Last Saturday, some 3,000 thousand people gathered around Saint Paul’s cathedral in London to “Occupy the London Stock Exchange” (or LSX). Two days later, the camp is still up, as several hundred people sleep in tents each night and many more gather in the day to decide actions. Yesterday the Cannon of St Paul’s gave the occupiers his blessing to allow them to stay, after the police tried to force them out. I interviewed two of my friends and fellow activists, Mark Boothroyd and Jeremy Dewar, the day after the event.

From GlobalWomenstrike.net

Tell me about the atmosphere. What kinds of people were there? Was it a very mixed crowd? Or were most of the people the regulars we’ve seen over the past year out in the streets?

Mark: The crowd was overwhelmingly young, most in their late teens or twenties. There were older people there in large numbers, but it was a very youthful action. There was not a noticeable union presence, no banners or flags, although I noticed some trade unionists from London who are active in the anti-cuts movement.

There was a contingent from Anonymous with Guy Fawkes masks and several banners. There were lots of homemade banners and signs which people had brought, and as I arrived I saw people making more with bits of cardboard and marker pens, drawing inspiration from what was happening to come up with new slogans and ideas.

The protest was very international with people from all over the world attending. I met activists from Spain, America, Slovakia, Poland and many other countries. Some of the Spanish activists became active around the M15 movement earlier this year and had formed the Real Democracy movement here in the UK, which occupied outside the Spanish embassy for several weeks in solidarity with the protests in Spain. Others were various activists from around the world who lived in London and wanted to take part in the protests in solidarity with all the others protesting around the world.

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Related stories:  Water Wars in the Movies

The following video consists of an online presentation by Miriam Torres of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, which helps local groups build a statewide movement for water justice and Leonardo Vilchis of Union de Vecinos, whose members in the Southeast Los Angeles city of Maywood, recently gained control of their local water company.

The presentation took place on Sunday, July 17, 2011 in my Urban Eco-Systems Thinking class in Antioch University’s new Urban Sustainability M.A. program, and goes deeply into the issues that prevent so many people in California from access to affordable and clean drinking water.

For more about the struggle for clean water in the city of Maywood, check out this video by Urban Semillas.

Related stories: The Right to Water in California

The real world event of what’s been called the Cochabamba Water Wars found its way into two recent feature films.  Cochabamba is the third largest city in Bolivia and in 1999 to 2000, the residents got organized and mobilized to stop a multi-national from privatizing their water.

Quantum of Solace released in 2008 is a James Bond, Double-Oh-Seven adventure I saw at the Cinerama Dome with by buddy, fellow mystery writer Bob Ward.  The picture has an exciting car chase for an  opener and Bond’s Bourne Identity-like close hand-to-hand combat scenes are smashing as he might say.  But the main villain in the film, Dominic Greene, is as bland as the white suits he wore.  In fact what I distinctly recall discussing with Bob after the flick was, “Man, what was up with that?  This is the franchise that gave us Goldfinger painting a woman in gold for revenge.  The German-Chinese Dr. No and his kung fu grip mechanical hands.  But Greene.  Really?!”

Anyway, Quantum deals, in part, with the on-the-nose named Greene, a member of the evil Quantum cabal that Bond is chasing down, out to control the water supply in Bolivia through his fake eco-friendly front.  There’s maybe one scene of some indigenous folks lining up for water but mostly Bolivia is represented by the fetching and deadly Bolivian secret agent Camille Montes who has a personal score to settle with her fellow countryman General Medrano, the officer instituting the coup as he’s in the pocket of Greene.  Okay, it’s a Bond film so of course he has to do the heavy lifting, but there’s not even a scene where he leads the roused Bolivian compasinos against Greene’s fortress.  I guess the producers concluded that wouldn’t be PC, the white savior showing up to lead the bedraggled brown folk — what with Bond having to exist as a kind of blunted post-Soviet Union imperialist for her majesty these days.  Or did Bond defeat Greene merely to ensure the proper allied oligarchs would control the water?

Last year’s Even the Rain, from Spain, shown in the States in art houses and at film festivals, has a lot more depth and verisimilitude going for it than 007’s last outing.  It’s a film within a film set-up and deals with a Spanish film crew arriving in Cochabamba during that fateful time to shoot a lefty film about Christopher Columbus.  Essentially they will show Columbus in a revisionist light as he exploits, enslaves and commits inhuman acts against the indios in the so-called New World – all for their gold and labor.  Indeed the focus of the story’s film is a priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, a cleric who eventually campaigned against the brutal treatment of native people.  Daniel is one of the non-actors the director Sebastian casts for the film for his Indian face and forceful way to play an historical leader named Hatuey, is also an organizer working to stop a multi-national company from privatizing their water.

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Over the past several weeks, residents of the Ethelred Estate – a 900-unit housing estate situated just south of the Thames river in the London area of Vauxhall – have been mobilizing to resist the government’s sell-off of their estate to a housing association. This “stock transfer” of public housing to a housing association has become a common story in England since the government began privatizing public housing in the 1980s. Today, local governments are continuing the trend by using the government’s austerity measures as a justification for selling off their estates to registered social landlords. And tenants here at the Ethelred Estate know exactly what that means: higher rent prices, less secure tenancies in the long-term and for many, displacement and the destruction of their community.

The above cartoon is by “Tim” for Defend Council Housing. The caption reads “It’s a bargain but you’ll have to make some minor changes – like the tenants.” There is a for sale sign on the estate.

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Is the lack of recreational space making us fatter? Probably. (Among other things)

Americans are getting fatter every day. I’m sure there’s a statistic out there pointing to how every x number of minutes, a person somewhere out in America is determined to be obese. Despite the fact that the City and County of Los Angeles are vast, there is a serious lack of parks to ensure that people have spaces to create community, stay active, and most importantly, stay healthy. Obviously, the problem of obesity in the United States, and especially in communities of color, will not be resolved by simply creating more spaces for recreation, as access to fresh, affordable food is also a key factor, but it would sure help if people in Los Angeles, and other urban cities throughout the country had places to run, walk and play.

In the meantime, as there is less and less available land in Los Angeles for parks, people that are able to get have easy access to open space (and can stay healthier) are those with large yards (keep in mind  that about 60% of City of LA residents are renters), can afford a gym membership of some sort, or are fortunate enough to live near open space (there’s very few of us).

As a kid growing up in South Los Angeles, it was much easier for me to get to Popeye’s and McDonald’s than to Rancho Cienega Park, which was about 4 long blocks from my house, but I had to walk across the train tracks (where the Exposition Line will soon run) and walk Exposition Blvd, where you found a wide assortment of furniture and trash dumped before you got to the park. Keep in mind, the 1990s were a tough time in South LA (i.e. 92′ Civil Unrest and and subsequent years of blight).

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Estate
by Fugitive Images, Paul Hallam, Victor Buchli, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson, Tristan Fennell
Paperback, 152 pages
Published September 24th 2010
Please buy direct from Myrdle Court Press
ISBN: 0956353924

This is an incredible book that will move you deeply, even if the true meaning of home and the trauma of losing it hasn’t been burnt into you by life itself. As someone who has experienced eviction and poverty and loss, I confess I have strong feelings about how people write about it, document it, photograph it. But here it is done with a beauty, love, and respect that comes closer to capturing the many shades of what it means and how it is experienced than almost anything I have read. There is no sentimentalization here, no glorification of the working class or a home that after years of landlord neglect has become much less than anyone would wish. Instead it is a deeply felt exploration of meaning from many angles, a teasing out across perspectives, a contextualization of loss and change through words and images and theory.

My favourite section is the first one by Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Lasse Johannson, the experience of living on Hackney’s Haggerston West Estate and watching it slowly emptying of people, introducing the incredible series of photographs from Haggerston and Kingsland Estates, with captions that add another level of depth to what the images make so vivid. Followed by a more literary piece by Paul Hallam, exploring estates in the plural and the singular, winding around the meaning and making of place and poverty, extracting quotes from residents that I confess made me shed a tear or two on the tube. There is much to ponder in Victor Buchli’s Archeology of the Recent Past, and a clear contextualization of the particular within the broader history of Britain’s social housing by Cristina Cerulli.

They come together in a thought-provoking, moving whole. No one can ever have the last, the final, the entire say of what estates mean to those who live in them, what it is like to live in them, what it is like to lose them. That is the point. Estate is simply a gift to those who read it, the gift of a view, a taste, an experience that will make you think and feel deeply.

Related stories:  Privatizing Public Housing, UK and Estate, a book review

This cartoon was created by Dr. Pop and the  Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights (CRNHR), a national organizing effort led by grassroots groups from the across the country who are fighting for a human right to housing in the United States. We also got great critical feedback and help from public housing members of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) and Union de Vecinos in Los Angeles and Community Voices Heard (CVH) and the Red Hook Initiative in New York City.

A Clear View of Public Housing is a story about public housing in the United States.  It takes place on a sunny day when three women of different economic classes meet up at a city park along with their young children and then get into a conversation about public housing.

A Clear View of Public Housing was made to be used as a  springboard to conversations and actions led by communities organizing in defense of human rights and, in particular, the human right to housing.

The story will be  available in three forms:

The above Video which you can share by email, post to your  website, or download.  A Spanish Version is also available.

An Interactive Slideshow version of the video, for use in workshop settings, as suggested below. [request]

A Comic Book (coming soon) for door-to-door outreach or to hand out after a workshop

Tips for Facilitators

Here are three simple ways that the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights has used the story in workshop settings.

1.  Role-Play
Ask volunteers from your meeting or workshop to take on a character’s role and read their speech bubble aloud to the rest of the audience.  We found the results to be engaging and funny.

2.  Practice: “What Would You Say?”After watching the video or slideshow, break up into small groups or pairs to practice answering one or two questions that came up in the story, such as:

What would you say, if someone said this to you:
Housing is a business and the government should stay out of it.  They should leave business to the business people.
or
Public housing over-concentrates poor people into neighborhoods, and that is not good for anybody.
or
Subsidized housing takes away people’s incentive to work hard.  No one should get something for nothing.

The burden is often on public housing tenants and housing rights activists to re-educate legislators and the general public on the issues that we face.  This often means that we must engage in conversations that are full of myths and prejudices.  You can use A Clear View as a tool to practice our side of these conversations, share the results with each other, and build the confidence we need to confront hidden myths and prejudices.

3.  Make Your Own Story!
Before we created A Clear View, we took some time to break down the story that we are being told about public housing.  We found that that exercise gave us a window into the assumptions and vulnerabilities of that story, and helped us get better at building one that reflects our own reality.  To do this, we used the Narrative Power Analysis tool which you can find in smartMeme‘s really helpful book: Re-imagining Change.

For more information about the CRNHR and to send feedback, stories, and suggestions, visit restorehousingrights.org or contact Brittany Scott.  We would love to hear from you!

This is how much the developed countries spent per capita on healthcare a few years ago, contrasted with average life-expectancy:

This is what privatisation with a vast government subsidy looks like–a perfect study in neoliberalism and the truth behind republican free market rhetoric. And it translates directly into how much my family has suffered over years without healthcare, and have continued to suffer even after achieving the insurance dream–large deductions from tiny paychecks, deductibles, unbelievable monthly medication costs.

All this in a country that has spent immensely more per capita on health care than any other, without actually providing it.

All this in a country where HMO profits have reached billions every year, even through the crisis. A desultory google search brings up Minnesota doctors protesting obscene HMO profits this year, the doubling of California profits in 2008, for the Bush years there’s a Senate investigation, and if you really want to vomit, the “good news” that 2010 profits bring and how they are achieved in Florida. All for a life expectancy that just beats Cuba who spends pennies compared to us, but provides what free healthcare it can to all of its residents.

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LISTEN to the Conversation


READ the Transcript:

Ryan interviews Janette Bulkan, who has worked on issues of poor governance, corruption, and their negative impacts on people, the economy, and the ecology in highly forested countries for many years.
Ryan: Will you tell me a little bit about your work, globally, around issues of environmental justice?

Janette: Well, that is an ambitious way of putting it.  My work is actually just a tiny piece of it.  I did my doctoral research on forestry concessions in Guyana.  And I started off looking at the differences between forest law, forest policy, forest regulations, on the one hand, and forest practices on the other, for large-scale and small-scale forest concessions. So I was basically looking at what the law said and what the practice was.  I was actually interested in a technical study to understand what kinds of harvesting practices, or at what levels, would make sense for the very fragile forests of Guyana.  Because these are forests that are located in the poorest soils, globally,land with  just a tiny, like a quarter inch of soil, on the Guiana Shield, which is occupied by Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, parts of eastern Venezuela and northern Brazil.

But I quickly realized that, and this was back in 2006,that my study wasn’t really about law, regulation, policy vs. practice –– because those laws and regulations were adequate, actually.  Or really thoughtful in many ways.  But my study was about governance and corruption.

I graduated and I went on to teach and I am now at The Field Museum, but I’ve maintained an interest in how these processes play out and affect the most marginalized peoples who live in these frontier areas as in Guyana and in Suriname.

So last year, this initiative called the LDPI –– the Land Grab –– the Land Deal Politics Initiative –– invited me to do a paper on the role of Chinese companies and the state of China, the government of China, in resource grabbing in Guyana. And I completed that paper, of course, before I came to the Field Museum.  After that, the LDPI, this Land Deal Politics Initiative, which is a consortium of the Futures Agriculture Unit in the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, Cornell University in the U.S.A., the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, and I think the University of South Africa.  This consortium raised funding to have a three-day conference on resource grabbing and land grabbing.  They made it possible for me to attend that by covering the cost of my airfare.  And that took place between the 8th and the 10th of April at the University of Sussex in England.

And it was really a moving experience, an intellectually very stimulating experience, but also an experience, I think, where scholars at different places in their career trajectories came together to think about these issues, globally and locally.  So I think the conference had accepted 120 papers for presentation and they had to turn away over 250 excellent papers because of the limitations of time and the actual venue that was chosen.  It’s a very small space in which to have a conference.  And it was only really possible because of excellent administrative arrangements by the University of Sussex, IDS.

Of those 120 papers, they represented people, researchers from 69 universities and 29 independent institutions.  And 17 of them were Africa-based scholars.  So this was all facilitated, in doing this work, by the LDPI, the Land Grab Deal Politics Initiative. And I think it cumulatively began to address an issue that is happening very quickly, which is the consolidation of land under long term lease arrangements between governments and large corporations in parts of our world in which there are no immediate possibilities of questioning –– what are the mechanisms under which this is done, who benefits, who are the winners, who are the losers, what does the State gain, is  it really about food security at the local level, or does something else play out.

So that conference, the LDPI Conference of 6th to 8th of April, isn’t meant to be one off.  There’s a website, on which all the papers are posted.  It’s meant to be a website in which you can upload other things, you can upload other papers and continue a conversation around these issues, because this phenomenon of land grabbing –– a new enclosure movement –– globally, is happening fast, and happening in a way that it is not on the radar screen of many people.

So we’re thinking about what are the implications of this land grabbing for us, wherever we are globally.  And what are the implications for the most marginalized peoples in these far-off places, who are experiencing that new phenomenon in their daily lives.  And what does all of this mean, in our globalized world which is also subject to rapidly changing climate?  Are we, in fact, thinking about these things deeply when we allow corporate decisions to determine land use and access.

Ryan: So, what exactly is land grabbing?

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