In 1990, I organized a grassroots coalition against redlining and for community reinvestment. It was led mostly by women of color and a few very exceptional men.  That was my job.  We were called Communities for Accountable Reinvestment.

We did direct actions against banks, forced the Federal Reserve to hold hearings in the community, we negotiated with bank presidents, and we even created our own people’s bank, called the South Central People’s Federal Credit Union.  We were, as my now-deceased comrade Clyde Johnson used to say, a raggedy coalition of determined folks.

All this occurred in the wake of the Savings & Loan crisis when the policy solution was a humungous bailout that favored the banks and hurt the people.  We used the facts of that narrative to teach people that the government, aka the people, subsidized the banking industry with low-cost loans, insured deposits, and yes, when things got tough, bailouts for the biggest.  For those reasons, we asserted, banking should be considered a right.

This all made sense to our members who had never received their proper measure of fairness or investment from banks that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) promised, but never delivered.  But communicating the painful consequences of financial discrimination to others –– to the press, to politicians, to people who didn’t suffer discrimination –– remained an uphill battle.  “Banks are businesses,” they would say.  And as our country veered neo-liberally towards deregulation, we were constantly reminded to leave business to the business people and banking to the bankers.

And then the riots happened.

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Guest blogger Tony Roshan Samara is associate professor of sociology at George Mason University and a resource ally with the Right to the City alliance.

About a month ago the Right to the City alliance (RTTC) and its allies occupied downtown Boston for an afternoon with the explicit goal of targeting Bank of America at its Massachusetts headquarters. The action was intended to draw attention to the central role played by banks in the foreclosure crisis that has torn across the country.

BOA was chosen because it is the largest bank in the country and it has been deeply involved in taking people’s homes in the Boston area. According to RTTC, BOA has the most homes in foreclosure in Boston, and most of these are in “majority minority” neighborhoods.

The action came at the perfect time. While anger against the predatory and destructive practices of the mega-financial institutions has been building for years, it has now come to a head across the country in a wave of protest that is truly historic. But the RTTC action has a special significance because it was organized by people from the communities that have been hit hardest by the latest predations of gangster capitalism.

The action took place on Friday Sept. 30th, when all of the organizations involved met at the downtown meeting hall of SEIU. The coalition that came together that day was pretty impressive. There were thirty four organizations from the Boston area alone, doing much of the arduous prep work leading up the weekend’s activities. These included the four area RTTC groups – City Life/Vida Urbana, Chinese Progressive Association, Alternatives for Community and Environment and Direct Action for Rights and Equality (from Providence!). But it also included, to name just a few, the Boston Workers Alliance, Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending, Network for Immigrants and African Americans in Solidarity, Women’s Fight Back Network, Youth Jobs Coalition and Union of Minority Neighborhoods (for the entire list, go to Take Back Boston).
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Observations on the motherland….

Every time I go to El Salvador, getting around is the quite the experience. The last time I went to visit family was in 2007. I decided to take my three friends to experience El Salvador, or the “motherland,” as I like to refer to it, since I always boast about it being the second best place on earth, besides Los Angeles. Gas prices were approaching U.S. prices (thanks to dollarization and global supply shortages), and car transportation was limited, so riding around San Salvador’s buses was the next alternative.

Bus transit in El Salvador is privatized, drivers either own their own buses, or are part of cooperatives, which set fares. El Salvador, as are many other countries in the developing world, is the final resting of all diesel-spewing buses that are gradually being phased out of our roads here in the States. The buses are brightly colored, with the a woman’s name across the windshield, listing all the key landmarks along each route. Compared to owning a car, getting around by bus is significantly more affordable as fares have remained consistently at $.25US. With gas prices surpassing $4 a gallon during my most recent visit in August 2011, and minimum monthly salary is around $125, I can’t help but wonder how in the world people are surviving.

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Marie Kennedy is a transformative community planner who often draws upon participatory action research (PAR) methods to advance her work. In this interview, she shares stories about the impact that PAR can have on both urban and rural communities.

Unlike conventional approaches to research, PAR is built on the understanding that everyone has the desire and capacity to create knowledge. This simple fact – that we are all seekers and potential producers of truth – is at the core of Marie’s work, as well as the work of many other great community builders, known and unknown.

Ryan
What’s typical of the participatory action research method?

Marie
Raising all voices really describes it. It’s about helping people to get in touch with what they already know, to get in touch with the problems they want to address, and with the strengths they can draw upon to address them.  PAR is a good way to get at that. It provides an opening that can draw that information out.

In general, this is also what I try to achieve in my planning work. There is a fine line between what transformative community planning and participatory action research do, and I am not always sure where that line is.

Years ago I was asked to work in the Cambridge area by a Crime Watch Group. This is not a group I would typically work with, but they were at a special place. They realized that they needed to work with the youth in their neighborhood. They saw that these youth weren’t simply problems, and that the youth actually had problems. So, I agreed to work with them on the condition that the youth were in charge of the process.

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Albert Einstein once said that “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

But at this moment, as we stare, overwhelmed,  at the perfect storm of economic and environmental degradation, we are doing just that.

We all seem to agree that our economy is in a big mess and there is a lot of consensus that Wall Street is to blame.  But when it comes down to doing something about it, we are pretty much resigned to moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic,  confining even those futile, if expensive, actions to the passengers in first-class.  We continue to feed the propagators, starve the victims, and kick people with good ideas to the curb  (like Elizabeth Warren).

This is bad, but not as bad as the fact that we don’t agree that the  global climate crisis even exists –– a state of affairs that is so maddening to Australian climate scientists that they were compelled to bust out a rap song (I’m a Climate Scientist) in their own defense.

What we really need now are tools that can help us re-discover and re-invent the purpose of the economy; to understand its necessary dependencies and responsibilities  to the planet; and to debunk, once and for all, the myth that economics is a neutral math-based science.
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The year is 1984 and I am on a bus riding through the green pastoral landscape of Northern Spain’s Basque country with about 30 other American educators, organizers, and social entrepreneurs.

For most of us, this wasn’t just a study tour. It was a Quest. We were on our way to visit the Bali Hai of cooperation, a place where the logic of “capital hires workers” has been turned on its head. A place whe workers have been hiring capital for the past 55 years.

We were on our way to Mondragon.

Twenty-five years later, while other “advanced” economies in Europe and the U.S. spiral into a tail-spin, there has been a revived interest in learning from Mondragon’s network of 100,000 workers and 100 worker-owned cooperatives which, in turn, own the Caja Laboral –– a bank that finances their current and future economic endeavors.

Back then, we pull up to the Polytechnic, where it all started, hoping to receive secrets of the universe. The lady who was starting a cooperative micro=brewery asked the instructor leading our tour:

“What do you teach here?”
“Accounting”, he responds, simply

Dissatisfied with this response, one of the educators probes further:

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Last year I read The City and the City a sci-fi detective story by China Mieville, which takes place in two cities that are in some places adjacent to each other, and in others, actually occupy the same physical space.  To manage and maintain the distinct existence of the two cities, their inhabitants have adopted a deep cultural practice of “unseeing”   — the ability and requirement to recognize, but not-see, things in the other city.  Things that are actually there, but cannot be.  The inevitable infractions of this law are called a “breach,” which is the highest crime imaginable by either city.  These crimes against the unseeable are managed by their own transborder police force, called the Breach.

It’s a great read, which I highly recommend for lovers of great fiction.  But I bring it up here because of how well this idea parallels one of the most poorly understood resistance movements of recent U.S. history — the resistance by unions, employers, and elected officials to the actual enforcement of affirmative action, specifically and particularly in the building trades which, when accessible, provide some of the best-paying jobs to working class Americans.  Forty years later, organized labor and employers still “unsee” the value of black workers in a manner that might even challenge the imagination of Mr. Mieville.

This history is reframed and ably presented in a recently published anthology edited by academics David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey called Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry.  Each chapter offers detailed descriptions of events between 1963 and 1973 when redevelopment projects and affirmative action programs collided with complicated movements by black communities to control the development of their neighborhoods and gain the right to work.  The leaders and citizens of these cities-in-the-cities were all African American.

The stories in Black Power at Work include inspiring accounts of the bold innovations that these movements produced to transform the distribution of opportunity between the races in the United States in a meaningful way.  Those elevated moments are, however, tempered by the despair of possibilities that are to this day unfulfilled. It is this history, reframed and reproduced that explains the importance and common sense of the current initiative to create a Black Workers Center in Los Angeles.  (an important a story, deserving its own piece, coming soon).

Black Power at Work is framed around some big themes that are elaborated in detailed case studies of key events in Brooklyn, Newark, the Bay Area, Detroit, Seattle, and Chicago, including: Read More…

While the economic crisis has hit all of us, and hit us hard, Greece is a country riding the edges of bankruptcy, even after the intervention of the IMF and the European Union.

This intervention has come at a high price, requiring Greece to slash its national debt at a brutal cost to its own citizens.

To find out more about the impact of the crisis on the lives of people and how they are responding, I recently spoke to Antonis, who is from Greece and is a fellow graduate student at the London School of Economics.

ANDREA: Tell us a little about yourself.

ANTONIS: My name is Antonis. I’m a student here in London and I’ve lived here for quite a few years. But I’m originally from Greece. Since the revolt of 2008, together with some friends, we’ve been covering what’s been happening in Greece in a blog, the Occupied London blog. We were also running a journal, an anarchist journal, called Voices of Resistance from Occupied London. But I think our project was one where the blog completely overtook the journal itself, so that’s what we’re focusing on at the moment.

ANDREA: Would you just say a few things about how concretely the crisis has affected Greece, and how it is affecting people in their everyday lives?

ANTONIS: Obviously it’s had a massive effect on every single level — the political, the social and the everyday — all around. And it’s happened very rapidly.  Its very hard to explain in a few words how big the change is because its something we are still assessing. People are still trying to grasp what has actually happened.

But to see the difference in the everyday reality in the country and in people’s mentality, even from December (which was the second to last time I visited) to March this year (which was the last time I was there) is tremendous.  To put it quickly, pretty much everyone, or at least most people I know who work in the public sector (and the public sector is huge), are facing the same sort of decrease in their wages — about 20 to 30 % of their total wages, anywhere between the two roughly.  And they probably are faced with even higher cuts in their pensions —  if you ever get to get a pension, the way things are going.

The private sector is about to go through the same kind of process and the cost of life overall has increased tremendously. Just to bring one example out of many: the cost of gas, from August 2009 to what they predict it’s going to be in a couple of months (in August 2010) has gone up by about 150%.

ANDREA: So how are people reacting to this? I know there was a general strike just a few weeks ago…

ANTONIS: Four weeks ago… There’s been a few general strikes actually; the one on May 5^th was the fourth in 2010 if I’m not mistaken. Which is not that much, by Greek standards, you would usually have at least a couple of general strikes in a year anyway.

ANDREA: And so when you say general strike, is it really everything that shuts down?

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The Native Green Landscaping and Gardening Cooperative, has been organized with the support of the Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California (IDEPSCA). The cooperative is comprised of IDEPSCA members, day laborers and household workers, all of whom have completed a green gardening training course and received a certificate in sustainable landscaping from the City of Los Angeles.  Want a to use less water and have a beautiful garden made out of native plants?  Give them a call at: (213) 252-2952 or shoot Raul an email at gro.acspedinull@evronar.  They’ll answer any questions and provide a free consultation.

Native Green’s website, brochure, and business cards were designed and produced by the UCLA Community Scholars team of Brenda Aguilera, Sara Martin, and Alex Stevens.

Here’s a shot of the brochure:

When thinking about urban environmental repair, there is perhaps no better place to start than in what may seem to be the most unlikely of places: Detroit, MI.  Yes, the ex-capital of the auto-industry is rewriting the rules of urban regeneration as we know them and Detroit residents are creating a whole new way of thinking city-life.

As Rebecca Solnit says, Detroit’s best-known recent history is one of urban apocalypse characterized by “deindustrialization, depopulation, and resource depletion”

One third of the population lives beneath the poverty line and local officials estimate unemployment to be near 50% (the official figure is 30%).

Since the mid 1950s, the population has gone from nearly 2 million people to less than 900,000. Thirty percent of Detroit’s land is currently vacant – roughly the size of San Francisco in square miles. On top of this, the entire city of Detroit has become a  “food desert” — there is not one produce-carrying supermarket in the City. The endless rows of abandoned buildings and houses of what was once Motor City offer an eerie glimpse into a “post-American” future.

Flickr/tronics

Flickr/bobjagendorf

But out of this land, another story is emerging, in which the people of Detroit are re-inventing their city as the urban agriculture center of the country.

I recently met Asenath Andrews, the principal of the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for young mothers and pregnant teens who raise animals and organic fruits and vegetables.  The school also offers classes on beekeeping and more to the community..

The conversation opened a window for me upon Detroit Green.

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Do-It-Together Energy

The next bubble is bound to be green. Stock markets will rise and fall based on how people relate to new energy technologies. So why not learn to master these technologies ourselves? This post reviews a few promising trends in the renewable energy sector, and talks about how ordinary folks can learn to master our own energy futures. Only a few short examples are highlighted here, so please leave comments with inspiring examples of your own.

Make Your Own Windmill At the age of 14, William Kamkwamba built his own windmill to power his house in rural Malawi. After discovering a book called Using Energy, he simply started experimenting with discarded local materials and designed an energy solution to help meet his family’s needs. His story was quickly picked up by NGOs across Africa, and celebrated at global thought forums like TED. William’s story teaches us that you can control your own energy future, and that you don’t have to have much money to do it. You don’t even have to be an adult! Sometimes, you just need the basic knowledge, a knack for experimenting, and the ability to find leftover materials from the area where you live.

Here is an excerpt from the work-in-progress documentary about William’s story:

Find out more on the Moving Windmills site.

Solar-Powered Internet

How much energy does it take to power internet usage in the world? A whole bunch. Getting connected, powering communication and searches, and storing information online all require tremendous energy resources. When we think about the internet’s billions of users, where this energy comes from starts to matter in a major way. As more people get connected every day, we need to be creative with how we power our lives online. One emerging example of powering our web time with renewable energy comes from Project Focus , a group that is partnering with leaders from rural Uganda to build a solar powered internet café.

Check out their short video.

New Tools for Living Off-the-Grid

Getting our energy from the sun and wind will mean that people no longer have to be dependent on major electricity companies to live our lives. Rather than plugging into a privately-owned network of energy providers, technology is emerging that can help folks light up their own lives, literally. The Solar Pebble is an awesome demonstration of how people anywhere in the world can harness the sun’s power by day, to bring light to their night-time activities. As more technologies like this emerge, it will be vital for people to learn how they can develop and reproduce them on their own. Check out Shervin Saedinia’s story about the Solar Pebble on four-story.

Banks or families?

This is the false choice that big banks and the American Bankers Association are offering Congress as they move to eviscerate the Financial Reform bill that is presently in the Senate, says Elizabeth Warren.

The banking lobby is willing to pay to get that job done — to the tune of $1.4 million dollars per DAY. I repeat. Big banks and their lobbyists are spending $1.4 million per day to make sure that meaningful financial reform does not occur. To make sure that an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency will either never come into being, or exist in name only. So we all need to do something about it. Now.

First I’ll answer the two questions that may be in your mind:

1. Who is Elizabeth Warren?
2. What can I do to support financial reform and prevent a future financial meltdown?

Elizabeth Warren is the fabulous, plain-speaking Harvard law professor who chairs the Oversight Board of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program — aka the “bank bailout”). She has been telling-it-like-it-is since she got there (as in big banks are not on our side).

What can we do to get financial reform?  Yesterday, Americans for Fairness in Lending and Americans for Financial Reform and allies co-hosted a great webinar featuring Ms. Warren  for about 1,000 people to answer exactly that question.

And here is what to do:

• Write to your Senators and ask them to strengthen the financial reform bill in the Senate.
• Write a letter to the editor of your local paper about the need for financial reform. Click here for contact information for media in your area.
• Sign the petition on Change.org.
• Get other people to do the same.

Whatever you do, do it fast.  The final vote may be as soon as May 3.

Here’s the webinar so you can listen yourself:

Elizabeth Warren 4/6/10 from Gilda Haas on Vimeo.

And here’s a clip of Elizabeth Warren with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show:

Five months ago, Brixton, one of the coolest areas of London, adopted its own currency, shown on the right below – the Brixton pound.   (scroll down for photos and videos).

The idea behind it? Helping to maintain a tight and sustainable community by promoting local businesses. The logo says it all: “Money that sticks to Brixton”.

This is how it works:  You exchange your regular British pounds for Brixton pounds at an exchange rate of 1:1 to spend in local businesses who accept the currency. While Bank-of-England-issued money is still accepted in local shops, some businesses incentivize their customers to buy their products in Brixton pounds by offering perks and discounts – more bang for their Brixton buck, so to speak. Brixton pounds can then be converted back just as easily.

By creating a more limited space in which money can be spent, local currencies gain “velocity” (i.e.: “The speed with which money whizzes around the economy, or, put another way, the number of times it changes hands” (definition by The Economistt) as they circulate in the local economy, acting as a powerful tool of reinvestment. According to a study done by the New Economics Foundation, money spent in this type of localized economy actually circulates three times as much as it would if spent in national chains! That means, you are essentially “voting with your wallet”. You decide where your money goes.

Brixton Market

For local businesses, this represents a huge plus as the profit they make stays in the community – as opposed to moving out of the community, up the ladder to high corporate executives of big national chain. This not only creates stronger ties of solidarity within the community, but it also adds value to the services and products sold in the local economy while building a strong local infrastructure.

Brixton shop

In this way then, mom and pop shops are sheltered from the tough competition of chains – who can sell their products at very low prices – jobs are protected in the area, and the community’s sustainability (and survival in these recessionary times!) is assured.

Rosie's Cafe

On top of all of that, Brixton’s local currency is helping keep the uniqueness of the neighborhood alive. About ¼ of Brixton’s community is of African or Caribbean descent. Reggae music blasts through the bustling open air market, as you wander along the stands sporting yucca root, sweet potatoes and plantains all interspersed between Halal butchers, Afro-euro beauty parlors and Vietnamese supermarkets.

fruit and vegetable vendor

It is not the first local currency of its kind. Communities from all over the world have created their own – from Australia, to China, Germany and Argentina. Here are some pictures of what some other international local currencies look like.

Brixton is the fourth community in the UK to print their own money, and there are talks that the city of Amsterdam might take it on as well!

For more information on the Brixton pound, you can visit their website at www.brixtonpound.org

And here are two cool videos from www.debateyourplate.com and the BBC’s Politics Show.