had once looked invincible, with the stone fronts, the copper lights, the marbled floors, run by the best people in town. Now bankers were seen as crooks, fraud artists who took people’s homes, their farms, and their savings. In 1930, 1350 banks failed….The next year, 2294 banks went bust.” The political seachange that occurred in 1932 was unlike any other we saw in the 20th Century.
I’ve been thinking about Egan’s book as I listen to the many convention speeches about what is right and what is wrong with America from the perspective of the two major parties. Democrats see a people who need more from their government. They seem to want a government that plays a balancing role by regulating markets, a government that provides opportunity and a safety net, and a government that works. Republicans seem to want less government, less taxes, and less regulation of business, despite their record of having grown government with huge deficits over recent years. It was fascinating indeed to watch their Vice Presidential candidate decry special interest funding while she has pursued earmarks in Washington for her city and hired lobbyists to garner a share at the federal trough.
It would be very difficult to argue that we face in 2008 circumstances even remotely like those of 1931 when a quarter of the population was unemployed. Our economy may not be zipping along, but it is not in the tank (despite the best efforts of the sub-prime lending hustlers). The challenge, though, is how to galvanize public action on two related issues that will require a political shift in will as occurred with the election of Roosevelt in 1932; those issues are climate change and energy independence. Right now, it doesn’t seem likely that those issues will affect the election much in one way or another, but if you talk with any experts in those fields, the globe must curtail the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or the climate system will spin out of control with unforeseeable results – mostly catastrophic, one might imagine.
Somehow, chants such as one heard last night – “Drill, baby, drill!!!” – seem unlikely to move us in the right direction.
Sy Hersh’s recent piece (New Yorker Magazine, July 7 & 14 , 2008 Issue) is one of the most frightening pieces I have read in years. In it, with his deft storytelling, he paints a picture of a struggle between the military command structure and the White House (primarily Dick Cheney) that has been pursuing an independent strategy to destabilize Iran.
Two things astonish: first, what was long thought a settled matter about the ability of the military command structure to oversee all field activities involving the use of lethal force, particularly important in a theater of operations such as the Middle East where what happens in a neighboring country can have very direct impact on our troops on the ground, turns out not to be the case. After all the scandals involving White House sanctioned “special operations,” Congress finally locked down the ability for independent action outside the military lines of command via the 1986 Defense Reorganization Actl…or did it? Remember the Iran Contra debacle? (more…)
Wade Rathke has done something some would never have predicted. Resigned as ACORN’s Chief Organizer. Who ever would have imagined?
I met Wade in 1972, as best I can recall. Marge Tabankin and I were running the Youth Project (she was my boss) and had developed a bit of a competition to find the most impressive new organizers “out there.” The YP, begun in the Center for Community Change’s basement, was an operation to leverage foundation $$ into community organizing that involved young people – an attempt to bring the national movements of the day down into the everyday lives of disenfranchised communities. I came up with Mike Miller from Organize, Inc. in SF – a skilled, talented follower of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation approach: parish based, working class organizing. Alinsky had defined the field in many ways and his Rules for Radicals was found on the shelves of an entire college generation at the time. Margie’s choice was this kid named Wade Rathke. (more…)
One of my Sunday morning rituals is to read Frank Rich’s column in the NY Times “Week in Review” section. Rich is such a refreshing voice these days, speaking truth to power in such an erudite fashion, and how necessary he is now that the doyens of public opinion have decided to add William Kristol to the regular weekly line-up of pundits. The latter seems caught between competing shortcomings: often on the facts, but now increasingly on their interpretation.
But it is neither Rich nor Kristol that caught my attention this Sunday. No, it was…..the “Public Editor”! This fellow, Clark Hoyt, is intended to referee when folks get factually out of line – often relatively minor transgressions. But this column – hmmm – how to say? It was mind-blowing. You see there was this column on May 12th authored by one Edward N. Luttwak, the military historian, in which he basically said that Obama would be unwelcome in the Muslim world because he was an “apostate” for having rejected his father’s religion and followed his mother’s Christian tradition. He argued quite convincingly that nothing could retrieve Obama from his fate and that he would be subject to assassination that authorities in Muslim countries could do nothing about because Islam sanctions the murder of apostates. For those of us who so want Obama, or anyone else, to return the U.S. to a positive and respected role in the international community, the column was disturbing to say the least, for it undermined our hopes for a renewed era of international comity.
So….more than TWO WEEKS LATER….it all turns out to be a bunch of hooey. Check out Hoyt’s column yourself. He couldn’t find an Islamic scholar who agreed with this wacko historian Luttwak. Not a one. And the editors of the Times? It turned out they hadn’t even asked a scholar to comment. They “consulted the Koran” (the editors, that is) and reviewed articles, but no experts were sought out. One actually might begin to question the judgment of the Times’ Editorial Board, if I can say such a blasphemous thing. Does that make me an apostate?
Yesterday morning’s NY Times editorial on the embarrassing revelations that the National Security Council deliberated on the specific “harsh interrogation methods” (that were to be applied in specific cases) reminded me of Michael Kieschnick’s blog a week ago. Provocatively entitled, “Which Torture Method did Cheney Prefer?” it got me thinking.
My response? Simple: dogs. Big, barking, threatening dogs straining at their leashes wanting to sink their teeth into kneeling, naked, blind-folded prisoners. Yes, I’m quite sure of it. Cheney is a hunter guy. He even shoots guns, as his friend Harry Whittington can attest (they say all the birdshot was successfully removed). So, it’s my guess that Cheney made sure they used dogs to “harshly” interrogate those poor souls.
Just how is it that this guy, multiply deferred from the Vietnam draft as a student and then as an expecting parent, ends up as America’s chief of revenge? For isn’t that really what this torture stuff is all about? Getting “them” back for the 9/11 attack?
If we as a people have come down so far on the ladder of civilization that revenge motivates policy, we have fallen far indeed. The corruption of our principals is exceeded only by the corruption of our politics. It is truly time for change.
guy. He even shoots guns, as his friend Harry Whittington can attest (they say all the birdshot was successfully removed). So, it’s my guess that Cheney made sure they used dogs to “harshly” interrogate those poor souls.