Finding Populism Today

Published on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 by Creators.com

Finding Populism Today

by Jim Hightower

 

 

To find populism flowering today, take a road trip across any stretch of America, or take a gander around your community. (File)


Mass movements don't just appear out of the fog, fully grown, structured and mobilized. They emerge in fits and starts over many years, just as the American Revolution did, and as did the Populists' original idea of a "cooperative commonwealth." A successful people's movement has to take the long view, to learn about itself as it builds, nurture the culture of its people, take chances, create fun for all involved, adapt to failures and successes, stay steadfast to its principles, have a stoic tenacity — and organize, organize, organize. A little serendipity helps, too, so grab it when you can.

In 2011 a serendipitous moment for the populist cause rumbled across our land, though later it was widely (and wrongly) dismissed as a failure. That September, hundreds of young people, loosely aligned with an upstart group called Occupy Wall Street, took over Zuccotti Park in New York City and audaciously camped out on the front stoop of the elite banksters who'd crashed our economy. Occupy's depiction of the 1-percent vs. the 99-percent struck a chord with the unemployed, underemployed, and the knocked-down middle class. Occupy encampments quickly sprang up in some 200 cities and towns from coast to coast.

The uprising was ridiculed (even by many progressive groups) as naive, undisciplined and "not serious." Who's in charge? Where's their strategic plan? Why don't they have position papers? All this carping about Occupy failing to produce the usual trappings of a Washington-focused interest group missed two essential points the young people were making: (1) such trappings are not producing any change, and (2) we're not an interest group, we're a rebellion.
Rebellion has to come first. As it builds, structure and process will follow in due time. The great strength of Occupy is that it was a genuine, non-institutional, social, non-wonkish, morally compelling, and spontaneous stand against the culture of inequality that the moneyed powers are imposing. It touched people in deeper ways than issue politics will ever do. And the great achievement of Occupy is that it prompted a cultural shift that turned Wall Street's barons into social pariahs and put the issue of inequality directly at the center of our nation's political debate.

To find populism flowering today, take a road trip across any stretch of America, or take a gander around your community. You will find a splendid array of ordinary folks rebelling against the bosses, bankers, big shots and bastards who dare subjugate us to their greed, including:

— Mad-as-hellers in dozens of states, often in isolated rural areas, now form an increasingly effective guerrilla network to combat the massive invasion by global oil and gas giants to frack our land. Last November, three Colorado cities beat back Big Oil's money and the lies of some of their own political officials in a vote to ban fracking in their areas. New York State and more than 100 other cities have imposed moratoria or bans on this corporate plundering.

— Putting a specific face on Occupy's theme of gross economic inequality, a nationwide revolt of exploited fast-food workers erupted last summer, gaining the high ground against McDonald's and other poverty-wage profiteers. While Washington sticks to the miserly federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, grassroots campaigns are elevating state and local minimums to $10 an hour and above. Last month, with much pressure from the outside agitators, President Obama signed an executive order, which says the minimum wage for federal contract workers is $10.10 an hour.

— Two huge corporate/government cabals — the sovereignty-sucking Trans-Pacific Partnership and the NSA's secret, Orwellian program of spying on every American - are coming unraveled, thanks to public outrage that has united a left-right coalition in Congress. Meanwhile, the crucial populist struggle to salvage our democracy from the Supreme Court's scurrilous Citizens United edict, quietly continues to gain ground with 16 states and over 200 local jurisdictions passing proposals in support of a constitutional repeal of the Court's ruling.

There's so much more underway, such as placing a Robin Hood tax on Wall Street speculators; a surge in co-ops as a democratic alternative to corporate control; getting Monsanto's genetically altered organisms out of our food supply; a vibrant and positive campaign by immigrants themselves for immigrant rights; battling giants such as Disney World and Walmart to win paid sick leave days for low-wage workers; freeing college students from Wall Street's loan sharks. All of these and so many more are the sprouting seeds of a widespread, flourishing Populist movement. The moment is ripe to bond them into something larger.

© 2014 Creators

 

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

Fifteen Millennial Movements to Watch This Spring

StudentNation

 

 

Campus-oriented news, first-person reports from student activists and journalists about their campus.

Fifteen Millennial Movements to Watch This Spring

 

StudentNation on January 13, 2014 - 10:38 AM ET

 

 

Protesters attend a Save CCSF rally in San Francisco to prevent the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges from revoking the City College of San Francisco’s accreditation. (For A Bit More Context/Flickr)

Last spring, The Nation launched its biweekly student movement dispatch. As part of the StudentNation blog, each dispatch hosts ten first-person updates on student and youth organizing in the United States—from established student unions, to emerging national networks, to ad hoc campaigns that don’t yet have a name. Check out last year’s posts, in chronological order, here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25.

To mark the new year, this week’s theme is emerging organizing. The list is far from exhaustive. 

As always, contact studentmovement@thenation.com with any questions, tips or proposals. Edited by James Cersonsky (@cersonsky).

1. In Denver, the Testing Resistance Plans Big

In 2013, students, parents and teachers throughout Colorado protested and petitioned to reverse the tide of education policy. In 2014, we will see new tests and programs that further compromise the value of education. From January 17 to 20, a Colorado Student Power Convergence will assemble in opposition. We plan to create a campaign to boycott all standardized testing. Planning will continue at a follow-up conference in February, the Student Power Continuum, where we will reach out to parents and students to encourage them to boycott the TCAP test and organize actions leading to United Opt Out’s national conference, March 28 to 30, in Denver.

—Alex Kacsh

2. In LA, the Undocuqueer Movement Grows

Queer and undocumented immigrant youth have been at the forefront of the immigrant youth movement. Undocuqueers have developed a critical lens of the mainstream LGBTQ movement by shifting its focus from marriage equality to issues affecting LGBTQ immigrants within education, healthcare and the immigration system. Of the 2 million deportations carried out under the Obama administration, many are queer, and many are trans* women placed in detention centers forced to experience physical, sexual and psychological abuse by officials and other detainees. In February, expanding on the work of QUIP, undocuqueer leaders, LGBTQ immigrants, parents and allies in Los Angeles will launch a national LGBTQ immigrant rights organization.

—Jorge Gutierrez

3. As Title IX Sits, the IX Network Spreads

Sun Devils Against Sexual Assault is a group of current and former Arizona State University students, staff and faculty committed to ending sexual violence on and off campus. After losing a major Title IX lawsuit in 2009, ASU made a commitment to protect students from rape culture, but students’ Title IX rights continue to be violated and the ASU administration continues to protect student and faculty predators. In addition to organizing Title IX and Clery Act complaints, SDASA wrote an open letter to ASU President Michael Crow in September and subsequently confronted him about the issue of rape culture in person last month. President Crow, like his colleague Kevin Salcido, Chief of Human Resources, is more concerned with protecting the University and its reputation than with protecting students from sexual harassment and assault. SDASA hopes to add ASU to the growing list of colleges under investigation by the Department of Education for Title IX violations.

—Jasmine Lester

4. As NYU Unionizes, Hopkins Fights for Democracy

Graduate students at Johns Hopkins have organized against a plan that would restructure the university. Changes include reducing graduate student cohort sizes in social sciences and humanities, an emphasis on junior faculty and the centralization of decision-making power with the university administration. This strategic plan was formulated behind closed doors with nominal and selective input from faculty and students. More than 270 graduate students have signed a letter calling for a one-year moratorium on the implementation of the plan. Departmental directors of graduate studies, the academic council and the faculty assembly also called for a moratorium. Graduate students attempted to confront the dean in person about the lack of response to the moratorium, but were met by vice deans and campus security. Like our peers facing similar structural reforms at educational institutions across the country, the graduate students at Johns Hopkins will continue to fight for democratic inclusion in university governance.

—Kellan Anfinson, Derek Denman and Chris Forster-Smith

5. CCSF v. Disaccreditation and Debt

In October, student organizers at the City College of San Francisco launched the second Student Labor Action Project chapter in California. As part of Campus Equity Week, CCSF SLAP hosted an End the Student Debt Crisis event with a screening of Default and a panel highlighting the crippling effects of the student loan industry on students and workers. Attendees were briefed on and asked to support a CCSF SLAP campaign to keep CCSF open and fully accredited. As one of the largest community colleges in the nation, CCSF is an affordable pathway to higher education for working-class people. Nonetheless, this past July, it received notice from the Accrediting Commission for Junior and Community Colleges that it wanted to close the institution. A battle has waged on ever since and a judge recently ruled that a private commission cannot revoke the accreditation of CCSF until a trial is held to determine if the action is lawful. But the campaign will continue until CCSF’s future is fully and permanently secured.

—Shanell Williams

6. LAVC v. the Cuts

After years of statewide cuts, the accumulation of a $5.5 million deficit and the possible threat of academic probation, the Los Angeles Valley College administration cut $606,470 from the college budget on November 8. These cuts included thirty-one already-scheduled classes, part-time faculty, student tutoring services and the entire track and field team—forcing teammates to go all the way to West LA to participate. The most drastic impact was a district-mandated increase in the average class size to thirty-eight students this spring and forty in the fall. On November 26, Students Against Cuts formed to fight against the cuts. The group’s ten demands include a reversal of the cuts, a call for transparent budgeting, a decrease in salary for top administrators, living wages for campus workers, the reduction of textbook prices and an increase in the number of classes.

—Albert Sarian and Dominico Vega

7. Student Unionism in Rhode Island

This spring, students at Rhode Island College are launching the Rhode Island Student Union Project with the goal of establishing a vehicle to fight for our interests and build the power of students across the state. This past semester, the embryonic RISUP tested combative politics by resisting the administration’s attempt to arm campus police. Disrupting the “what-if” narrative triggered by a false-alarm shooting at URI last year, our efforts spurred critical dialogue across the campus and successfully led administrative officials to hold off on what we saw was a very negative policy, at least “at this point in time.”

—Servio Gomez

8. Socialism in Tennessee

In the fall, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, witnessed the birth of its first socialist organization, the Sewanee Young Democratic Socialists. Since then, along with HOLA, which promotes Latino/a cultural awareness, we have cosponsored talks by movement photographer Pocho-one and facilitated workshops to help undocumented students navigate the college application process. We also participated in the inaugural meeting of the Tennessee Student Union Project, which seeks to give students and campus workers across the state a voice against the corporate assault on higher education. Although we press forward in a historically conservative institution and region, we have found no shortage of allies.

—Brandon Kemp

9. A Working Class Union

The Working Class Student Union was founded by students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison when one student was told that kids like her could only get more financial aid if she got pregnant. The group works to bring social class into diversity discussions, connect working-class and first-generation students with others who share their background and provide ready access to campus resources. This spring, WCSU is working to publish a series of narrative videos from students and staff on campus with working class, low-income and first-generation backgrounds, providing support and validation of student experiences on campus. With this project, we hope to reach students grappling with social class issues as well as develop support services for these students.

—Marissa Hatlen

10. The Wisconsin Idea, Revisited

Wisconsin is unique in that students have a constitutional right to shared governance in the University of Wisconsin system. Still, a culture of fear and apologetic racism infiltrates the work that students across the system are trying to accomplish. Aiming to change this culture, Sankofa Squad, the statewide student association for students of color and allies across the system, is researching systematic bias and how it is harming students across the system in order to gauge the types of resources and skills required to offer equity and justice to those impacted communities.

—Lamonte Moore

11. Dignity in School

This year, the Missouri GSA Network, with the help of the Dignity in Schools Campaign, started organizing around socioeconomic justice, with a focus on student “push-out” and the school-to-prison pipeline. Homophobia and transphobia are among the primary reasons why students are pushed out of the institutions that were meant for them. In St. Louis, several schools have implemented violent and secretive practices that exacerbate youth criminalization. Our socioeconomic committee, GSAs for Justice, hosted a rally to start off the school year and will be marching in St. Louis’s annual MLK day parade. At the end of January, we will further our understanding of the school-to-prison pipeline by visiting BreakOUT! in New Orleans. On March 5, we will have our annual Queer Youth & Ally Day at the capital, which is completely run by student leaders.

—Sterling Waldman

12. Democracy at Work

The SEIU Millennials chapter in Los Angeles emerged from a conference this fall, with young worker representation from Oregon to Florida. Our work focuses on two questions: First, why are we, as a younger generation of healthcare workers, choosing the healthcare industry? Second, what issues are important to us? I got involved because I want a say in what happens in my union. I cohosted the last conference call of the year for the program in which we organized our first interlocal video conference call, scheduled for January 21. Our goals for 2014 include strengthening political action, supporting Walmart workers and winning greater income for fast-food workers

—Manny Hernandez Jr.

13. As New Jersey Signs the DREAM Act, Arkansas Pushes Tuition Equality

In the fall, Arkansas Natural Dreamers targeted Congressman Steve Womack and our ICE office in Fayetteville as part of United We Dream’s thirty days of action. On January 26, AND is organizing an event for Arkansas leaders to dicuss how to improve the atmosphere in the state for the undocumented community. Dreamers will talk about the importance of in-state tuition and the importance of working with our national network, United We Dream. As the movement grows, we will continue working to synchronize our actions nationwide.

—Irvin Camacho

14. As Congress Sits, Roanoke Pressures Goodlatte

In 2014, Roanoke United Families for Immigration Reform will continue pressuring Representative Bob Goodlatte, urging him to move on immigration reform this year, an issue he claims will be a top priority this year. Our organization has come a long way since our first meeting in October 2013. We held twenty days of sustained action outside of Goodlatte’s office with more than 100 people showing up throughout the month and at least thirty participating every night. This spring, we’ll continue working on reform on a national level, while also fighting to make Roanoke a sanctuary city, stopping the detention and deportation of members of our community and fighting for tuition equality and driver’s licenses for all undocumented Virginians.

—Paulina Hernandez

15. How to Document a Generation?

This spring, two online spaces, Undocumenting.com and Youngist.org, are working together to highlight the multidimensional nature of the millennial identity and to reinforce our ability to tell our own stories. Our projects have grown out of disillusionment with mainstream media’s overwhelming focus on the narratives of millennials—as in Girls or Gossip Girl—and seek to challenge the outsourcing of our stories. Our upcoming collaboration explores the dichotomy of art and journalistic writing created by young people. Future collaborations between our projects have the potential to carve out space for undocu-youth, queer kids, women of color and youth of color to exist beyond that single narrative. In the long term, we envision a mediascape that is rooted in social justice and leaves no pieces of ourselves behind.

—Sonia Guiñansaca and Isabelle Nastasia

Read Next: The Top 14 Student Activism Stories of the Year

Related Topics: Education | Activism | Politics

CHANGING THE WORLD-THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEF

Soldiers For Peace International

Our mission is to join individuals and groups working in different ways to ensure that our children live in a rational, sustainable world. When enough people abandon the belief that war is inevitable,it will become unthinkable. War is conducted for corporate Empire. Therefore,the first step to ending war is ending corporate control of the US government. All social justice efforts lead to the end of war, the ultimate injustice. Those who work for justice are Soldiers For Peace.

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This is the personal blog of Rick Staggenborg, MD. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the official positions of Take Back America for the People, an educational 501.c3 nonprofit established by Dr Staggenborg.

Feel free to reproduce any blogs by Dr Staggenborg without prior permission, as long as they are unedited and posted or printed with attribution and a link to the website.

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Thursday, January 9, 2014

CHANGING THE WORLD-THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEF

It is impossible to build a movement without having a shared understanding of the problem we are trying to solve.  The difficulty in doing this is that all of us view the world from different perspectives, often radically divergent ones. To build a movement of sufficient influence to change the dangerous trajectory the world is currently on, we need to be able to get the broadest coalition of individuals of differing philosophies possible.

We are up against a powerful coalition of wealthy and influential individuals with the simple goal of consolidating their control over the nations of the world and their resources. Our objective has to be as simple and must appeal to people across the spectrum of political ideologies. In this third in a series of articles about how to dismantle the New World Order, I consider how opinions are formed and use my experience as a psychotherapist to explain how even deeply held beliefs can be challenged and changed.



Listening to self-identified “liberals” and “conservatives” debate, it almost seems like you are listening to people who live in different worlds. In a very real sense, they do. That is because each of us exists within a mental reality we construct based on concepts we acquire early in life and that far too often, we do not challenge. The more divergent our most fundamental beliefs are, the more it seems that we are speaking in different languages when we try to discuss politics. The solution is not to avoid the subject, but to recognize the source of these differences and try to find a common language with which to discuss possible solutions to problems that affect us all.

It helps to understand that we are fundamentally more alike than we are different and that it is our commonalities that make us human. Thinking of ourselves as humans first and members of any other group second helps us keep in mind that we all share important basic values and concerns. We must use the awareness of our common interests to stay focused on the task of building a future in which all can thrive. Rather than fighting each other, we must remember that our differences are a source of strength if we are willing to listen to each other with respect, learn from each other and integrate diverse points of view into a formulation of a problem that we can agree on. If we then put ideology aside and develop common strategies based on shared goals and values, it is possible to change the world. We have to try, because the alternative is almost certainly the self-destruction of human civilization.

We are all born into a world that is an undifferentiated confusion of sense impressions. We only gradually come to make sense of it by forming concepts that approximate what we perceive and experience. When a young enough child sees something round, it sees “a ball.” It doesn’t matter if the round thing is a baseball or a basketball. The concept serves the purpose well enough until the child is old enough to understand that various balls are used in different sports for specific reasons. But what if a child looks at the sun and sees only a ball? It certainly looks round. The child has to learn to develop more sophisticated concepts about round things  to understand how an apparently round object that they cannot touch is fundamentally different from the “ball” it resembles. Understanding such differences is essential to building a personal model of reality that corresponds to "objective" reality as defined by logical conclusions based on observations and the applications of internally consistent theories about the world.

So it is with all simple concepts. As we grow and acquire more information, we have to modify and refine the concepts by which we construct our views of reality. Failing to do so in a changing world leads to increasing divergence between our personal world and objective reality. When people who disagree start to rely on ideological arguments that conflict with observable fact, the collective consciousness becomes literally "schizophrenic" in the sense that it is a "split mind." That is the key to understanding why those who think themselves liberals and conservatives really do live in different universes. Only when they find a common language to share their world views can they come to a common understanding of how the world works and how we can change it together.

The fundamental obstacle to people uniting around common values and goals is the nearly universal conservative impulse. Far from being unique to those who identify as conservatives, it is based on a fear of change that most of us have whether we are conscious of the prejudice or not. Any psychotherapist knows this from experience. Many if not most of the people we work with come to us with problems so painful that they are willing to ask for help, yet seem to reject any suggestion that solving the problem requires sometimes painful questioning of basic philosophical beliefs that form the core of their identities.

This tendency is of course even more pronounced in those who blind themselves to the fact that they are in pain. It is even harder to address this pain when the individual insists that he must solve all his problems on his own. At least those who seek help in psychotherapy have taken the first steps of admitting that they have a problem they cannot solve on their own and are willing to seek help thinking through the problem from another person’s perspective. When therapists encounter what they call “resistance” from those who find it difficult, they may throw up their hands and place the blame on the patient. However, the effective ones try to find ways to help motivate patients to change. That is the essential task we face in awakening our fellow citizens to what they have to do to change the political reality that is the ultimate source of our pain.

The first step in establishing dialogue between people of different political philosophies is to abandon the notion of “conservative” and “liberal.” As soon as you label yourself, you start to see people who see things differently as “the other.” You attribute beliefs to them that they may not hold, at least when their beliefs are held up to close questioning. When we try to talk to each other in a friendly and nonjudgmental manner about our differences, we are showing that we are not engaged in a contest of wills but seeking genuine understanding. If we manage to communicate our desire to work together toward common goals based on common values, we have the basis for healing the artificial left-right split. This is the Great Divide that keeps us fightingeach other instead of the common enemy: the economic elite who would have us become their slaves in a permanent fascist New World Order.

Thanks to a corporate media and the politicians whose interests it serves, the concepts of “conservative” and “liberal” have been turned on their heads. Traditionally, the intellectual defense of conservatism was the belief that radical change can lead to chaos and the loss of all the gains that have been made in creating governments more responsible to the needs of the people who form them. It is based in part on the idea that everyone is inherently corruptible, or at least those who seek the power to determine the destiny of nations and the world.

There is a logical basis for this fear, given lessons of history. However, thanks to the politics of division and corporate media and politicians that frame political debate to serve the interests of their wealthy patrons, most people who consider themselves conservatives today have supported the most radical turn away from representative democracy to date. Those most dissatisfied with the results not only blame “liberal” politicians and their supporters but fault the party most have supported for years because they do not think they favor change that is radical enough.

Modern liberalism has been as drastically perverted. With the Democratic Party moving ever closer to outright support of fascist policies in an attempt to appeal to what the corporate media defines as the political center, it is gradually moving that illusory center away from the ideal of representative democracy and toward an ever more powerful plutocracy.  The effect is to have turned traditional liberalism into its antithesis. Instead of realizing that radical change has become imperative, they seen content with the incremental efforts of a corrupt party that claims to challenge the economic elite while voting to support it on nearly every issue where the corporate interest conflicts with that of We the People.

This can only end when partisan Democrats learn to question their deeply held belief that if and only if they can elect more Democrats can the country be saved from the depredations of a wealthy and powerful aristocracy that has in fact gained control over both parties. As with the Tea party movement, liberals most angry at the direction the country has taken have taken to actively opposing the Democratic Party. They blame the stubborn refusal of the rank and file to hold their leaders accountable for the miserable state of what passes for liberalism in America. In their ridicule of all Democrats, they fail to acknowledge the legitimacy of trying to work within the system for those who choose to do so. Instead, they are abandoning the political process altogether or forming an ever-expanding array of third parties that further divide their cause because they cannot seem to work together.


Fortunately, psychotherapy offers a way to resolve the conflicts between political reality and the way most people perceive it, whether they consider themselves liberal, conservative or neither. The trick to dealing with the patient who resists examining their own role in creating their problems is first establish rapport, then help them explore their beliefs. If those which are healthy and life-affirming can be shown to be incompatible with those more deeply held, one of the beliefs must change.  If the person is capable of honest self-reflection, the healthy belief will be retained and beliefs based on cognitive distortions will be rejected. As a result, the belief system itself changes.

The alternative is to distort information that reveals the contradiction so that one can resist that change. Either way, being aware of two contradictory beliefs simultaneously creates a form of anxiety known as cognitive dissonance. It is the reason Albert Ellis' rational emotive therapy technique works. In RET, the therapist’s job is to help the patients look at their lives objectively so that they may choose to change rather than resist it at a cost to not only their psychological integrity but their happiness. When the therapist succeeds at helping the patient see the connection between the simplistic beliefs that made the world make sense to the child and the problems they experience when they try to hold onto these beliefs as adults, it is possible to help them find more nuanced ways to view the world that are consistent with their core values.

I will not go into the basic differences in the modern conservative and modern liberal mind sets. I have little to add to George Lakoff’s description of the one as favoring a stern, paternal view of government that encourages individuals to succeed on their own in a rigged system and the other as favoring a nurturing, cooperative society with a prominent role for government. I suggest that those interested in exploring these ideas read his excellent treatise Don’t Think of an Elephant. What is more important is what he doesn’t say, which is how to reconcile these different world views. That requires focusing not on the differences in the beliefs we are raised with, but the ideals we were all taught to regard as sacred. Among these are the principles of representative democracy and liberty and justice for all.  While concepts of these ideals differ, there is nearly unanimous agreement that they are thwarted by a system that is deeply corrupted by special interests.

By framing our common interest as ending the corruption that is threatening America and the world, we can find a way to talk to each other about how to create a united national and international front against fascism, even if we choose not to put it in those terms. How we might best have that discussion will be the topic of a future essay on tactics for conducting a nonviolent, democratic revolution.

Previous essays in this series are here:

Part I:   Toward a strategy for dismantling the New World Order
Part II:  Setting goals for real global revolution

Building the Good Society

Commons Magazine

Commons Magazine

Commons Magazine

Commons Magazine

Building the Good Society

Notes toward a political platform for the commons

| by Jay Walljasper

Economy and Markets, International, Politics and Government

 

It’s wonderful to have your fondest hunches confirmed by a close-to-home source. When speaking and writing about the future of the commons movement, I frequently note that many people understand the principles of the commons, even if they don’t know the word. I recently republished an article about the commons that appeared in Utne Reader magazine 12 years ago—written at a time when I was unfamiliar with the concept myself. Here’s another article I published at the same time about what it would take to create a truly good, democratic society. In re-reading the article, I saw that this list comes pretty close to defining a political platform for the commons in the U.S.

Here’s the article as it appeared in the March-April 2001 edition of Utne Reader. —Jay Walljasper

(Photo by Brett Davis under a Creative Commons:“license”:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ from flickr.com)

Universal health care: This would include natural health treatments and psychological therapies, both of which save money over the long haul by preventing serious medical conditions.



A fair electoral system: How about a voting system in which the guy who gets the most votes wins? Even better would be proportional representation (common outside the English-speaking world), which allows third and fourth parties to bring fresh ideas into the political debate without becoming spoilers.



Full employment: Any society that glorifies work as much as we do ought to offer every citizen the chance for a worthwhile job. Even in a recession, there are slums to fix up, trees to plant, and the unfortunate to care for.



Far more federal spending on schools than on the military: Education is a better national security investment than weapons and warriors. The popular T-shirt says it all: “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.“



A 6-to-1 ratio between the highest-and lowest-paid employees in any enterprise: This might have the added benefit of coaxing some of our more greedy and ostentatious billionaires to relocate in the Cayman Islands.



Four weeks paid vacation for all: A movement is already under way to give Americans the same kind of free time that Europeans, Australians, and the Japanese enjoy.

A hummable national anthem: Ours isn’t so bad for an old battle poem plastered atop an English beer hall tune, but it’s time for an anthem more people are willing to sing. Maybe “This Land Is Your Land” or “All You Need Is Love.“



A strongly unionized workforce: From weekends off to civil rights legislation, labor unions have been the sparkplug of significant social improvements. The right-wing drift of recent decades can be attributed more to the decline of labor’s power than to the fading of 1960s radicalism.



Natural and historic preservation: More parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, historic districts, and generous tax credits for saving scenic landscapes and landmark buildings.



Unstinting support for the arts, humanities, and basic science: Think of tango festivals, touring comedy revues, cool museums (Gloria Steinem’s girlhood home in Toledo?), and new revelations about dinosaurs and dogwood blossoms.



Topflight public broadcasting free of corporate purse strings: Imagine great investigative reporting, live poetry slams and salsa shows, original dramas by emerging literary talents, and humor of all varieties. Like the best of BBC, but in the many accents of America.



Diversity. Character. Color. Charm.
 Scrap the melting pot and grab a stew pan so we can savor all of America’s spicy flavors. Let West Virginia celebrate its Appalachian splendor, Detroit its African-American and Arab-American heritage, Boulder (and Halifax) its burgeoning Buddhist sensibility, and Gilroy, California, its famous garlic.



Greater global awareness: We give shamefully small amounts of nonmilitary aid to poor nations around the planet even as U.S. corporations exploit their people and environment. Adding insult to injury, many Americans show little interest in anything happening beyond our borders. We’re losers in this situation too, missing out on great ideas from other cultures that could help solve some of our own problems here at home.

Tags

Utne Reader, commons political platform

Posted November 25, 2013