Waging Nonviolence

The first boat to protest nuclear weapons is back to inspire a new generation

Fredy Champagne has been a peace activist ever since he returned from combat in Vietnam. He’s been kicked out of college, where he was accused of starting a riot. He’s opened health clinics in Vietnam. He’s delivered school buses to Cuba. But in 2010, he received a call that opened his eyes to a story of resistance he had never heard before.



The call was from one of Champagne’s fellow members of Veterans for Peace, or VFP, asking him to go check out a boat that had been hauled out of the water in Humboldt Bay, California — only an hour’s drive north from his home in Garberville, where he was serving as the president of the local VFP chapter.

The boat — named the Golden Rule — wasn’t much to look at. It was far from seaworthy, and those who had already looked it over thought it was better suited for firewood than seafaring. “A lot of the side planking was gone,” Champagne said. “There was absolutely no interior. It was all rotten. And there was no steering mechanism, no mast, no motor, no nothing.”

But there was more to this broken-down old ship than what the eye could see. This vessel was a piece of history — having once played a consequential role in making the world safe from above-ground nuclear weapons testing. In 1958, the Golden Rule’s former owners, a group of peace activists, tried to sail it into the American nuclear weapons testing zone in the Pacific as a form of protest. While the authorities cut their voyage short, the Golden Rule still managed to spark an upsurge of opposition to nuclear testing, leading five years later to the adoption of the Partial Test Ban Treaty.

When Champagne learned this history, he was shook. “I was standing there. It was real quiet at the shipyard… And I felt the boat was talking to me. I felt the boat’s spirit. And you know what it said? I sensed that the boat was telling me, ‘Get off your ass and do something.’”

So, do something he did. Champagne set about restoring the boat along with a small team of several other VFP members. Five years later, the Golden Rule was sailing down the West Coast to the 2015 VFP National Convention in San Diego.

Now, in the midst of its Great Loop Tour circling the entirety of the eastern United States, the 21st century Golden Rule aims to be more than a history lesson. Veterans for Peace and the project’s many supporters are working for nothing less than igniting a new movement to abolish nuclear weapons altogether.

Fredy Champagne inspecting the damage to the Golden Rule in 2012. (Courtesy Fredy Champagne) Nuclear dread inspires nonviolent action

The story of the Golden Rule begins, in a sense, with the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima in 1945.

Writing in the February 1958 issue of the radical pacifist journal Liberation, former U.S. Navy Commander Albert Bigelow recalled that he was “absolutely awestruck,” even though he “had no way of understanding what an atom bomb was.” In that moment, he said he intuitively “realized for the first time that, morally, war is impossible.”

With his wife, Sylvia, he joined the Religious Society of Friends — becoming Quakers and turning toward the kind of activism that would eventually lead him to the Golden Rule. One of his first actions, however, was to host two “Hiroshima Maidens,” young women disfigured by radiation who came to the United States for plastic surgery in the mid-1950s.

Nonviolent direct action against the nuclear threat was only just beginning to take shape. In 1955, activists in New York and other cities began to engage in non-cooperation with civil defense drills. Outcries grew even louder when the Soviet Union and Britain joined the nuclear club — and the introduction of the hydrogen bomb greatly expanded the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. Military leaders such as Gen. Omar Bradley and public intellectual Lewis Mumford were trying to alert the public by November 1957.

The health impact of atmospheric testing had drawn special concern, including that of prominent physicists and public health experts who warned that radioactive fallout would spread cancer far from the testing sites. As Bigelow put it, “The overwhelming weight of scientific opinion said any nuclear explosion was dangerous.” The point was evident from an anti-testing petition circulated by Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, which attracted more than 2,000 signatures in just a couple weeks. Even scientists from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, recognized that fallout would cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.

Nuclear dread had even made its way into popular culture with, for example, the 1954 release of the Japanese monster film, “Godzilla,” based on the mutating effects of radiation.

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While concern spread, it wasn’t until a May 29, 1957 meeting among representatives of the era’s leading pacifist groups that a movement propelling popular action began to form. The War Resisters League, Catholic Worker, Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Friends Service Committee and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom all agreed to form the ad hoc committee Non-Violent Action Against Nuclear Weapons, known to its members as NVA. [SANE, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, was formed at the same time, with an explicit intention to involve non-pacifists and to leave direct action to others.]

The power of nonviolence was already in the air, following the successful conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which made its potential apparent to many people who had not given it serious consideration. Moreover, there were already close connections between the Black freedom movement and pacifist leaders such as Bayard Rustin of WRL and Glenn Smiley of FOR, both of whom advised the Montgomery movement. (Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out publicly in favor of banning the bomb and abolishing war as early as December 1957.) Jim Peck, who later joined the Golden Rule crew, had organized for desegregation inside the federal prison where he was jailed for draft resistance during World War II. He had also participated with Rustin and others on the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, the first Freedom Ride.

NVA’s first action was at the site of atomic testing in Nevada on Aug. 6, 1957, the 12th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. As Bigelow wrote, about three dozen people began a prayerful vigil in the early morning hours, then, “Eleven of us, in twos and threes, rose from the prayer vigil at intervals, approached the main gate, talked to the 40 or more armed men there, and crossed the line into the project as an act of protest.” Those who crossed the line, including Bigelow, Peck and Lillian Willoughby, were arrested, tried and given suspended sentences in time to rejoin the vigil the next morning, during an atomic test. “At dawn,” Bigelow said, “we experienced, from a distance of about 25 miles, a nuclear explosion. This was proof that our intuition, our feeling, and our senses were right. We knew that we could never rest while such forces of evil were loose in God’s world.”

The actual inspiration for sailing a ship in the testing zone came from England, where pacifists were talking about forming a “Peace Navy” and sailing into the British test zone at Christmas Island in February 1957. By April, they had formed the Emergency Committee for Direct Action Against Nuclear War. Harold Steele, a member, began making plans to sail into the test zone after trips to India and Japan.

Although Steele’s Pacific trip never took place, the concept crossed the Atlantic. Bigelow and Bill Huntington began shopping for a suitable boat in December 1957, with Huntington eventually finding the ketch that would be named the Golden Rule in Los Angeles. Their sights were set on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the United States had been testing nuclear weapons since 1946.

Albert Bigelow (right) in front of the Golden Rule. (Swarthmore College Peace Collection/Albert Bigelow Photo Collection) The voyage of the Golden Rule

Since there were no laws barring a sailboat from the open Pacific, the original voyage had not been envisioned as an act of civil disobedience. In a Jan. 9, 1958 letter to President Eisenhower, Bigelow, Huntington, George Willoughby and NVA Coordinator Lawrence Scott, all Quakers, said in a plain fashion, “We write to tell you of our intended action regarding the announced spring test explosions of American nuclear weapons.”

“Four of us,” the letter continued, “with the support of many others plan to sail a small vessel into the designated area in the Pacific by April 1. We intend, come what may, to remain there during the test period in an effort to halt what we feel is the monstrous delinquency of our government in continuing actions which threaten the well-being of all men.”

On behalf of the American Friends Service Committee, Bigelow had already tried to deliver to the White House a stack of more than 17,000 petitions calling for an end to nuclear testing. Hoping for a meeting with a staff person he knew, Bigelow was told instead to leave them with a police officer at the White House gate. As he wrote in the February 1958 issue of Liberation, “The experience has strengthened my conviction that we must, at whatever cost, find ways to make our witness and protest heard.”

The Golden Rule crew aboard the ship in Hawaii, from left to right: William Huntington, Albert Bigelow, Orion Sherwood and George Willoughby. (Swarthmore College Peace Collection/Albert Bigelow Photo Collection)

The Golden Rule set off from San Pedro, California that spring, but turned back due to bad weather and to replace a seasick crew member with Orion Sherwood, who had been teaching at a Quaker school in New York. Sherwood, who now lives in Salt Lake City, said when he found out about the need for another crew member, he quickly sent a letter expressing interest. 

Sherwood’s brother had been a B-29 pilot in the Pacific, dropping incendiary bombs on Japan and flying over Hiroshima. “One of the crew at least was taking pictures of the results of the atom bomb. And he did the same for the second bombing of Nagasaki,” Sherwood said. “I certainly was hopeful that somehow we would get beyond the testing and have an agreement that we would not continue.” Soon after expressing interest, he was on a plane to Los Angeles to meet up with the others in time for a March 25 re-launch.

It was three weeks into the voyage that the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, issued a rule making it illegal for U.S. citizens to enter the bomb explosion area. The commission’s intent was obvious. The Associated Press called it “a legal barrier against the plan by four Americans to sail a small boat into the Eniwetok area as a protest against forthcoming U.S. nuclear tests.” For Bigelow, writing in his 1959 memoir, “The Voyage of the Golden Rule,” “it meant our protest was effective,” and the government’s immorality lay exposed to view. Only then did the crew accept that not only were they sailing into a radiation zone, they were also violating federal law. They decided to go ahead.

An hour after a federal judge issued a temporary injunction ordering them not to sail, the crew set off from Honolulu and were quickly placed under arrest and sent to Honolulu’s city jail for a week. With an appeal working its way through the federal courts, communication with NVA back on the mainland, and even a visit from prominent pacifist leader A.J. Muste, the crew pondered deeply over the relationship between their legal argument that the AEC rule was unconstitutional and their original plan. When the U.S. attorney said he’d drop all the charges if the Golden Rule would give up its plans, they declined the offer and decided to sail again. “It is the government who should be restrained and not us, they said.”

Just before taking off on June 4, Bigelow was rearrested on the dock. As he was taken back to jail, Huntington — who had just been replaced by NVA member Jim Peck — rejoined the crew and took on the role of captain. The Golden Rule didn’t get far this time, either. Soon all five were in jail, this time for 60 days.

As the story captured global attention, it touched off ripples of activism focused on ending atmospheric testing and eliminating nuclear weapons. “Back on the mainland hundreds of people felt that they were involved,” Bigelow wrote, describing the outcry during the first jailing. “Picket lines had formed around federal buildings and AEC offices across the nation.” In Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and smaller cities, protesters were carrying signs with messages such as, “Stop the tests, not the Golden Rule” and “Stop the bomb tests – U.S., Russia, Britain.”

Golden Rule supporters in Hawaii protesting the crew’s jailing in 1958. (Facebook/VFP)

“Most of these people had never been in a public demonstration or picket line before,” Bigelow wrote. “In San Francisco alone, 432 persons petitioned the U.S. attorney to take action against them. They said that if the crew of Golden Rule were guilty, so were they!”

Another group tried to communicate directly with AEC officials at their Germantown, Maryland office. Denied a meeting, they began a vigil and fast inside the office. Alan Willoughby, George and Lillian Willoughby’s 8-year-old son, was there. “Initially, there was sort of a cold reception,” he recalled, but said the AEC staff “eventually warmed up” to their pacifist visitors. One of the guards even took a few kids on an outing to keep them entertained while their parents maintained their fast.

For the young Willoughby, it was just another normal family experience. “We spent our weekends and summer holidays on picket lines, vigil lines, peace marches,” remembers his older sister, Sally. “I think I even got on national television, or at least in the national news,” Alan said. The main difference this time, he recalled, was that their dad had “gone off on his own” and was in jail a few thousand miles away.

Previous Coverage
  • How activists sailed into a war zone and helped build the mass movement against the Vietnam War
  • Yet another ripple occurred when another boat arrived in Honolulu while the Golden Rule crew was still in jail. Earle Reynolds, who had studied the impact of radiation on the people of Hiroshima, was circling the globe in a boat called The Phoenix. Moved deeply by the Golden Rule’s example, Reynolds and his crew — which included his wife Barbara and children — decided they, too, would sail into the testing zone on their way back to Japan. The Phoenix was within a hundred miles of the test zone when, like the Golden Rule, it was boarded by Coast Guard and forced to end its voyage.

    “The courage of Albert Bigelow, the Golden Rule’s crew, and the Reynolds family triggered massive national protests and actions that contributed to the negotiation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty which endures to this day,” said Joseph Gerson, author of “With Hiroshima Eyes” and several other books on nuclear weapons policy.

    A renewed mission

    When the Golden Rule crew left Honolulu Jail and agreed they no longer had need for the boat, they put it up for sale — netting $14,600, which they applied to the project’s expenses. Details of its travels in the decades after its historic voyage are a bit murky. But when the Golden Rule was hauled out of the water some 52 year later in Humboldt Bay, it was only about 650 miles north of the San Pedro shipyard from which it had embarked for the Marshall Islands. Boatyard owner Leroy Zurlang agreed to let members of Veterans for Peace take ownership of the boat with plans to make it once again seaworthy.

    With Fredy Champagne and his wife, Sherry, handling publicity, fundraising and volunteer recruitment, and Chuck DeWitt, another VFP member, serving as restoration coordinator, VFP worked to put the Golden Rule back on the water — and to carry a message that the need to abolish nuclear weapons was as urgent as ever.

    VFP Golden Rule Project Manager Helen Jaccard first learned about the project in 2011 at a Northern California VFP regional conference. She and her partner — longtime VFP member and former president Gerry Condon — then drove to Eureka in their RV to take a look. With two big holes in the side, Jaccard was not impressed. “I was like, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea to take this boat out somewhere,’” she said.

    When she visited again a couple years later, “Things were starting to look a lot more like a feasible boat. And then in February 2015, Veterans for Peace put out the call to have people come and finish her in time to get her down to the VFP National Convention in August that year.” That’s when Jaccard and Condon, who had already been living full time in their RV, decided to move into the boat yard.

    When VFP asked her to get involved, Jaccard said she was “just about in tears.” She had read Bigelow’s 1959 book about the voyage and found it thoroughly inspiring. “To think that we could do something like that,” she said, “I was blown away.”

    Since 2015, the Golden Rule has been up and down the West Coast. A trip to the Marshall Islands was halted by the COVID pandemic, but the boat has been to Cuba. It’s now traveling up the East Coast from the Washington, D.C. area toward New England — an example of active nonviolence and a vessel for educating the public about the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

    Last fall it sailed from Minneapolis down the Mississippi to Cairo, Illinois, then via the Ohio, Tennessee, and Tombigbee River system to Mobile, Alabama. Along the way, the Golden Rule made several stops in Iowa, including in Dubuque, home to a significant community of Marshall Islanders. As reported in the project’s Fall 2022 newsletter, “Sailboats escorted the Golden Rule into the harbor for a grand entrance. Marshallese women, in traditional dress, sang sweet harmonies of welcome.” The experience left the crew and observers in tears, moved by the reaction of a community whose homeland had been used 67 times as a nuclear testing site, leaving some islands poisoned and a trail of cancer.

    Sally Willowbee [who spells her last name differently than her parents, George and Lillian], traveled to Iowa from her New Jersey home to support the boat’s renewed mission. The Marshallese people she met “didn’t know about what the Golden Rule had done in ’58,” she said, but she found them deeply appreciative. “It kind of felt like the Golden Rule finally got there.”

    Helen Jaccard stands in front of the Golden Rule. (Facebook/VFP) History that inspires

    Currently, the Golden Rule is in Baltimore, Maryland headed for Philadelphia, New York and New England. “I’m thrilled to be able to bring the boat to all of the eastern state supporters that have been kind of pushing for that all these years,” Jaccard said.

    When it arrives in New London, Connecticut during the second week of June, Joanne Sheehan will be among the greeting party. Since the late 1970s, Sheehan has been an anti-nuclear organizer in southeastern Connecticut, home to a nuclear submarine base at New London and the nearby General Dynamics shipyard in Groton, where the Navy’s latest omnicidal submarine, the Columbia class, is under construction. The region was also the focus of NVA’s successor, the Committee for Nonviolent Action and its Polaris Action Project, which led years of anti-nuclear protest in the early 1960s.

    Sheehan, who runs the War Resisters League’s New England office in Norwich, has been exploring WRL’s archives the past several years, looking for the stories of radical pacifists who sought to apply Gandhian principles to campaigns against segregation and nuclear weapons in the mid-20th century. “Anytime we look at movement history, there are lessons there to be learned,” she said. In the story of the Golden Rule and NVA, she finds an interconnection of issues, an interconnection of people even across international borders, and a deep commitment to nonviolence among people who understood “that the only way we win is to work together.”

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    Sheehan also identifies ripples sent out from the Golden Rule, starting with the Reynolds family and the voyages of The Phoenix, which not only protested nuclear testing in the Pacific and Russia, but later defied the U.S. government by delivering humanitarian assistance in Vietnam.

    Greenpeace, which began its life with sea-based protests against nuclear testing, is another child of the Golden Rule. Both Albert Bigelow and Jim Peck were among the participants in the 1961 Freedom Rides to desegregate inter-state bus transportation in the deep South. Bigelow, in fact, was injured when he interposed his body between the young John Lewis and members of a racist mob in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Meanwhile, Barbara Reynolds spent the rest of her life working actively for peace, including starting the World Friendship Center in Hiroshima and aiding Cambodian refugees in California.

    To Sheehan, “this boat is “a wonderful symbol of all of that” — a piece of history that can inspire a new generation of activists to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons and harness the power of nonviolence.

    “With all of the nuclear weapons states ‘modernizing’ or expanding their nuclear arsenals … courageous actions of civil disobedience and other imaginative initiatives and organizing to reduce and eliminate the existential threat of nuclear weapons are needed more critically than ever,” said Joseph Gerson, who heads the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security. “The current voyage of the Golden Rule certainly contributes to that awakening.”

    Will Thomas, a VFP member from Auburn, New Hampshire — who once patrolled the Caribbean aboard the USS Okinawa during the Cuban Missile Crisis — believes the Golden Rule still has a story to tell, particularly as the threat of a nuclear exchange between Russia, the U.S. and NATO grows amid current fighting in Ukraine.

    “I think the new voyage of the Golden Rule is needed to remind citizens that the ‘Doomsday Clock’ is now ticking and set at 90 seconds to midnight,” he said. “As a Veteran for Peace, I support the mission of today’s Golden Rule, which is to inform and educate people and to ‘sound the alarm’ that we must act now to protect our planet and humanity.”

    I was every woman’s worst nightmare. Restorative justice changed me.

    Tears poured down my cheeks. Hunched over on a hard plastic chair, elbows on knees, I buried my face in my hands. The group was silent. I had just shared the details of my crimes. Robbery and sexual assault. I confessed to being every woman’s worst nightmare. Recounting these moments from years ago brought a resurgence of guilt and shame. I had been a young, strung-out, ruthless gang member, with zero respect for women, and I had an accomplice to impress. 

    The host of our group embraced me with a hug, her gentle hand rubbing my back. “I’m proud of you,” she whispered in my ear, validating my emotions, and washing away years of crippling embarrassment. She was a sexual assault survivor.  

    On May 3, 2018, I completed Bridges to Life, a 14-week restorative justice program. I walked out of that experience with a level of healing and restored confidence I never thought was possible. I became friends with women who experienced the opposing side of my worst actions. They didn’t see me as a perpetrator, and I didn’t see them as victims. We began unsure of what to expect and ended as true friends. We built relationships — bonds that had a face, a name, hopes, dreams and purpose. We shared each other’s pain. We laughed together, cried together, held each other and understood. 

    Almost two decades since my crimes, I am still paying the price for those poor choices. My family and community are still paying a price. Most of all, those I’ve harmed have paid an unfair price, and their voice has been silenced by a justice system numb to the idea that reconciliation between victims and offenders is a possibility in many circumstances. 

    Todd Rogers, a man in my group, described the power of forgiveness. “In the decades since my criminal convictions, nothing and nobody could convince me that I could still do great things in this life,” he said. “That all changed when someone who knew firsthand the impact of my actions spoke into my life. It felt like I was freed from a cage of regret, and destined to be a difference maker in this world.” 

    Little did we know at the time, but this was one of the last in-person groups ever held here. During COVID the prison would only allow prisoners to have the Bridges to Life workbooks, and watch a video. There was zero human interaction with survivors. Now, the entire program has been eliminated, depriving a new generation of prisoners of this life-changing experience.

    The disconnect 

    With an incarcerated population of 2.2 million, the U.S. does not have a system premised on reform or creating model citizens. It is a system that incapacitates, punishes and builds upon the failures of society. This system traumatizes souls, incarcerates minds, destroys the spirit and shackles the body. Broken people enter its gates, and exit, oftentimes worse and wholly unprepared to engage a world that has passed them by. 

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    Our court system, where justice is supposedly dispensed, is no better. I was guilty, but many are not. The guilty are often overcharged by zealous DAs. Imprisoned without bail, or any chance that they can afford bail, the accused are prosecuted with little influence from the victim and ultimately tried by a jury of their peers — whom they’ve never met.  

    Our system purports to give voice to victims, but sadly, victims have almost no bearing on the final outcome. It is the voice of a prosecutor, with far too much power and authority, that has the final say before “justice” is dispensed by a judge — often mandated by archaic laws. 

    Those convicted of crimes are often sent to a prison compound far from their loved ones, for decades, without any choice from the victims or community. Stripped from the process is any opportunity to reconcile, or set terms for restitution or reinstatement into society. This does a disservice to everyone involved — the guilty, the crime victims and society as a whole. 

    The system should begin first with the victim, or the family of the victim. There is no accommodation to determine whether victims would like to seek alternative measures in restitution, reconciliation or accountability from the perpetrator. Instead, there is a presumption that victims desire the harshest penalties, sending offenders to a full-time school of criminality, a gladiator arena falsely labeled a correction center. As if the name isn’t Orwellian enough, prisoners lose all dignity and are subjected to daily violence and racist segregation promoted by a government agency: the Department of Corrections. 

    I don’t advocate being “soft on crime,” but neither do I believe that locking people up for decades is making the world safer. Too often we lock up young people who are just learning how to function in the adult world. We force them into a system that does not teach them what they need to know to be productive citizens. Under the best circumstances, it creates model inmates, maybe, but never model citizens. Most return to public life worse than when they began their prison sentences, only to be overshadowed by a national recidivism rate that’s staggering — as high as 70 percent within the first five years out and 80 percent for prisoners with juvenile records.  

    Building bridges

    One alternative that should be more widely available is Bridges to Life, a faith-based, nondenominational program that connects victims to offenders. People of all faiths or no faith are equally welcome and valued. 

    John Sage started Bridges to Life in 1998, five years after his sister was brutally murdered. He struggled to recover from the shock, anger and grief. John felt called to do something productive to help victims heal and move on, and offer the offender a chance at rehabilitation. In seeking lasting justice, he developed a program based on a restorative justice model that connects communities to prisons in order to reduce repeat violent crime. 

    Restorative justice is a system of criminal justice that focuses on the rehabilitation of prisoners through reconciliation with victims and the community at-large. Restorative justice is not new. It was practiced in Africa and smaller Indigenous communities long before the colonization of territories by Western European powers. 

    The goal in restorative justice is to get participants to take responsibility for what they did and empathize, as they listen to crime victim survivors talk about the impact that violent crime had on them and their families. This may begin as uncomfortable, but quickly becomes a powerful experience, with the potential for accountability, restitution, forgiveness and healing — a truly restorative process, meeting the ends of justice. 

    In the restorative justice theory of change, prisoners self-identify with new, positive identities, replacing old negative self-identities. As a result, they develop healthy social support that reinforces these new identities. The concept: If you think you are scum, you will act like scum. However, if you think you are gifted, with talents, abilities and a positive identity, that’s how you will more likely act on a regular basis. 

    What does change look like? 

    Restorative justice views crime not simply as the breaking of a law, but as damage to individuals, property, relationships and the community. It represents a holistic approach to addressing criminal behavior. And it becomes a great tool toward healing the communities harmed. 

    When we build relationships, we humanize each other and rather than simply being faceless people, we become friends, family members, students and mentors. Behind these relationships are real people, with real names, feelings and experiences. It then becomes easier for participants to understand the harm they caused and to take responsibility. 

    The primary focus of restorative justice is victim impact, which allows the perpetrator to gain empathy for their victim or other people who have been victimized in similar ways. This occurs in moderated confidential meetings with the victim and the victim’s family, or with a victim of a similar crime willing to participate in a restorative process. 

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  • It’s a chance to be heard and listened to by both sides. It’s a chance for the offenders to examine themselves, and understand why they made the choices they did, how they harmed the victim, family and community, and what they can do differently in the future. 

    Restorative justice recognizes ways to mend broken relationships. It is a program focused less on punishment and revenge, and more on rehabilitation and redemption. It is a volunteer process that should be made available, should the victim want it. 

    Bridges to Life is one of the first nationally recognized restorative justice programs. Over the 24 years that it has been operational, over 55,000 prisoners have graduated, in 185 prisons and rehab facilities, with the help of 3,100 volunteers. 

    A 2020 National Police Foundation Independent research study compared the recidivism rate of those who go through Bridges to Life, to those who don’t. Program participants decreased their chances of recidivism by 30 percent, with a 62 percent reduction in people returning to prison for a violent crime. It’s a powerful program with proven results. 

    Advocates of the current prison industrial complex are content with restorative justice being a part, or fragment, within the failing system of warehousing. I strongly believe that it must become the system itself, and the way in which we resolve disputes within communities. 

    With programs that have worked, but have been disbanded or greatly scaled back — like “bring a lifer to work,” furloughs and parole — it wasn’t the public that cried out for mass incarceration. It was lobbyists, on behalf of Department of Corrections-backed unions, private prisons and corporations seeking to profit off of the prison industrial complex. 

    Case in point: There are over 4,100 private companies in the U.S. profiting off of mass incarceration, which is a multi-billion-dollar business. 

    Commercials, ads and propaganda have convinced people that the streets are full of monsters who are irredeemable, and worthy of death, life in prison or decades behind bars.  

    However, very few people are irretrievably broken. People, and most prisoners, naturally respond to incentives, treatment of unmet trauma and addiction, and investment into their future.  

    In 17 years of incarceration I’ve never had a major infraction. I’ve taken sexual and psychological exams, and am documented as a low risk to re-offend. I’ve already passed a parole hearing to determine my low risk level, and whether I qualify to begin the next segment of my sentence. While the parole hearing report states that I am “conditionally safe to release to the community,” it concludes, “do not release Mr. Olson, as he still has over 30 years left on his sentence…”

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    Because my sentence does not allow for meaningful release planning, I’ve instead begun to career and family plan while serving my sentence. I’m engaged to be married and have started writing and regularly producing a podcast called “The Abolition Christian.” I have a voice, and I intend to use it to make a difference in this world, first, to defend the vulnerable, and next, to expose injustice and advocate for change.  

    My dreams are simple: to own a house on a chunk of land, have a family, a garden, animals and be involved in a movement or ministry that contributes to my community.  

    Mass incarceration cannot be ignored. With our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters locked up, this is a problem that will only get worse if there is not significant structural change immediately.  

    This is one of the most urgent matters requiring action from our current generation. I believe they have both the courage and foresight to bring about a long overdue transformation, using the successful model of restorative justice to create a more just and equitable system. 

    How EndSARS protesters re-emerged to upend Nigerian politics

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    In October 2020, young Nigerians mobilized across the country against their inhumane treatment by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, or SARS, a division of the Nigerian police. The historic protests — organized by what came to be known as the EndSARS movement — turned bloody when security forces opened fire on unarmed activists at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos, killing and injuring dozens.

    Violent reprisals by hoodlums and perceived agents provocateurs across the country gave the Nigerian security forces the legal ground to violently repress protesters, which precipitated the end of the demonstrations. Since then, attempts to mobilize to demand justice for those brutalized by police and killed during the protests have been greeted with further government persecution.

    Given the danger they faced in the streets, demonstrators returned to Twitter, where the movement first began, and kept raising their voices for good governance and justice online. In June 2021, to silence their campaign, the government banned the use of Twitter, which lasted for seven months.  

    At that point the movement appeared dead, but activists found a new avenue to call for change during the build up to the 2023 general elections. To push for a new government that would meet their demands, they helped start the Obidient movement, which made them a major force in Nigeria politics.

    During the pre-election campaigns, this new generation of Nigerian youth, also known as the Soro Soke, or Speak Up, generation, made it clear that if they could unite, they had the numbers to overthrow the current political order run by a few old and corrupt men. This old guard had allegedly ordered the security forces to shoot at them during the EndSARS protests.

    About eight months before the elections, Peter Obi, the former governor of Anambra State and a well-known sympathizer of the EndSARS movement, announced that he would run as the presidential candidate of the Labour Party. The party aims to promote and defend social democratic principles and ideals to achieve social justice, progress and unity. However, since it was formed over two decades ago, the party has never threatened the major parties that dominate Nigerian politics — winning only one governorship.

    Peter Obi surrounded by supporters. (Twitter/@TheOfficialPOMA)

    Peter Obi joined the party on May 27, 2022, greatly boosting its membership and support. He helped draft the party’s 62-page manifesto and projected himself as an agent of change ready to tackle social, political and economic injustice.

    Leading #EndSARS activists saw an opportunity to use Obi’s run to change the political system and open the space for ordinary people to take power. As a play on his name, they created the Obidient movement, believing that he was the best vehicle to bring about good governance and meet their demands.

    Becoming a contender

    The movement gathered support with tactics similar to those used by #EndSARS. There were lively discussions on the internet about the best approach to pull off the biggest political upset in Nigerian history. They ran targeted YouTube ads and hosted live conversations on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, among other events, to get people to register and vote.

    Twitter became the most powerful social media tool used by activists to build momentum for the movement. Twitter Spaces were organized to attract educated young Nigerians. One conversation hosted by Modupe “Moe” Odele, a well-known social media influencer and tech lawyer, attracted over 60,000 viewers and an average of 5,000 listeners per minute for more than three hours. They discussed various strategies, including how to break language barriers, build a mass movement of volunteers, leverage voter data and information and mobilize support for other candidates in the Labour Party.

    Value Driven Leadership, a group of professionals dedicated to changing Nigeria’s political environment, even developed a mobile app called Obidient Townhall Platform, to mobilize supporters. 

    The movement’s savvy use of social media to mobilize support for the party was criticized by opposition parties who argued that elections cannot be won online. However, the Obidient’s social media campaign proved them wrong, leveraging young people to organize their followers and building serious momentum for the party.

    A Obi supporter door knocks ahead of the election in February. (Twitter/@vsntongs)

    The majority of young Nigerians came to view Peter Obi as a “third force” and the candidate for anyone opposed to the current elite. In addition to their use of digital and analog media, Obidients built a community of supporters across the country through grassroots mobilization. They formed groups of canvassers and voters who engaged locals in the streets and marketplaces and went door-knocking for the Labour Party. At the same time, volunteers worked to overcome linguistic and religious barriers and enhance Obi’s appeal across the country.

    They also organized political rallies, marches, comedy skits, speeches and other events. These helped increase awareness about the party, attract millions of voters and successfully mitigate an increase in election violence. The campaign turned Obi into a serious contender for the presidency.

    Changing the political landscape

    Two main political parties have dominated Nigeria since 1999. Their regimes have been marked by corruption, socioeconomic inequality, increasing poverty and political terrorism that has claimed many lives.

    Elections in the country have long been characterized by violence. In the buildup of the 2023 elections, at least 100 deaths were recorded, and no less than 39 died during the national elections. Police officers, elected officials, hired thugs, voters and even an unnamed staff member of the Independent National Electoral Commission were among those killed during the presidential and governorship elections that were held on Feb. 25 and March 18.

    The movement undermined the culture of violence during elections through rallies, protests, marches, walkouts and speeches. This helped debunk the idea that the use of violence is necessary to outshine political opposition. Despite violent attacks on the Labour Party supporters, they were able to withstand repression from machete and gun-wielding thugs sponsored by the opposition, who have long built their organization through violence.

    In the official count for the presidential election, Obi came in third place with over six million votes — a shocking result for a movement that started only eight months prior. The party won 11 out of 36 states and the federal capital territory, Abuja ­, as well as 40 seats in the National Assembly. And in the March 18 gubernatorial elections, the party won Abia state and several seats in the state house of assembly across the country.

    However, the technology deployed to accredit voters and transmit election results from polling units malfunctioned, which disenfranchised many Obi supporters and created room for rigging. Violent attacks on members of the Labour Party and electoral malpractices also affected the results.

    Obidients protest against election rigging. (Twitter/@CNWAOKOBIAJNR)

    The alleged rigging by the Independent National Electoral Commission, a body responsible for the conduct of elections in Nigeria, in favor of Bola Tinubu, the ruling party’s candidate for president, has created widespread suspicion about the electoral process. Disgruntled political parties such as the Labour Party and People’s Democratic Party have sought legal redress. Activists, civil society organizations and others have continued to protest the presidential result.

    The Labour Party has been granted the right to inspect electoral materials and are contesting the outcomes of the presidential election and the governorship elections in several states. They are disputing the election results in court, and are determined to not let electoral fraud decide the election, as it has in the past. This has continued to raise citizens’ awareness that political parties should be held accountable when they engage in electoral malpractices.

    As the Labour Party contests the results of the elections, the newly-elected lawmakers — eight senators and 34 House of Representatives members — have been charged by the leadership of the party to ensure quality representation and champion policies and programs that will benefit all Nigerians.

    At the same time, with members everywhere — in the entertainment industry, soccer, churches and mosques, academic institutions, media and civil society organizations — the Obidient movement is here to stay.

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    The movement altered the practice of vote buying and made it possible for candidates to run for office without needing to spend such large sums of money. This leveled the political playing field and allowed the average Nigerian to run for office and win. It has also opened the political landscape — allowing ordinary people a forum to voice their complaints and call for political change — and disproven the rationale behind the ruthless and self-serving political “godfatherism” that backs candidates to pilfer the nation’s wealth.

    The people are no longer required to choose between two political parties that have failed to fulfil their campaign promises. Many EndSARS protesters and others who seek change have found solace in the Obidient movement, making the Labour Party a powerful third force in Nigerian politics.

    Ultimately, EndSARS’ resurgence in a new form offers an important lesson for organizers: When a movement is on the verge of losing its voice, building a chain of resistance with a political party that shares its vision can be the saving grace.

    How cleverly subversive nicknames for China’s president fuel dissent

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    On March 10, 2023, Xi Jinping was unanimously elected president of the People’s Republic of China. With this third mandate, the most ever for a Chinese president, he now occupies a similar standing in history to Chairman Mao, who ruled for 27 years.

    To outsiders, Xi’s reign may look uncontested, but there are signs of growing resistance within China. In just the last six months, there were anti-Xi banners hung over a major Beijing thoroughfare and a series of highly-impactful street marches against Xi’s zero-COVID policy.

    Even before these recent outbursts, Chinese people have found ways to express their dissatisfaction with Xi. To avoid government censorship and imprisonment — or worse — dissidents in China developed a creative tactic: They began using nicknames to refer to, and critique their president. According to the censorship log leaked by the social media app Xiaohongshu in 2020, 564 words were considered “sensitive” by the Chinese government when referring to Xi.

    These nicknames are cleverly subversive variations of Xi’s name, oftentimes pointing to his appearance, actions or history — and going against the image that he wants for himself. The efforts to suppress their usage reveal the extreme lengths the government is willing to go to in order to preserve its hegemony. Just as importantly, though, the nicknames serve as inspiration for further dissent, exemplifying the Chinese people’s unwavering pursuit of free participation in politics and their resistance to oppression.

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    1. Diao Jinping (刁近平)

    Xi got his first well-known nickname even before he was elected president. In an article published on Nov. 20, 2010 by the state broadcaster China Central Television, or CCTV, Xi Jinping (习近平) is erroneously called Diao Jinping (刁近平), a supposed “mistake” that any careful reader could find and spread.

    Most likely, this “error” was an intentional jab by Xi’s political enemies, as it carries a hidden meaning. The character Diao (刁) is quite similar to the surname Xi (习) with a dot removed. Diao (刁) means “cunning, overly picky eaters,” and it is very often paired with other words, such as Diaomin (刁民), which means “unruly people,” or Diaonan (刁难), “making things difficult.” In essence, by calling him Diaomin, the article was lowering him from the upper class to the underclass. Being seen as unruly was not something Xi — then the country’s vice president — wanted attached to his image.

    If Xi’s political enemies did plant the nickname in CCTV, it wasn’t their only “mistake.” Later they misnamed Premier Wen Jiabao (温家宝) as Wen Jiashi (温家室), which means “Wen family,” seemingly to point out that he owed his position to his family’s influence. Knowing CCTV’s rigor when reporting on Chinese officials, it’s difficult to accept this as a simple error. Ultimately, this small ploy in the partisan struggle shows that Xi’s ascension to the presidency was not frictionless. From the start, people have opposed him and even continue to use the nickname — even though CCTV has stopped.

    2. Xi Winnie

    In 2013, President Xi was nicknamed Xi Winnie on social media because some believe he looked like the character Winnie the Pooh. Back then, the new president’s politics and personal character were not fully known by most Chinese — so there was no hatred or malice behind the nickname. Winnie the Pooh was popular and widely considered cute. The use of the nickname was meant to show the people’s cordial and friendly attitudes toward Xi.

    However, in July 2017, the authorities in China decided to delete everything about Winnie the Pooh. Then, in April 2020, someone on pingcong.rocks, a social media site that has been banned in mainland China, wrote that, “Xi Winnie is a man who wants to be an emperor. Being compared to the cute Pooh may have a great advantage in becoming a president, but it has become a huge stain on a man who hopes to rule the world forever.” It was then that some people who previously held him in high esteem — and who were not too politically minded — first began to realize how controlling Xi could be, how he wanted to project his own perfect image without challenge, and how little respect he had for free speech. While other nicknames are now preferred over Xi Winnie in China, it has become the most common nickname associated with Xi in Western countries — thanks in part to mentions in media like “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.”

    In 2013, during a appearance among everyday people, Xi ordered a popular type of steamed stuffed bun.

    3. Xi Baozi (习包子)

    Like many politicians with unstable political positions, Xi Jinping also wanted to establish a friendly image to increase the support of the people. In an article on Dec. 28, 2013, CCTV reported, “Xi Jinping Queued up to Buy Baozi (包子) and Chatted With the Citizens While Eating.” Baozi (包子) are cheap steamed stuffed buns that are preferred by the general public. So his decision to eat Baozi could be seen as a photo-op, helping him win the favor of the masses.

    The only articles still available where he is shown caring for the elderly and living a simple life were published between late 2012 to mid-2014. After 2014, there is practically no record of him eating ordinary meals — perhaps because he no longer needed such reporting to connect with everyday people.

    By the end of 2013, after the baozi stunt, there were in fact people questioning, as the BBC reported, whether Xi’s friendly approach to the people was just a deliberate show. They became skeptical, and out of that came the new nickname, Xi Baozi. Baozi is also a common folk saying, referring to people who “swallow their voices,” who are gutless and will not fight back when they are bullied. This nickname essentially calls Xi a coward.

    Then came the related derivative word, Baozilouxian (包子露馅). It refers to the leaky stuffing inside the bun. This nickname came about after the Panama Papers leak in 2016 revealed the assets hidden overseas by politicians and the rich and powerful, including Xi’s brother-in-law Deng Jiagui.

    Two years later, another way of saying it had emerged, Baozilouxian (包子露宪). It has the same pronunciation as the earlier one, but more than just “leaked secrets,” it means the constitution has been exposed and broken. This was in March 2018, when representatives to the National People’s Congress almost unanimously voted on a constitutional amendment to remove term limits for the president, opening the way for Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely.

    These two incidents were enough to make more people less enthusiastic about Xi and the Chinese Communist Party. But due to strict government censorship, people were prevented from effectively voicing their dissatisfaction or fully grasping the meaning of such an amendment. As a result, mass uprising in China were impossible at that time. However, a portion of those who knew the truth continued to use Xi Baozi, while others chose to invent new nicknames to voice their dissatisfaction in online conversations, carefully avoiding censorship.

    4. Xi Dada (习大大)

    Shortly after the nickname Xi Baozi appeared, and before the Panama Papers were leaked, Xi earned a nickname he was very happy with, Xi Dada (习大大). It appeared on Sept. 9, 2014, when a teacher asked him, while visiting a classroom, “May I call you Xi Dada?” to which President Xi answered, “Yes!” Unlike the other nicknames, he embraced this one.

    Dada (大大) mimics the babbling of a baby and is translated to Papa/Papi. The teacher’s asking to call him dada was a sign of the people-friendly image he created by using the Chinese media to win over many people. Like a father he positions himself to be a protector for the oppressed through his aggressive anti-corruption drive, although some saw it as a selective campaign to weed out political opponents.

    With the approval and promotion by the government, Xi Dada was the most widely used nickname both in official media and social media for a long time. But it all went sour when the Panama Papers leaked and the National People’s Congress amended the constitution. The nickname fell out of popularity. Xi in turn avoided using it, so as to not arouse the people’s disgust. Or, maybe, he no longer needed to project a caring father image.

    Quan Ping’s selfie wearing the Xitler T-shirt he created.

    5. Xitler

    On Oct. 1, 2016, a citizen, Quan Ping, was arrested and charged with inciting subversion of state power. The court cited his Facebook and Twitter posts as evidence, along with a photo of him wearing a T-shirt that included several nicknames, including the earlier-cited Xi Baozi and two others: Da Sabi (大撒逼) and Xitler. The former means “big idiot,” while the latter is of course an allusion to Hitler. It’s a straight up insult.

    Since the evidence cited at the trial is sealed as a private court document, it cannot be confirmed. Therefore, the T-shirt might not have been the direct reason for Quan’s arrest and the 18-month sentence he received. What is certain is that Chinese officials acknowledged the nicknames’ existence while also making it clear that using them is a punishable offense.

    6. Xi Jinping (习禁评)

    The Chinese Communist Party has become more extreme in its control of speech during Xi’s presidency. The monitoring of online speech, the flagging of sensitive words, and the erasure of comments on online forums happen frequently. In response to this crackdown, social media users came up with a new nickname, Xi Jinping (习禁评). It sounds exactly like Xi’s full name, but there is a difference in the characters that gives it an ironic meaning. The characters Jinping (禁评) in this nickname mean “to prohibit comments,” so Xi Jinping (习禁评) is “Xi prohibits comments.”

    7. Xi (席)

    Another contextual nickname is simply Xi (席). The pronunciation of this character is exactly the same as that of the president’s surname, Xi. However, Xi (席) means a Chinese bamboo mat, seat or a position. Some use the nickname Xi (席) as an object and analogy to express personal opinions.

    The following is a comment posted on Xiaohongshu: “My mat (Xi-席) is old, of poor quality and has been on the bed for over 10 years, but it is not completely broken. I really want to cut the mat and get a new one.” In this passage, many key words indicate that the commenter’s target is President Xi. “Poor quality” and “I really want to cut the mat and get a new one,” indicate dissatisfaction with his reign. “Old” and “has been on the bed for over 10 years” refers to the time that Xi has been in power.

    In China, “Cut the mat” is a historical allusion to draw a line with someone. Therefore, the last sentence also signals that Xi is at fault for the deep chasm such separation will cause.

    8. Exi (恶习)

    Maobing Yangcheng Exi (毛病养成恶习), meaning “Defect create vice,” first appeared online in 2014. Mao (毛) is Chairman Mao’s surname, and Bing (病) literally means disease, E (恶) means evil, and Xi (习) is president Xi’s surname. There is also a progressive relationship between these two words: Maobing (毛病, defect) comes first, and Exi (恶习, vice) follows. Therefore, Maobing Yangcheng Exi can be interpreted as “the disease of Mao creates the evil of Xi.”

    A similar sentence Maobing Bugai, Exi Nanchu (毛病不改,恶习难除) means “it is hard to eliminate the evil of Xi without rectifying the disease of Mao.” This nickname serves as a warning, revealing that without limiting Xi’s power, China will suffer as it did during Chairman Mao’s dictatorship.

    One can easily understand why such sentences are popular. There are lots of similarities between Mao and Xi. For example, much like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Xi’s draconian zero-Covid strategy was sold as something that would benefit the Chinese people. Yet, as the Urumqi fire protests showed, many had their doubts about the positive effects of barricaded gates and large-scale centralized quarantines. Some believed it was a ploy to control the people and to avoid any mass gathering that might pose a threat to President Xi as he was sought his third controversial re-election at the end of 2022.

    Beijing’s Sitong Bridge draped with banners telling Chinese people to “go on strike.” (Twitter)

    Sitong Bridge protest and Urumqi marches

    China’s heavy-handed censorship system makes it difficult to consistently discuss a topic or unite with people who have similar views online. This is in part why some outsiders might be pessimistic when it comes to the possibility of change. However, the constant stream of new nicknames — and their complex, coded meanings — is proof for hope.

    What’s more, the internet is not the only battlefield. Even with the possibility of harsh repression, there are still brave citizens who are engaging daily in the fight against totalitarianism. By using the nicknames to voice their opposition and seeing the wide responses from others, some social media users have come to see that they are not alone, and indeed they form a large community. This recognition is encouraging and galvanizing enough to give them the confidence to move their protests from online to the streets.

    Three days before the Chinese Communist Party convened its 20th congress, a Chinese man, Peng Lifa, draped Beijing’s Sitong Bridge with protest banners bearing messages that were visible from one of the city’s busiest transportation routes. It expressed dissatisfaction with the government and called for students and workers to strike and remove the “dictator and state traitor Xi Jinping.”

    A month later, on Nov. 24, 2022, a fire broke out in a quarantined residential building in Urumqi, Xinjiang, killing 10 people. Heartbroken and angry citizens questioned the official death toll and whether the lockdown led to the victims’ deaths. Subsequent indifferent official responses and their irresponsible attitude further aroused people’s anger. Eventually, the citizens spontaneously gathered and rushed to Urumqi City Hall. Students and citizens in different cities also launched marches. The protests spread to 207 universities and 24 cities within China and were later dubbed the White Paper movement because people were holding up blank white paper, representing what they wanted to say but couldn’t.

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    The move from online dissidence to the streets took tremendous courage — and the togetherness emboldened people further, as some marchers even chanted, “Xi Jinping, step down!” Although remarkable in its brazenness, such escalation seems only natural. After deploying clever rhetorical and language skills to devise nicknames for President Xi, the most powerful and natural conclusion of such efforts was to call him by his full name, Xi Jinping. This showed a complete opposition to the government and disregard of censorship.

    Ultimately, the government caved in — at least partially. Many city officials immediately lifted their zero-COVID policies. The government blamed the protesters for the surge of COVID infections and called them actors influenced by foreign states. All the while, the police were arresting the leaders of the movement.

    Yet, despite the ongoing repression — and Xi’s continued, unremitting dominance on the global stage — it would be a mistake to think of China as a hopeless case. The Chinese people have seen the power of their creativity and courage, and there’s no telling what that might inspire next.

    The Doomsday Clock and me

    Frida Berrigan protesting nuclear weapons on Tax Day outside the Federal Building in Baltimore in 1979.

    This article was originally published by TomDispatch.

    I’m not a TikTok person. I’m too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It’s nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It’s meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon — to the proverbial “midnight.”

    When it comes to TikTok content providers, I wouldn’t normally think of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It’s a deeply serious organization founded in 1945 by physicists in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The clock was invented two years later by landscape artist Martyl Langsdorf as a way of graphically illustrating the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. In its 76 years of existence, its hands have been moved 25 times, but never more ominously than in January of this year!

    And no need to look further than TikTok to see what happened. Amid all the tweens trying to jumpstart the next viral craze, a 30-second video features five representatives of the Bulletin‘s science and security board frozen in place as a voice intones: “We move the clock forward, the closest it has ever been to midnight.” Then two of them pull a cloth off it and add, “It is now 90 seconds to midnight.”

    On TikTok, versions of this video got hundreds of thousands of “likes” and thousands of comments. Mind you, that’s a blip compared to the videos of even minor celebrities. Still, I found myself scrolling through the comments, many of them versions of “Does this mean I don’t have to pay my mortgage/bills/ taxes?” Others had lines like “Someone call the Avengers” or asked if it had anything to do with Taylor Swift’s Midnights album. This being the Internet, there was all too much cursing and all too many oblique emojis, as well as people poking fun at the awkward staging and long stretch of silence in the video.

    Mixed with such inanity were expressions of genuine fear, confusion, and distress over the possible immanence of nuclear war. That is, of course, what the clock, as a salient piece of public art, is supposed to do: generate conversation, spark inquiry, and lead to action. As artist Sam Heydt observes, the Doomsday Clock should remind us that “the edge is closer than we think. In a time marked by mass extinction, diminishing resources, global pandemic, and climate change, the future isn’t what it used to be.”

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    Tick, tock indeed!

    One hallmark of TikTok is reaction videos where creators split the screen to show their response. In one, a young white woman reacts this way: “Are we supposed to be scared? My generation is never going to have retirement, never going to own a home. I’m living in a van.” I get it: there’s so much that seems more immediate in our world: school shootings, police violence, bank collapses, and inflation, to name just a few. Who even has time to notice now that the future isn’t what it used to be?

    But embedded somewhere in any of those in-your-face issues, whether we know it or not, are nuclear weapons, threatening the end to it all. Certainly, the Pentagon knows it, since (whether you’ve noticed or not), it continues to invest your tax dollars in nuclear weapons, big time. Between 2019 and 2028, the United States is on track to spend at least $494 billion on its nuclear forces, or about $50 billion a year, according to a Congressional Budget Office assessment. Analysts actually estimate that Pentagon plans to “modernize” — yes, that’s the term — its nuclear arsenal could cost you as much as $1.5 to $2 trillion in the coming decades.

    The clock has never been so close to midnight and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is using every tool at its disposal to keep clanging the alarm bell. It even has a Doomsday Clock playlist on Spotify, while its 90-second clock announcement was briefly front-page news at the Washington Post (the front of their Science section, anyway) and the New York Times. Still, we live in such an atomized (excuse me for that!) and polarized media environment that it’s increasingly hard to penetrate the noise cloud.

    Nuclear weapons, once a top-of-the-line issue for so many Americans, have faded into, at best, a background hum. So, I wonder, what happens after the Doomsday Clock reaches midnight? What’s next for that metaphor? Or as the seconds are shaved away amid a war in Ukraine that could always go nuclear, is it time for an entirely new metaphor, something (excuse me again!) more explosive?

    Then, of course, there’s that other great danger to us all, climate change, which, it seems, doesn’t even need a metaphor. The alarm of raging wildfires, unbelievable floods, megadroughts, fiercer storms, fast-melting glaciers, and disappearing rivers leaves the very idea of metaphors in the dust. Climate scientists are blunt to the point of bruising on this. What part of “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all” don’t you understand? That, of course, is what the recently released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserted with “high confidence.” Tick, tock, indeed!

    Come to think of it, maybe nuclear weapons don’t need a new metaphor either. After all, we already have the mushroom cloud, the haunted eyes of that child in Hiroshima, the shadow of a dead person left on that rock, and the unnatural silence that followed the wall of sound and flame incinerating thousands of human beings in an instant. That’s no exaggeration. That was Hiroshima in 1945.

    In 2023, when we consume news and images in almost real-time, it’s hard to imagine that the now-iconic images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were censored and treated as contraband by our government at the time. It wasn’t until 1952 that the searing images of photographer Yoshito Matsushige were finally published, first in the Japanese magazine Asahi Gurafu and then in Life magazine. And there’s so much that none of us will ever see. After all, Matsushige spent 10 hours walking through his devastated city of Hiroshima but took only seven pictures. “It was such a cruel site,” he said later, “that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter.”

    It’s three minutes to midnight and you want to do what?

    Previous Coverage
  • Nuclear weapons ruined my life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way
  • I recently met a group of college students from all over the country. To my shock, none of them seemed to have heard of nuclear weapons before I mentioned them. I couldn’t relate. I’m no Martyl Langsdorf, but thanks to my family, I’ve grown up with the Doomsday Clock in a way few other people have. I don’t remember a day of my life that I haven’t thought about nukes and this country’s ability to literally obliterate humanity.

    Some dads say things like “money doesn’t grow on trees” when their kids ask for permission to see a film. My dad was Phil Berrigan, a nuclear abolitionist and peace activist. So, he would say: “It’s three minutes to nuclear midnight and you want to go to the movies?” Imagine living as if your personal choices made a difference when it came to nuclear war. That’s certainly how my parents and their friends in the Catholic Left lived and how a small subculture continues to live today.

    My mom and dad, Elizabeth McAlister and Philip Berrigan, a former nun and a priest,refused to pay “war taxes,” trespassed onto military installations to protest our world-ending ways, held vigils at weapons manufacturing plants, and protested during the stockholder meetings of giant weapons-making corporations, while taking care of the victims of skewed U.S. policies by organizing soup lines and opening their doors to the unhoused.

    By reminding me of where the hands on the Doomsday Clock stood at any moment, my dad helped me integrate concerns about nuclear weapons into my daily life. He helped me measure out the energy I had for any worry. I mean, why fork over $8 (now $28?) at a movie box office to get scared by a horror story on the celluloid screen when the real world is scary enough for free?

    76 years of the Doomsday Clock in 25 moves

    So, nuclear timekeeping started in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight.

    By 1949, as the Cold War heated up and the Soviet Union got the bomb, the hands on that clock were moved to three minutes to midnight, code for distinctly too close! As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote after Russia exploded its first nuclear device, “We think that Americans have reason to be deeply alarmed and prepare for grave decisions.” The nuclear arms race was off and running. 

    In 1953, after the U.S. and the Soviets developed and tested massive hydrogen bombs, those hands were moved to two minutes.

    In 1960, sustained international cooperation and the successful negotiation of arms control treaties between the superpower rivals compelled the scientists to move the clock hands back to seven minutes to midnight.

    In 1963, in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis and the terror of near-nuclear war, the U.S. and USSR signed new agreements, ending atmospheric nuclear tests. The world sighed with relief as the clock was moved back to 12 minutes.

    But in 1968, as the Vietnam War fanned global tensions, the Soviets expanded their nuclear arsenal, and France and China both developed nuclear weapons, it was at seven minutes again.

    1969 brought another sigh of relief as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was signed and the nations with such weaponry committed to future nuclear disarmament talks. The clock inched back to 10 minutes.

    In 1972, when the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the disarmament agreement that came to be known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT, the clock made it to 12 minutes.

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    My life and the Doomsday Clock

    In 1974, however, India tested a nuclear device painfully code-named “Smiling Buddha” and that minute hand was moved to nine again. I was born just a few weeks before that Indian test, which spurred neighbor and rival Pakistan to launch its own nuclear program. By the following summer, my parents would carry my infant brother and me as they marched with friends, hauling full-sized replicas of the nuclear weapons that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the streets of Washington, every day for almost a week to mark the 30th anniversary of the atomic bombings.

    In 1981, as the Soviets continued their war in Afghanistan and Americans elected Ronald Reagan as president, the clock ominously moved to four minutes. I was seven and my brother six when our father was sentenced to 10 years in jail (later reduced) for his part in a 1980 action. A group that called itself the Plowshares Eight had walked into the General Electric Space Technology Center in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, with the early morning rush of workers. There, they symbolically disarmed some model nuclear weapons. Their trial was later made into a movie starring Martin Sheen (with my dad playing himself).

    In 1984, the clock was moved to three minutes to midnight as President Reagan pumped money into Star Wars technology as a way to win a future nuclear war. Just a month after I turned 10, my mom went on trial for her Plowshares action a year earlier at Griffiss Air Force base in upstate New York. That summer, my family and their friends also tried to maintain a round-the-clock presence at the Pentagon concourse. 

    In 1988, the Bulletin‘s scientists reset the Doomsday Clock at six minutes to midnight as the work of a growing global antinuclear movement started to deliver dividends in agreements to cut back the number of deployed long-range nuclear weapons. That summer, when I was 14, we built a rough, shed-like house and brought it to the Pentagon Parade Ground to call for “homes, not bombs.” We stayed all night and watched the rats take over the Pentagon grounds as it grew dark.

    By 1990, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the clock was readjusted to 10 minutes to midnight, the furthest from disaster since 1968.

    In 1991, in the wake of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and began to cut back their nuclear arsenals as the Soviet Union faded into history. Appropriately enough, the Bulletin moved the clock to a breathtaking 17 minutes to midnight, writing: “the illusion that tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are a guarantor of national security has been stripped away.”

    In 1995, a close call and human error led the scientists to nudge the clock to 14 minutes and, in 1998, nine minutes, while calling on the United States, Russia, and other nuclear states to “fully commit” to “control the spread of nuclear weapons.”

    In 2002, in response to the 9/11 terror attacks and growing concerns about loose nuclear materials, the science and security board adjusted the clock to seven minutes. My father died that December, after a lifetime of anti-war activism. He spent the last year of his life trying to jumpstart a “national strike” for nuclear disarmament.  

    In 2007, after North Korea tested its first nuclear device, the Bulletin moved the clock ominously to five minutes to midnight and the science and security board added human-made climate change to the doomsday formula. In that announcement, they wrote, “As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and at the onset of an era of unprecedented climate change, our way of thinking about the uses and control of technologies must change… The clock is ticking.”

    In 2010, the Bulletin inched the minute hand back up to six, thanks to the Copenhagen accord on climate change and new negotiations between the U.S. and Russia on arms reductions.

    Between six minutes and five minutes to nuclear midnight, I got married, pledging to work for the abolition of such weaponry with my husband, who grew up in southeastern Connecticut, protesting at submarine christenings and launches at a U.S. naval base on the Thames River.  

    Thanks to new North Korea aggressiveness and general global intransigence on climate-change commitments, 2012 saw a modest drop to five minutes. That was a “time” that took on a new kind of urgency for me after the Sandy Hook school shootings that killed six teachers and 20 kids about the same age as my dear stepdaughter in nearby Newtown, Connecticut. Her school beefed up security in response, checking IDs and barring parents from the building. Every day, when I carried my newborn son to pick up his sister, I had to go through an elaborate process at dismissal time in a state of near panic, flinching at any loud noise and feeling both the fragility of my kindergartener’s life and the threat to all life from nuclear weapons. After all, the Sandy Hook killer had but a small arsenal compared to what the United States threatened the world with every day.   

    By 2015, Russia and the U.S. had both announced new spending to “modernize” their nuclear arsenals and, in climate terms, it was the hottest year on record. The Bulletin ominously moved the hands of the clock to three minutes to midnight for the first time since the Cold War year of 1984.

    By then, I was the mother of two toddlers, born in 2012 and 2014, and my stepdaughter was 9. Those three wonders helped me stay focused on the beauty of each day and the extraordinary web of life that the growing nuclear arsenals on this planet eternally hold hostage. I recommitted myself then to taking the nuclear threat seriously, but without hectoring my kids about the Doomsday Clock the way my dad had done with me.

    In 2017, the Bulletin moved those clock hands 30 seconds closer to midnight, its first half-minute move ever in response to President Donald Trump’s inflammatory nuclear rhetoric, soaring Pentagon budgets, and new threats to the global climate.

    A year later, in 2018, we lost another 30 seconds and the clock hit two minutes to midnight, as the Bulletin pointed out that international diplomacy had been “reduced to name-calling, U.S.-Russia relations featured more conflict than cooperation, the Iran deal was imperiled, and greenhouse gas emissions rose anew.”

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  • How do you tell the kids that Grandma is in jail for resisting nuclear weapons?
  • Though no longer a kid, I still found myself watching a parent being hauled off to jail. This time, it was my mother, then 79, arrested for trespassing with six friends at the Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia in a move to symbolically disarm the Trident nuclear submarines there.

    In 2020, the Bulletin’s clock moved to 100 seconds to midnight, while citing the two existential dangers of climate change and nuclear weapons in its press statement.

    Over the next two years, the magazine did something new. It didn’t change the hands on the clock but issued press releases about why they remained at 100 seconds. Meanwhile, in 2021, the kids and I helped make 68 signs thanking each of the nations that had adopted the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. My kids poured their hearts into those works of art, adorning them with silver paint and sparkles. That treaty celebration day in New London where we live was cold and windy and the two little ones were almost hidden behind their signs, while they asked me lots of questions about Honduras and the island of Nauru which I gamely tried to answer without resorting to Wikipedia. An adage attributed to Mark Twain came to my mind then: “War is how Americans learn geography.” I smiled, thinking that my kids were learning geography through protest and peacemaking.

    And then, this January, the Bulletin‘s science and security board again shaved the time by seconds, announcing that it was now 90 seconds to midnight.

    What’s next (or do I mean last)?

    In the 76 years since its creation, the minute and second hands of the Doomsday Clock have moved 25 times, back and forth — tick, tock, tick, tock — from 17 minutes to midnight at its furthest from imminent danger to the present 90 seconds to midnight. What lies on the other side of midnight?

    On a normal clock, 12:01 would simply begin a new day, a new chance to learn from the past and adjust your path to the future. The question now is whether such a 12:01, a future without the Doomsday Clock, without the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change is even imaginable.

    Why Tortuguita’s murder is only the tip of the iceberg

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    Few people outside of Atlanta knew about the police training facility nicknamed “Cop City” when plans were approved in 2021, but all that changed in January when Manual Esteban Páez Terán, known as “Tortuguita,” was murdered by police. 

    Their death launched a torrent of news coverage, including an article by NBC stating that police had never killed an environmental activist in the U.S. before Tortuguita. That may be true, but the U.S. has long been complicit in the death of activists abroad through its involvement in resource extraction and training police and military personnel. 

    One such country is Honduras, which had the highest number of killings of land defenders per capita in the world in 2019. There, in the community of Azacualpa, land defenders are fighting against extractivism, despite the real dangers they face. Their struggle and the Stop Cop City movement may seem unrelated, but they are deeply interconnected and both in need of international solidarity to win.

    ‘A power that we have to confront’

    For 200 years, the cemetery in Azacualpa, Honduras was the resting site of generations of Chorti people, descendants of the Indigenous Mayans. But in January 2022, in the middle of the night, the Canadian-based mining company Aura Minerals destroyed the sacred burial site to get at the gold beneath it. In the morning, the people woke up to find the bodies of their loved ones gone — to where, they still have no idea. 

    The community of Azacualpa is unified under the Committee for People Affected by MINOSA, the subsidiary of Aura Minerals that has operated the San Andrés mine in Azacualpa since 2009 and sold extracted gold abroad to companies that include Asahi Refining and Auramet International, both of which have refineries in the United States. 

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    The committee, along with Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective and the human rights law firm Bufete Estudios para la Dignidad, sent a joint letter at the end of January to Asahi and Auramet to express concerns over their continued business with the mining company and urging them to immediately cut ties. 

    “When MINOSA took over, their intention was very clear from the very beginning that they were going to destroy the cemetery,” said Jalileh Garcia, a recent graduate of Oxford University and a Honduran native who wrote her master’s dissertation on the mine. “They’re destroying the links, these shared connections that people have between the living and the dead.”

    The letter follows a long history of resistance by the community and its supporters. In 2019, human rights organizations brought a case before the Supreme Court of Honduras, which declared that the cemetery was cultural patrimony of the Indigenous community and could not be excavated. In 2020, Aura Minerals fought back by getting a local judge to authorize excavation of the cemetery even though it defied the Supreme Court ruling.

    “This just shows that MINOSA functions as a power that is over the state of Honduras, over the authorities of Honduras, and that is a power that we have to confront,” said Pedro Mejia, a lawyer with the firm Bufete Estudios para la Dignidad, which has represented the community since 2018. 

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    The people of Azacualpa have not only used the law but also their bodies to resist the mine. In 2014, the community blockaded the entrance of the mine after learning of the company’s plans to expand into the cemetery, a violation of a 2012 agreement made with municipal authorities and representatives to relocate the mine. A few weeks later, military and police retaliated with beatings, tear gas and arrests. In 2015, the community tried again, prompting more arrests.

    The company has also tried to divide the community by causing rifts among families. To get families to sign off on the exhumation of their loved ones, they offered the equivalent of thousands of dollars, a not insignificant amount for a rural community. All it took was the approval of one person, even if the rest of the family was opposed.

    “They took advantage of our community’s poverty and offered money in exchange for the exhumations,” said Yessica Rodríguez, a 22-year-old activist who was born in Azacualpa. “At no time did we want to sell our dignity, and yet they violated our rights.”

    Now that the cemetery is gone, Garcia says the people are demoralized, but they continue to fight on behalf of the relatives they have lost.

    “You’re talking about community members who, because of their bonds with their dead loved ones, continue to resist,” Garcia said. “One man who was physically threatened said, ‘As long as I know that I defended my loved ones, you can kill me right here.’”

    The destruction of the cemetery occurred under former President Juan Orlando Hernández, whose presidency ended when he was arrested and extradited to the United States under charges of corruption and involvement in the drug trade. His successor, Xiomara Castro, assumed the presidency as the country’s first female president just days after the cemetery was destroyed. In March, she declared an end to open-pit mining, a commitment she has not yet upheld, though no new permits have been granted to companies like MINOSA.

    “We have to put pressure on her,” Rodríguez said, “so that one day we can achieve justice in our community.”

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    For Rodríguez, the fight is about defending the land for future generations. “In our community there are more than 200 areas where we could get water, but they have disappeared because of the contaminants like cyanide that the company uses, which get discharged into the rivers,” Rodríguez said. “If the mine destroys our population, our forests, then I believe that if tomorrow I have a child, he will not have a place to live, he will not have a place to grow his crops, he will not have a place to drink water.”

    ‘We need to work together’

    Between 2012 and 2021, Global Witness reported that more than 1,733 environmental activists were killed in countries across the world — an average of one person every two days. The narrative around these deaths is often focused on corruption, and the role of the Global North in putting a stop to these human rights atrocities. However, the U.S. is not only complicit in these deaths by buying gold from mines like the one in Azacualpa but it has also trained the perpetrators of these crimes.

    In 2016, a group of hitmen murdered Berta Cáceres, a Honduran environmental activist and leader known for opposing the building of a hydroelectric dam on a river sacred to the Indigenous Lenca people. Her murder was coordinated and carried out by men trained by the U.S. military — one at West Point and two at Fort Benning, the former site of the School of the Americas, or SOA, which trained Latin American soldiers and became known for the violent and repressive tactics carried out by its graduates. Fort Benning is also where Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd, started his career.

    That’s what makes Cop City, or as the Atlanta Police Foundation is calling it, the Public Safety Training Center, so alarming. The original plan for the new training facility involved military-grade training and explosives testing areas on 150 acres of forested land that once housed the Old Prison Farm. Now, after pressure from defenders of the South River Forest, the plan has been scaled down to 85 acres and it will no longer involve explosives testing. However, it will retain elements such as a firing range, “shoot house” and burn building.

    Being just 100 miles from Fort Benning, activists say the facility would only increase police violence in a state that already has the fourth highest incarceration rate in the world. “Cop City is the new School of the Americas,” the Stop Cop City movement tweeted in January.

    A School of the Americas Watch march to Ft. Benning in 2019. (Facebook/SOA Watch)

    Beyond the SOA’s complicity in human rights abuses and killings throughout Latin America, there’s also a legacy of international solidarity. In 1990, an organization called SOA Watch was formed in protest of the school, organizing die-ins, prayer vigils, blockades, and other forms of nonviolent direct action. In time, it became the largest grassroots Latin America solidarity organization in the U.S., working to challenge the belief that “land, resources and human rights are commodities that can be bought, stolen and destroyed.”

    Pedro Mejia, one of the lawyers representing Azacualpa, echoed this sentiment. He said that international solidarity is needed to “confront the extractivist neoliberal economic model, which allows companies like these to settle in territories without anyone’s permission, exercise violence against communities and take all the wealth of the people.”

    He also warned that movements and leaders should be on guard to prevent being co-opted or corrupted by outside organizations looking to fund a project and move on. Links with other organizations or communities can, on the other hand, provide some protection. “We, particularly as lawyers, can notify some human rights organizations about the risk to a community leader,” Mejia said, which can decrease or stop the threats they face.

    “There have always been employees at the mine who say to us, ‘If the company pays one day, so will you,’” Rodríguez said. “So that is why we always emphasize that if something were to happen to us, the mine is responsible.”

    The community knows that sending the letter co-signed by 60 civil society organizations to Asahi and Aurame in January is not enough to win back their land, and they continue to strategize over their next actions.

    On March 9, the Movement for Black Lives shared a futuristic newspaper titled “Black Liberation Times,” imagining a world 10 years after the defeat of Cop City and protection of the Weelaunee Forest. It describes the creation of a Tort Community Center, a community space named for Tortuguita, where people could take free classes, garden and take part in workforce development programs. It imagines families finding “play and joy” in the forest. 

    This is a vision that the people of Azacualpa can relate to. “These are not spaces where it’s just violence and suffering,” Garcia said. “The resistance is about creating a new future.”

    Inside the prisoner-led struggle to win education for all

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    Despite increasing recognition that prison education is a key tool for reducing crime, Washington State prisoners were recently forced to gather in a janitor’s closet to organize and facilitate college education for people incarcerated in several prisons across the state.

    They took this dramatic step because new official restrictions are jeopardizing a liberating, prisoner-led program known as Taking Education And Creating History, or TEACH. Organized by a handful of incarcerated people — including me — over a decade ago, TEACH’s goal is to democratize education for people with long sentences.

    Between community support and financial backing outside the correctional system, TEACH successfully circumvented the Department of Corrections, or DOC, policy of excluding long-term prisoners from education for much of its existence. Since 2013, over 300 incarcerated individuals across three state prisons have become college students.

    In a monumental breakthrough, legislation was passed in 2021 that turned TEACH into an official, DOC-recognized program. However, new threats to the life-saving program are leading prisoners to renew their fight for education for all.

    An investment worth making

    Men incarcerated at the Washington State Reformatory founded the Black Prisoners Caucus in 1972. Over the years, the caucus has done everything from drafting legislative bills to organizing fundraisers that support impoverished communities.

    Roughly a decade ago, members of the Black Prisoners Caucus decided to organize around a common complaint: that the Washington DOC does not prioritize people with sentences longer than seven years for higher education. Whenever prisoners mustered up the courage to do something more with their lives, their lengthy sentences excluded them from classes, a clear indication the DOC does not consider them worthy of educational investment.

    There are significant impacts to denying incarcerated people an education. In the absence of educational opportunities, the prison facility becomes a breeding ground for apathy and hopelessness, causing many prisoners to engage in prison politics and senseless acts of violence.

    Furthermore, as laws change, and some prisoners have their lengthy sentences overturned, prisoners are released back into their communities devoid of resources and tools to function in society. The domino effect has led to more crime, which has led to higher recidivism rates: a counterproductive approach to creating a safer society.

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    The Black Prisoners Caucus decided to create a workaround by developing an independently-funded education program. Without DOC funding, the administration couldn’t deny access to prisoners with long sentences seeking education.

    Incarcerated individuals at Clallam Bay reached out to representatives from both Evergreen and Seattle Central College, meetings were scheduled, and discussions began to center around the easiest way to provide education to those behind bars. Having nothing on hand but pen and paper, the prisoners and professors worked together through seminars and workshops. While professors offered their time to develop course curriculums, the prisoners put out posters and fliers, communicating TEACH’s vision in an attempt to attract more volunteers. The work was guided by a board of currently-incarcerated people at Clallam Bay, who voted Kimonti Carter as chairman.

    In its first year, between 2013 and 2014, incarcerated students flooded into classrooms, and with them came new ideas. While professors were teaching world literature and political economy, prisoners began creating their own curriculums and teaching themselves. Specific dates and times were scheduled for specific classes, student rosters were kept to manage attendance, and surveys were created to be sure the prisoners were getting their educational needs met. As the program gained popularity, additional organizations and professors began lining up to volunteer their time and resources.

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  • Prisoners reignite movement to end mass incarceration
  • Crucially, everything for the program was funded from the outside. Sponsors like The Village of Hope donated math books, dictionaries, folders, pencils and composition books. Lydia Barlow, founder of Fabians Fund, initially offered to donate scholarships to the program, expressing her passion to help incarcerated individuals after her brother committed suicide while in prison. But she was so inspired by the work that Fabian’s Fund ultimately became TEACH’s primary funder, covering the college tuition of every student enrolled in the program.

    In 2015, TEACH successfully implemented accredited courses through Seattle Central College — negotiating cheaper tuition for students by paying for classes in bulk. In 2016, the program received an $11,000 grant from the Social Justice Fund, enabling the program to provide more college courses to prisoners who sought to further their education.

    The program began to expand to new prisons, a rarity for programs not officially sanctioned by the Department of Corrections. With our sponsors traveling from one prison to another, speaking to prison administrators about the program, TEACH made its way into Washington Correction Center and Stafford Creek Correctional Center, in addition to Clallam Bay. Separate TEACH boards were developed for each specific prison.

    Although certain facilities have shown resistance, due to the preconception that the Black Prisoners Caucus would create racial conflict, TEACH and its sponsors had established enough credibility to gain backing from key members within DOC headquarters.

    By explaining the obvious benefits that TEACH provides to Washington’s prison system, TEACH sponsors persuaded DOC to permit monitored conference calls between board members in every facility where the Black Prisoners Caucus exists. The calls enabled TEACH to plan and organize collectively to meet every facility’s educational needs.

    Breaking down barriers

    Over seven years, TEACH has had an impact far beyond educational opportunity. “One of the most amazing aspects of developing TEACH was the family dynamic it created,” explained Derrick Jones, president of the Black Prisoners Caucus at Washington Correction Center. “Knowing that we were trying to produce educational opportunities for all prisoners, it enabled us to concentrate on the development of the program, which gave us a sense of togetherness.”

    Jones recounted how he witnessed prisoners endure violence from their racial groups for showing up to classes. “For a period of time,” he said, “prison politics threatened a number of white and Hispanic men for attending the TEACH program. Those who favored the prison status quo were offended that the TEACH program was run by Black men. In spite of the altercations, the prisoners-turned-students persistently pursued their education — even in the face of physical danger.”

    “I realize that I have the potential to be more than a gang member.”

    Progressively, TEACH began breaking down barriers between various racial and cultural groups — contradicting administrative beliefs that the Black Prisoners Caucus would further racial tension. Prisoners who would’ve never interacted with one another were now sitting at tables thumbing through books, while preparing for exams.

    When asked how TEACH has impacted the prison environment, Darrell Jackson, co-chair of the TEACH program at Washington Correction Center, said, “It has reduced the violence in prison, while creating a positive educational community for everyone — regardless of one’s crime, race or affiliation.” He added, “Those with lengthy sentences were given a sense of purpose, something that many are stripped of when they enter into prison.”

    Dakoda Collins’ feelings mirrored others in the program: TEACH altered the trajectory of his future.

    “I was 16 years old when I came to prison,” he said. “My entire focus was to promote gang activity. After being charged with murder, my spirit sunk into the possibility of never coming home. I felt dead with no worth, and for me, there was no point in changing. Now that I’m taking college courses and passing with over a 3.0 GPA, I realize that I have the potential to be more than a gang member. I found value in myself, something I wouldn’t have had apart from this program.”

    New challenges

    As TEACH grew, there was a desire for the program to be recognized by the DOC, which would bring benefits like priority access to classrooms as well as supplies and materials within the facility. The program would also be protected from getting disbanded by prison officials. So TEACH sponsors assisted Washington State legislators to pass Bill 1024, which added TEACH to DOC’s official educational policy in 2021, making those benefits a reality.

    Still, the program was greatly disrupted by the pandemic and DOC leadership changes later in 2021. With staff members refusing to comply with mandates placed on them as employees, many quit their jobs, leading the administration to lean heavily on prisoners to keep the facility operating. Without prison laborers, the facility’s food operations, laundry and maintenance could not function. Therefore, prisoners were forced to work, while the education building where classes were held was shut down. As a consequence, relationships between TEACH and its sponsors began to dwindle, and a major partnership that existed with Seattle Central College became uncertain.

    In spite of the fact that TEACH has generated tremendous breakthroughs over the course of its existence, one of the greatest challenges has been recapturing the stability it once had prior to the pandemic.

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    In early 2023, incarcerated members of TEACH became aware of a DOC memo of understanding released in October of 2022 prohibiting the program’s board members from meeting without a Black Prisoners Caucus sponsor.

    Although college classes were permitted to continue, the board would not be allowed to meet without a sponsor to supervise prisoners. The challenges felt insurmountable, but the program’s facilitators refused to cave.

    With our hands tied by this restriction, the board members shifted from conducting our meetings in a classroom, to conducting them in a janitor’s closet. Squeezed into a small space with mop buckets, dirty rags and cleaning supplies, the board members gathered on weekends to strategize on how to continue providing educational opportunities for those in prison.

    One member was given the task of generating a list of local colleges, another was delegated the responsibility of contacting professors who worked at the facility. Consequently, the TEACH program at Washington Corrections Center was able to enroll 32 students into Centralia College, this 2023 winter quarter.

    With Elizabeth Grant teaching sociology and Alisha Williams teaching intercultural communications, the program continues to reduce recidivism by providing educational opportunities to prisoners. Currently eight prisoners from Washington Correction Center alone are less than a semester away from graduating.

    Obtaining adequate technology, strong relationships with supporting colleges, and a bachelor’s degree pathway are all targets we aim to hit. Providing prisoners with access to valued resources, fair treatment, and an open door for higher education, is an investment worth making. Yes, there are times when the work feels taxing, and the fight against a system designed for prisoners to fail can be draining.

    But as long as systemic barriers to education continue to surface, TEACH will continue fighting for educational opportunities for all prisoners.

    Water defenders protect Guatemala’s majestic Lake Atitlán from mountains of garbage

    Hundreds of activists from across Guatemala walked along the shores of the majestic Lake Atitlán in the country’s western highlands in commemoration of World Water Day on March 22. In their hands they carried white flowers, which they left floating along the shores as an offering.

    The ceremony was held as part of the regional meeting of water activists to mark the international day meant to bring awareness to the water crisis around the world. This meeting was hosted by the local collective Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’, which has become one of the most active water rights defenders in the Central American country.  

    For years, once a month, women have gathered alongside local fishermen to collect mountains of garbage along the shores of the lake and in the waters of the popular tourist destination. But with the lifting of their hard-won bans on plastic bags and single-use products during the pandemic, they are now renewing their struggle to limit waste.  

    There are groups in over a dozen areas of San Pedro la Laguna that mobilize to clean the shores. But they don’t do this just for tourists; many join because they rely on the waters of the lake for daily chores.

    Women wash their clothes in the waters of Lake Atitlán on Feb. 25. (WNV/Jeff Abbott)

    “The water is used for everything — for use in the home or cleaning clothing,” explained María Díaz, an elderly Maya Tz’utujil resident of San Pedro la Laguna who explained that she and many others lacked access to running water in their homes.

    Residents have gathered each month to clean up the shores and waters of the lake since 2009 following the outbreak of cyanobacteria. This critical work has fallen on locals and community associations because the Guatemalan government has shown little interest in cleaning the lake. 

    Among the key organizers of these efforts are the women of the collective Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’, who in the last year have not only collected and disposed of the garbage, but also sought to bring national attention to the pollution. They argue that there is little interest from national authorities in responding to the contamination. 

    “It is incredible the amount of garbage that makes it into the lake, and local and national authorities do not fulfill their responsibilities,” said Nancy Gonzalez, who works with Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’. 

    As much as 3,000 tons of garbage enters the lake during the rainy season, which lasts generally between May and November. And throughout the rest of the year, tons of garbage produced by residents and tourists alike enter the lake from the various clandestine dumps surrounding it. 

    Climate change has played a role in the continued contamination, with heavy rains and heavy unseasonal winds bringing garbage down into the lake.

    “All the garbage that arrives here largely comes from the north side of the lake when it rains,” said Nicolás Roq Ché, who works with the Association of Fishermen and joins the women from Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’. “Many of the garbage dumps are near the rivers and as a result it arrives in the lake.”

    The problem of contamination of waters in Guatemala is much bigger than just Lake Atitlán. It is estimated that between 90 and 95 percent of water across Guatemala is polluted, including Lake Atitlán, Lake Amatitlán near Guatemala City, and Lake Izabal in eastern Guatemala. 

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    While the contamination affects the majority of residents and neighboring countries, subsequent Guatemalan governments have done little to resolve the problem. According to the women of Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’, the Guatemalan business councils, which have regularly opposed efforts to ban or reduce the use of single-use products are largely responsible for the contamination. 

    So the women decided to take direct action to protest the contamination of the lake, and symbolically return the garbage to what they say is the source.

    Business leaders’ responsibility

    In October 2022, members of Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’ traveled just over 100 miles from San Pedro la Laguna to Guatemala’s Industrial Business Council in Guatemala City to protest private industry’s part in the contamination of the lake. Members brought baskets filled with garbage that they had collected from Lake Atitlán, throwing it over the fence.  

    “We decided to gather the garbage and return it to the business leaders,” González said. “They have a great responsibility for the management of the lake and the final disposal of waste.” She added, “we could continue to be here year after year cleaning, but we went to demand that the business leaders assume their responsibility.” 

    The community has taken steps to reduce the amount of products that contaminate the lake. Residents of San Pedro la Laguna pressured the municipal government to issue a municipal-wide ban on single-use products, such as styrofoam plates, plastic utensils and plastic bags, which was enacted in October 2016. Residents quickly adapted, bringing tupperware to the market to store proteins such as chicken, or using hand-woven or recycled bags to carry purchases. 

    But the Industrial Council filed a lawsuit against the local initiative, which ended up in the country’s Constitutional Court. The measure was protected by the court, and other Indigenous communities across the country quickly adopted similar initiatives to ban the use of plastics. 

    However, many of these measures were set aside because of the limits put on indoor dining during the pandemic. Since then the residents have renewed their efforts to reinstate the ban and reached out to other communities to join them.

    Expanding efforts

    The summit in San Pedro la Laguna on World Water Day was part of Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’s efforts to expand their efforts to clean Guatemala’s contaminated waterways. The collective has utilized social media and local television and radio stations to encourage the community to get involved.

    Local fishermen rake the sands in one of the sectors of San Pedro la Laguna on Feb. 25. They say that local business owned by foreigners have done nothing to help their efforts. (WNV/Jeff Abbott)

    According to González, their efforts have inspired others to join in the efforts to clean up the lake. But while Lake Atitlán is considered a popular destination for eco-conscious tourists, the women of Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’ say they receive little support from tourists or foreigners that live along its shores. 

    “We have to educate so that we improve,” said Salvador Quiacain, a respected elder in the Maya Tz’utujil community of San Pedro la Laguna who works with Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’. “We are calling on the national and international community to help together.”

    The municipality of San Pedro la Laguna has taken steps to control the garbage, opening a new facility in 2016 about four miles from the town to properly process garbage. This is the only option in the area, and it has become key for disposing of the trash that the women and their collaborators remove from the lake.

    At the heart of their actions, whether it is the education, cleaning or successfully implementing the prohibition of single-use products, the goal of Comunidad Tz’unun Ya’ is to reduce the amount of garbage that is created, so it doesn’t end up in the lake or clandestine dumps. 

    “We are seeking to produce less garbage,” Quiacain said. “There will come a day when the pile of garbage will be bigger than our volcanoes, and that will be a risk to human life.”

    This film tells the little-known story of the Vietnam protests that gave peace a chance

    When Robert Levering was a young antiwar organizer planning and training mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War in late 1969, he never could have imagined one day finding out that he — and millions of others protesting across the country — had played a role in averting a possible nuclear attack. 

    At the time, the antiwar movement had just pulled off two of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history. First was the one-day strike on Oct. 15, 1969, known as the Moratorium, which drew more than two million participants nationwide. Then, one month later, on Nov. 15, another half million people flooded the nation’s capital for the Mobilization. 

    Despite these successes, however, the war continued to rage on for several more years, making it easy for many of the record number of protesters to wonder if their actions were having any kind of impact. The ensuing decades, which saw movies and popular culture often denigrating or belittling the antiwar movement, did little to further a true understanding of its vital role in ending the war.

    Now, over 50 years later, the astonishing evidence of what these historic protests accomplished is finally clear thanks to a new documentary film executive produced by Robert Levering called “The Movement and the ‘Madman.’”

    By focusing in on little-known declassified documents, as well as testimonies from President Nixon’s own advisors, “The Movement and the ‘Madman,’” uncovers the former president’s horrifying plans to escalate the war — which included nuclear weaponry — and how the movement stopped it all from ever happening.

    With the film set to premiere on May 28 (at 9 p.m. EST) on the PBS series “American Experience,” I spoke to Levering — a frequent Waging Nonviolence contributor — about the process of making this documentary and how it’s presented in the style of a “political thriller.” Levering also honed in on the film’s important lessons for activists today — namely never losing hope in a movement’s ability to create change.

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    How did this film come about?

    My life was not filmmaking. I started into the film world at age 75. And the first film that I worked on was “The Boys Who Said No,” which was about the draft resistance movement. I was one of the team of draft resisters, who basically gave advice and counsel to the director about shaping the film, accuracy and so on. While working on that film, I thought that it’s really a shame that there’s no film about the broad cross section of the antiwar movement, or the main part of the antiwar movement. There have been — in addition to this draft resistance movie — a couple of films about the GI resistance movement. And lord knows how many there have been about the Weather Underground, and then also about the Chicago Seven and the Chicago police riot in ’68. But there’s been nothing about the broader movement. 

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  • How anti-Vietnam War protests thwarted Nixon’s plans and saved lives
  • Initially, I started thinking that maybe it’s possible to actually do it — make one that tells the story of the antiwar movement. Well, we’re talking about a 90 minute or 60 minute movie, not an 800-page book. It’s just impossible to cover something that [took place] over a 10-year period. So, I thought about one of the stories I heard [renowned whistleblower and antiwar activist] Daniel Ellsberg mention a number of times when I’ve been with him, which is that, in 1969, the big demonstrations actually averted possible nuclear war, or use of nuclear weapons. I thought that would be an interesting story to focus on. Then I did more research for an article I wrote on Waging Nonviolence about the events of 1969, the two demonstrations: the Moratorium in October and the Mobilization in November. That’s when it became clear to me that there could be a film.

    You also reviewed the Ken Burns Vietnam series for Waging Nonviolence around that time as well. Your analysis on what was missing from that must have inspired you to make this film as well.

    That’s correct. The Ken Burn 18-hour series on PBS had just aired, and I wrote an article for Waging Nonviolence where I basically said it’s a great antiwar film — in that it depicted how fruitless and pointless the war was. I’d say probably half of the 18 hours showed battlefield scenes. At least that’s what I think most people come away remembering. However, the very small part of it that did talk about the antiwar movement was very negative, and it included some former antiwar people being critical of it. So, it was not a fair depiction.

    How did you come to be involved in the antiwar movement?

    I graduated from college in 1966, which was a terrible time if you were a healthy male, because the Vietnam War had cranked up and the draft calls were very high. All of my peers and I were very concerned about the military, about whether or not we’d have to go. Should we go? Should we go to Canada? Should we become conscientious objectors? The position I ultimately took was the draft resistance position — not to cooperate with Selective Service. 

    In addition to that, my profession until 1973, was that of an antiwar organizer. I was mostly working with the American Friends Service Committee and other Quaker groups. I worked basically on nonviolent training — both smaller civil disobedience demonstrations and larger demonstrations with coalitions. In 1969, I worked with the New Mobilization Committee. I was one of their staff members, and my particular function was the training of the marshals for [the Nov. 15 Mobilization demonstration]. My colleagues and I actually trained between 4,000-5,000 marshals [to serve as nonviolent peacekeepers during the demonstration].

    Now that you’ve talked a bit about the movement, can you say a little bit about “the madman” and what that’s referring to?

    The madman in our title is in quotes. We’re not saying Nixon was a madman. We’re saying he had a madman strategy, and that is what he himself called it. The strategy was basically: If he threatened the North Vietnamese and the Soviets with enough pain, they would cave and give in to the American demands. The film describes this in some detail with a number of people who were on the staffs of Nixon and [National Security Advisor] Henry Kissinger. [Nixon] at various points threatened the North Vietnamese and the Soviets that he would unleash great damage to their country. And the underlying thing, which one of Kissinger’s people says, is that he was threatening nuclear weapons against them, as well. 

    Previous Coverage
  • Ken Burns’ powerful anti-war film on Vietnam ignores the power of the anti-war movement
  • More than just making threats, however, he actually made specific plans — and we show the declassified documents for this plan, which was called Duck Hook, in the movie. He was planning to knock out the dikes in North Vietnam, which would have flooded the country and probably killed hundreds of thousands of people, as well as destroyed all the cities. The plan also included use of tactical nuclear weapons near the Chinese border, to knock out the rail links between China and Vietnam. So, it wasn’t just bluffing. Nixon even had a date for when he would unleash this plan: Nov. 1 1969.

    Now, why didn’t it happen? It was because of the Moratorium demonstration on Oct. 15, 1969, which involved between two and three million people in 200-plus cities and campuses across the country. Nixon could see that this would undercut his threat. So he called it off — and that is not just a supposition on our part. He says it explicitly in his memoirs. He called it off because he believed that his credibility with the North Vietnamese wouldn’t be sufficient if he didn’t have the support of the American people.

    What was it like for you and other activists to learn about your impact directly from Nixon in his memoirs?

    Let me just clarify that, in his memoirs, Nixon says he called off a planned escalation of the war because of [the protests]. It wasn’t until more recently [through declassified documents] that we actually knew what he called off. So it wasn’t something that you could focus on that much. You couldn’t hang very much on it, because you didn’t know exactly what he was talking about. Now, we know exactly what he was talking about — and that’s what the film reveals. This will be the first time this whole story is being told to a mass audience.

    You interviewed some 30 people for this film. Obviously, you can’t name them all here, but what are some of the names that stand out?

    Let me just say that the film’s director, Steve Talbot, and I have spent our careers as journalists. I was a print journalist, and Steve was a documentary journalist. We both approached this story as journalists, trying to get the points of view of the main players of it. We weren’t trying to make a “movement” film. This is a film that’s meant to be a documentary of these events. So from a journalistic point of view, you don’t just talk to people that you agree with, you talk to a wide spectrum of people who — in addition to Ellsberg — had actually worked on Kissinger’s staff. 

    Two of the people we interviewed [Roger Morris and Anthony Lake] actually worked on the Duck Hook plans. So, they were intimately familiar with this. Another person we spoke to [Stephen Bull] was Nixon’s personal aide, and that’s a very important part of our film because we alternate between what was going on inside the White House and what was going on on the street. We sort of tells both sides of the story.

    Was there anything surprising that stood out to you from those interviews, where you learned something new?

    Well, frankly, I’d only sort of generally heard what had happened. I didn’t understand what people who were actually working on the inside were thinking. So I thought it was very interesting [to learn their perspectives]. One of them [Morton Halperin] was real clear that he didn’t think the Vietnam War was winnable. Right from the time he started working with Kissinger he said that. And even though that was his opinion, and Kissinger knew it, he still worked on [the plan]. I think that was surprising. They realized how serious Kissinger and Nixon were about this madman strategy, because they were trying to implement it — or trying to create something that would scare the other side.

    Did any of them acknowledge the impact of the movement?

    I can’t say that I remember if they did. But one of the things that was very telling, which we have in the film, is that one of them [Anthony Lake], when the March Against Death was marching in front of the White House and the demonstrations were going on, said that his wife, children and friends were out there on the streets. He was in the White House, but would have preferred being out in the streets. I think that was probably the most surprising thing that I heard, and that’s a very important realization for people that are involved in nonviolent movements: You can’t assume that everybody on the other side is monolithic. There are a variety of opinions and sometimes people are much more sympathetic to you than you think they are. That’s probably the single most telling comment, in terms of something that’s important for people involved in social change movements. You just can’t assume that you’re not reaching people. The overall theme of the film is that we didn’t know until decades later what impact we had. But at the time, some of the individuals [on the other side] were very sympathetic to us.

    What about the people from the movement you interviewed? Any takeaways that stand out to you?

    There were four main Moratorium organizers, and one has passed away. We were very fortunate that we were able to interview the remaining three [Sam Brown, David Hawk and David Mixner]. So they tell the story of how the idea for a nationwide moratorium came about and just a lot of details, like who came up with the idea and why they changed it from the original idea of a general strike. We were also able to talk to two of the main organizers of the Mobilization, Cora Weiss and Dick Fernandez. Unfortunately, most of the other steering committee members have already passed away. 

    In addition to that, we talked to a number of people at my level of organizing — the rank-and-file organizers and participants. I also think it’s important that we talked to Congress members [Reps. Pete McCloskey and Donald Riegle] who reflected on the impact of the antiwar movement on Congress. I think only one of them is actually in the film, but we did talk to two of them. Then we also talked to about a half dozen historians who gave more context for what was going on.

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    What challenges did you run into while making the film?

    We did our first interviews in the fall of 2019, at a gathering of the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee in Washington, speaking with a couple of historians and three people that were involved in the antiwar movement. Then, two months later — at the end of February — we interviewed Daniel Ellsberg. And then we all know what happened in March of 2020.

    We had already begun to set up in-person, on-camera interviews with all of the people, as we had done for the first half dozen. But then, when it became clear that COVID wasn’t going to just blow over, we had to figure out another way of doing the interviews. So we decided to do audio only, which means that — in the film — you don’t see any of the people we interviewed as they are today. In the typical documentary film you almost always have whoever is being interviewed on camera, and then you go to archival footage. You sort of go back and forth through the present day to the past. But by doing it the way that we did this film, you are always looking at something that was in the past. Aesthetically, this was something we’re very pleased with. 

    Our director, Steve Talbot, was influenced by the Peter Jackson film “They Shall Not Grow Old,” which is about World War I. It’s a very powerful movie, and it’s audio only. Jackson used interviews with people that fought in the war. So, the whole idea is that people will feel like they are immersed in that year, 1969. All of the archival footage, the photographs, everything, is from 1969.

    And if I could just add one other thing: Part of what we had in mind was to do what you could call a political thriller. That’s not so easy to do if you’re constantly jerking back and forth [between archival footage and interviews]. 

    It’s rare to see a film focused on a movement on national television.

    Other movements have gotten a lot of primetime coverage — in particular, the civil rights movement and the women’s suffrage movement. But not the Vietnam antiwar movement, even though it was larger in terms of the number of participants, its scope, and its duration, at least in comparison to the main part of the civil rights movement. Both the Moratorium and the Mobilization were by far the largest political demonstrations that ever happened to that date in American history. So it was a huge movement, a very significant movement. For people who are of my age, it was definitely central to our lives. There were just over 2 million men who actually served in Vietnam. Meanwhile, according to “The Boys Who Said No,” there were about a half million who resisted the draft in one form or another. There were actually more people on the streets in October 1969 than served in Vietnam during the entire 10 years of the war. It was massive, and that was just one day. There were demonstrations over a 10-year period. So it was a huge movement, and yet there were virtually no films made about it.

    How does that make you feel on a personal level to be able to get this film aired on PBS, the same outlet that aired the Ken Burns series?

    Well, of course I’m delighted. But more than just my personal reaction, it’s really important to change the narrative about the Vietnam antiwar movement. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, there were a whole lot of films that were very disparaging of it, like the Rambo films and “Forrest Gump.” The scenes from the antiwar movement, they’re just caricatures. 

    Previous Coverage
  • Why ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ deserves praise – from an antiwar organizer who was there
  • Unfortunately, what people remember most is the Chicago demonstrations. Yet, most of the antiwar movement didn’t go to Chicago. I was there. So I know. There were maybe 5,000-10,000, at most. And that was after the Pentagon demonstration the year before, when there were over 100,000 people. But that’s not what people talk about. They talk about what happened in Chicago, about the Yippies, the police riot and so on. That’s one image. The other one has to do with the Weather Underground, about the bombings and that kind of thing. And then there’s the way the right wing of the country has cultivated things like the idea that antiwar people spit on servicemen when they came back from Vietnam. That’s an image many, many people have. There’s actually a great book on the subject called “Spitting Image” that refutes the whole thing. But it’s still what sticks in people’s minds. 

    The idea that the antiwar movement was something that involved millions of people from all walks of life [just isn’t talked about]. I think our film really shows a whole other side of what was going on. So, I’m delighted that we’re helping to rewrite the narrative.

    To what extent does the film get into the specifics of organizing?

    The film shows a variety of ways that people were involved in trying to make a massive movement, and how it doesn’t just start on the day of the demonstration — that there’s a lot of planning and training that went into it. Because of the length of the movie, we couldn’t get into a lot of the details. But I think that people get a good sense of what it took to pull off these huge demonstrations. The overall theme of the movie is that you never know what impacts you’re going to have at the time. 

    It’s so common that after a big rally or march, or almost anything, people feel as if no change happened — that it didn’t have any impact. But in this case, because the documents are declassified, and information has come out, we know what kind of impact we had. That’s a very rare thing. It’s not something that happens fast either, particularly when the stakes are so high. 

    If you look at all of human history, the Vietnam antiwar movement is one of the very few massive movements within a country at war. Throughout American history, when there have been actions against wars, the people opposing the war have been squashed. That’s certainly what happened in World War I. It’s just a very unusual thing that we were able to do what we did — to be able to build as massive a movement as we could. Look at what’s going on with Ukraine. It’s not even our country involved, and the war hysteria in this country is off the charts. That’s what happens when countries are at war. Patriotism to a lot of people means that they need to fall in line, support our troops. That opposition was true at the beginning of the Vietnam War, but we were able to overcome that.

    What can those organizing against war and militarism today learn from this story?

    I think any social change movement can learn from this. The biggest hurdle that a lot of people have is that they feel helpless. They feel like they’re not having any effect, that it’s easy to become cynical. But you have to have hope in order to keep at it year after year after year — particularly when you’re up against a major opponent.

    “The Movement and the ‘Madman’” will be available for streaming on PBS.org during and after the broadcast.

    How movements can keep politicians from selling out

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    It is a pattern we see again and again: New political hopefuls are elected to office espousing progressive values and vowing to challenge the status quo in Washington, D.C. They are sent off with high hopes. But then, over time, the change they promise never materializes.

    Worse yet, the politicians themselves begin to change. They become more distanced from the supporters who first put them in power. They aspire for a higher office and assert their “independence” by bucking their base and playing to the center. They make amends with key commercial interests in their district. They become apologists for “the way things work,” and they criticize those wanting bolder action as naive and unduly impatient.

    But does this have to be the case?

    In recent years, social movements have taken increasing interest in engaging the electoral system and electing champions to office. They have done so with the recognition that we need inside players to amplify and respond to pressure generated by activists on the outside. And yet, we know that many inside players — even ones who initially seem sympathetic — end up getting co-opted and becoming part of the system.

    Facing this reality, movements do not need to give up on the prospect of an inside-outside strategy. But they do need to look carefully at a central problem: How do we keep those we send into the den of Beltway politics from selling out? What factors allow for an exceptional minority to remain true to their democratic base?

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  • Should we disrupt the Democratic Party or try to take it over?
  • The goal for progressive groups seeking to intervene in electoral politics has been to elevate “movement candidates” or “movement politicians”people who can operate differently than the typical politicians who are prone to careerism and driven by oversized egos. And yet, the idea of what constitutes a movement candidate can be amorphous.

    In giving the concept more clarity, it is important to emphasize that a movement candidate is not just someone who speaks up in support of causes of social and economic justice, or whose innate integrity makes them stay true to their values. Nor is it simply a matter of an individual’s background, with the politician coming out of a marginalized community. Fundamentally, what defines someone as a movement politician is more structural. Movement politicians do not act alone. Rather, they rely on grassroots organizations as an institutional base of strength and support to help them reject the ingrained norms and culture of mainstream politics. They stay accountable not just because they are believers, but because movements offer them an invaluable foundation from which to operate.

    In order to effectively combat the corrupting pressures of mainstream political culture, it is first necessary to name these forces — to account for why so few are able to navigate the norms of Washington politics without being pulled into treacherous currents. With a detailed concept of the institutional pressures at work clearly in mind, we can then understand how movements can help politicians resist.

    How Washington co-opts

    For his 1988 book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” renowned linguist and political thinker Noam Chomsky teamed up with University of Pennsylvania professor Edward Herman to analyze the culture and institutional structures of mainstream media in the United States that dominated during the Cold War. Chomsky and Herman sought to determine how — in the absence of formal systems of state censorship — the mass media could nevertheless be relied upon to serve the interest of dominant elites, making sure that viewpoints that were truly critical of corporate capitalism and Washington militarism would remain ostracized.

    Sketching what they called the “propaganda model,” Chomsky and Herman argued that five “filters” were in place through which “money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public.” First, the media was owned by the rich, with mergers consolidating firms into ever fewer hands. Second, publications relied on ad revenues as a primary source of income, making them dependent on corporate advertisers for their sustenance and profit. Third, the media accepted a culture of “expertise” which deferred to official sources from business and government. Fourth, reporters who stepped out of line would be disciplined by flak from those in power. And finally, the ideology of anti-Communism could be used to push certain viewpoints off-limits for mainstream discussion.

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    With these filters in place, there was no need for oligarchs or government officials to officially censor the press. Instead, the filters created a media culture that would do this for them. In spite of occasional exposés that revealed corporate or political misbehavior, expressions of dissent from the tenets of the “free enterprise” system or the assumptions of Cold War foreign policy could be kept to a minimum. In Chomsky and Herman’s words, the filters worked effectively to “fix the premises of discourse and interpretation.”

    For each of the five filters that Chomsky and Herman identify in their analysis of the mass media, an analog can be found in the ways mainstream political culture bolsters status quo norms and places constraints on politicians seeking change. These norms can be found throughout U.S. politics, including at the state and local levels. But they are most pronounced in Washington, D.C.

    So what, then, are the filters in mainstream politics that weed out dissenters?

    1. Party structures

    A first filter in Washington political culture is the formal structure of the two-party system. Although U.S. political parties are weak compared with many European ones, the Democrats and Republicans still have carrots and sticks they can use to discipline their members. The parties control committee assignments in Congress, with senior members securing powerful chairmanships. Newly elected officials who aspire to greater influence quickly learn that deference to party leaders can result in valuable perks, while outspoken criticism brings impediments to career advancement.

    An obsession with having “access” and being on good terms with powerful people does not affect only junior party members. It shapes the entire milieu of progressive advocacy in Washington, D.C. In a 2022 Twitter thread, Evan Sutton, a Democratic political operative and former trainer for the Obama-era New Organizing Institute, described how such preoccupation becomes toxic: “Access is a plague,” he wrote. “During the Obama administration, I sometimes attended meetings organized by the White House Office of Public Engagement. The groups invited would almost never say boo, because in D.C. the most important thing is being invited to the meetings and the Christmas party.”

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    The slights that come when an upstart politician refuses to defer can impose significant costs. The parties run big-money committees to oversee efforts to win seats in both the House and the Senate — bodies such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC. These institutions have influence in determining which candidates will be recruited and backed in various districts, and whether they will be deemed worthy to receive millions of dollars of support for their campaigns.

    In addition to determining priority races and giving their blessing to selected candidates, the parties’ campaign committees help to determine who can get jobs working in politics — at the level of campaign managers, strategists and media consultants. In 2018, shortly after veteran Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley was defeated by the insurgent campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, and after incumbent Mike Capuano similarly lost to Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, the DCCC implemented a new rule designed to send off such grassroots primary challenges. Specifically, it announced a ban on doing business with political consulting operations that took on incumbents — effectively freezing out some of the most mobilized forces at the party’s base.

    Ocasio-Cortez would later rail against the logic of the decision: “If you are the DCCC, and you’re hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive insurgents, you would think that you may want to use some of those firms,” she said. “But instead, we banned them. So the DCCC banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing.”

    2. Campaign finance

    The second filter that colors Washington culture is money, specifically the massive amounts that fuel U.S. campaigns and end up infecting the political system as a whole. Officials in both major parties have described the current structure of American democracy as “a system of legalized bribery and legalized extortion.” The costs of contesting for elected positions in the United States is astronomical. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the combined total of all spending in House and Senate campaigns came to more than $4 billion in 2016 — almost double the inflation-adjusted total from 2000. Tasked with raising thousands per day throughout the length of their terms, sitting representatives spend lengthy sessions “dialing for dollars” from wealthy donors at party-sponsored call centers just blocks from Congress.

    In a 2016 interview with 60 Minutes, then-Rep. Steve Israel explained that these demands sharply escalated after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for spending in elections: In the early 2000s, “I’d have to put in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, at most, two hours a day into fundraising,” he said. “And that’s the way it went until 2010, when Citizens United was enacted. At that point, everything changed. And I had to increase that to two, three, sometimes four hours a day[.]”

    Elected officials themselves widely dislike such fundraising burdens, and beleaguered staff members often have to cajole their lawmakers to stick to scheduled “call time.” Nevertheless, if politicians wish to rise through the ranks of their party, they must excel at the task. In addition to raising money for their own campaigns, elected officials are expected to contribute to organs such as the DCCC or its Republican equivalent — payments known as “party dues.”

    A 2017 report by the reform group Issue One explained, “although they do not often admit it publicly, party leadership, in private, explicitly ties congressional committee assignments to members’ dues.” The report quoted Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, who stated: “They told us right off the bat as soon as we get here, ‘These committees all have prices and don’t pick an expensive one if you can’t make the payments.’”

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    Trey Radel, a former Republican representative from Florida, described the none-too-subtle mechanisms through which expectations are conveyed: “Every time you walk into a [National Republican Congressional Committee] meeting, a giant goddamn tally sheet is on prominent display that lists your name and how much you’ve given — or haven’t,” he writes. “It’s a huge wall of shame. The big players, people in leadership positions and chairs of powerful committees, always dominate the board, raising millions[.]”

    To secure these funds, lawmakers lean on not only wealthy individuals but also on businesses. As the Issue One report further argued, “chairs are often reliant on money from lobbyists and special interests, frequently pressuring and cajoling those working in the industries they regulate to donate generously to their campaigns.” The impact, as former Democratic Rep. Jim Jones of Oklahoma described it, is that “Big money doesn’t come in casually. It wants to have its point of view prevail, whether it’s to block legislation or to promote legislation.”

    In principle, politicians are not personally enriched by campaign contributions: the money goes to fund their campaigns, and it is not bribery in the sense that the cash is pocketed by an overtly corrupt official. Yet financial largesse both enhances their job security by allowing them to get reelected, and it heightens their power and standing among their peers. Moreover, should they ever decide to “retire” from public service, cozy relationships with lobbyists mean that plush boardroom appointments and handsome consulting contracts await them through Washington’s infamous “revolving door.”

    In the end, money permeates nearly every aspect of Beltway culture and profoundly shapes the strategic vision of the major parties, including how they relate to their bases of support. “I go to the Democratic caucuses every week,” Sen. Bernie Sanders explained in a 2013 interview, “and every week there is a report about fund-raising … In the six years I’ve been going to those meetings, I have never heard five minutes of discussion about organizing.”

     3. Experts, consultants and staffers

    Mainstream political culture takes cues from a relatively small network of think tanks, legislative advisors and technocrats. This class of policy experts, staffers and political consultants create a third filter that enforces politics as usual and screens out wayward viewpoints. They make up the “adults in the room” whose sensibilities help set the “Overton Window,” or the range of policy positions that are regarded as realistic for elected officials to pursue.

    Not surprisingly, within these ranks, representatives of poor and working-class people tend to be few and far between, as are critics of the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, business leaders and economists directly or indirectly backed by corporations are considered credible voices on a wide range of public affairs, and the selection of Wall Street veterans for government posts related to the economy is regarded as reassuring to markets. Foreign policy positions are passed between neocons and reliable centrists who can be counted on to endorse American exceptionalism and support the spread of “free markets.”

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    In December 2018, newly elected members of Congress were invited to a week-long training at the Harvard’s Institute of Politics meant to ease their transition into Washington life. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted of the event: “Invited panelists offer insights to inform new Congressmembers‘ views as they prepare to legislate: # of Corporate CEOs we’ve listened to here: 4. # of Labor leaders: 0”

    In a 2018 article in the Nation, journalist Joseph Hogan cited former U.S. representative and current Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who cautioned that constantly standing up to consensus opinion can be a wearying prospect: “You are surrounded 24-7 by colleagues and lobbyists who are constantly telling you how things work. You know they’re wrong but after a while you halfway believe their BS.”

    Community organizing leader George Goehl echoed the sentiment: “[P]rogressives who get elected and go into the halls of power quickly realize that neoliberalism is the baseline, the dominant politic. Quickly, their radical imagination starts to fade,” he explained. Elected officials “need to learn to be able to spot the way neoliberal assumptions and compromises can creep in,” he argued. “Otherwise, we elect people with great intentions, good politics, who still get swept up by the machine.”

    Even with Democrats in power, neoliberal economic groupthink has prevailed at critical moments. In her 2014 memoir, “A Fighting Chance,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote of the Obama administration’s failure to create any serious accountability for the financial sector in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis: “The president chose his team,” she argued, “and when there was only so much time and so much money to go around, the president’s team chose Wall Street.”

    In retrospect, Obama himself has been willing to acknowledge that the biases of prevailing wisdom in Washington limited the policy options his administration was willing to consider. “I think there was a residual willingness to accept the political constraints that we’d inherited from the post-Reagan era — that you had to be careful about being too bold on some of these issues,” he stated in a 2020 interview with New York magazine. “And probably there was an embrace of market solutions to a whole host of problems that wasn’t entirely justified.”

    Of course, many progressive groups — including ones that contributed to the unusually robust grassroots drive that put Obama into office — were telling the administration at the time that Wall Street’s irresponsibility in creating the financial crash should be the occasion for a major break from past economic orthodoxy. But these people were not seen as the “serious” voices that the president needed to heed.

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    Elizabeth Warren relates that she was explicitly warned against disparaging those in power upon arriving in Washington. In April 2009, when she was serving on the congressional oversight panel monitoring the Treasury Department’s economic rescue plan, Warren was taken to dinner by President Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers. “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice…” she writes. “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

    4. Flak

    The fourth filter in Chomsky and Herman’s model, known as “flak,” consists of the negative responses that a reporter or news organization would receive if they stepped out of line. Advertisers could pull their sponsorship. Access could be withdrawn. And irate administration officials could complain to a reporter’s editors. All of these served to illustrate that it was less painful to follow the path of least resistance.

    A similar type of flak can be directed at officials who place themselves at odds with the norms of mainstream political culture. While the first three filters can be subtle and preemptive, setting boundaries so as to stop wayward action from ever taking place, flak comes later and is less subtle. It is the retribution experienced by those who persist in spite of implicit warnings. It is losing a committee assignment, being denied campaign funding from the DCCC, or, as per Larry Summers, being expelled from the circles of “insiders” given influence over policy deliberations.

    Evan Sutton notes that “The Biden White House has made no bones about its willingness to cut people off” and that having the “temerity to publicly challenge the president lands you on a permanent shitlist.” He adds, “The Hill is no better. Pelosi’s office and many others will burn your number for stepping out of line. Funders will cut you off if you’re perceived to be crossing the president or the speaker.” As a result, Sutton explained, “very few are willing to risk it.”

    Industry produces flak of its own. In describing the system as “legalized bribery and legalized extortion,” Sen. Russ Feingold emphasized that the second part was just as relevant as the first: those who refuse to play along face a threat of something bad happening. Often, this takes the form of opposition groups funding primary challenges by rivals, or running well-resourced recalls or referendum campaigns that cripple efforts to pursue progressive policy.

    In a 2013 interview, Bernie Sanders described situations in which fellow lawmakers would express sympathy for legislation he proposed, but were cowed by the promise of flak. “If there’s a tough vote in the House or the Senate — for example, legislation to break up the large banks — people might come up and say, ‘Bernie, that’s a pretty good idea, but I can’t vote for that,’” he explained. “Why not? Because when you go home, what do you think is going to happen? Wall Street dumps a few million dollars into your opponent’s campaign.”

    Nor can those who are challenged count on the support of their party. There have been numerous incidents where Democratic organs have opted not to endorse their own incumbents who are seen as too progressive. And although flak is not always decisive, the constant need to combat it can be a serious drain on time and energy — as well as a deterrent to others who are not willing to brave the same treatment.

    5. Ideologically imposed limits to debate

    A final filter identified by Chomsky and Herman pertains to how ideological labeling and scaremongering could be used to impose boundaries on public debate and mark certain positions as impermissible. Specifically, writing in the 1980s, they highlighted how the ideology of anti-communism was deployed. The fact that left-leaning policy aims — whether foreign or domestic — could be denounced as signs of creeping socialism “helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism,” they argued.

    Twenty years after the original publication of “Manufacturing Consent,” Chomsky and Herman revised their framework slightly to note how other ideologically laden charges — particularly those related to “anti-terrorism” and the “war on terror” — could be used to push dissenting opinions outside the bounds of acceptable debate.

    In today’s context, the filter of ideology might be applied to a diversity of issues — limiting what is acceptable in discussions of immigration, policing and prisons, or a range of other topics. Examples would include the ways accusations of radicalism were used to force the resignation of “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones from the Obama administration. Or one could point to the concerted attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, which sought to characterize her criticisms of Israeli policy and objections to AIPAC stances as antisemitic and beyond the pale.

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    While this filter can be interpreted in a more expansive way, the extent to which specifically anti-communist dogma and red-baiting tactics have lingered long after the Cold War is noteworthy. Among Republicans, the line of attack remains ever-pertinent. Just in the past few years Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has used red-baiting language to denounce everything from the Green New Deal (a “radical, socialist” policy) to student debt forgiveness (“student loan socialism”) to statehood for the District of Columbia (“full-bore socialism“) to pandemic social spending (“a Trojan Horse for permanent socialism”). In early February 2023, House Republicans made a point of passing a resolution stating that “Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.”

    Perhaps more distressing is the number of Democrats who play into the attack — or fumble when responding to it. While the success of Bernie Sanders and the Squad in recent years has changed the political landscape, party leaders remain defensive and fearful. In 2017, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a point of stating, “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.” And, for their part, 109 Democratic members of Congress voted with the Republicans in support of their February resolution.

    How movements break the filters

    Chomsky and Herman argued that the filters on the mass media rarely needed to be imposed in an overt manner. Over time, the biases they created became so embedded in the professional culture that practitioners internalized them. “The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news ‘objectively’ and on the basis of professional news values,” they wrote.

    Likewise, within Washington politics, the cultural norms are pervasive enough that those who are primed to succeed are the ones who have habituated themselves in advance. They have accepted the way in which the game is played, and they are comfortable embarking on a quest to gain power within the confines of the existing system.

    Meanwhile, those who try to retain their integrity by denouncing the system find themselves constantly repulsed. In November 2020, as she reached the end of her first term, Ocasio-Cortez had been remarkably successful by conventional standards, solidifying her support in her district, achieving widespread celebrity, and gaining a large platform from which to advance her views. Yet she stunned a New York Times interviewer by reporting that she regularly considered getting out, saying “I don’t even know if I want to be in politics.”

    “Externally, there’s been a ton of support,” she explained, “but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.” She made clear that it was not just violent threats and demonization from the right that were disconcerting, but also the behavior of fellow Democrats: “It’s the lack of support from your own party,” she said. “It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy.”

    When we wonder why once-hopeful political champions bow out, or why politicians elected to take on the system acculturate themselves to it over time, the combined power of the five filters provides a compelling explanation. Left on their own, individual elected officials have slim hope of standing up to the institutional forces arrayed against them. Although some exceptional individuals may be able to sustain themselves, most need significant help if they are to survive.

    This is where movements come in. Having a base of grassroots institutions to back movement candidates gives them a grounding they can use to sidestep Washington norms, wage insurgent campaigns and govern in a manner that shows accountability to their core constituencies rather than to wealthy elites. Instead of relying solely on personal values to remain principled, they make this challenge into a collective task. With regard to the five filters, movements provide tools for resistance, offering infrastructure, resources and conscious strategy for counteracting each of them in turn.

    Previous Coverage
  • Can social movements realign America’s political parties to win big change?
  • In terms of party structures, movements help politicians form effective factions and allow them to join organized attempts to create realignments in party composition and ideology. While groups including Justice Democrats work at such tasks in Washington, D.C., more developed structures exist at state and local levels. In some cities, central labor councils have significant influence in nominating or approving candidates for party leadership. In some instances, progressive caucuses have created unity and allowed for mutual support among elected officials who may be to the left of their party’s local leadership. In others, bodies such as the Working Families Party or New York DSA’s Socialists in Office committee have provided alternate quasi-party structures that can provide a home for lawmakers who may otherwise be marginalized.

    When it comes to campaign finance, technologies of small donor fundraising have given grassroots campaigns the ability to compete with more conventionally funded candidates. (Bernie Sanders, for one, raised more than $231 million from 2.8 million donors in 2016.) Furthermore, the ground game and volunteer muscle of movement field operations — drives that knock thousands of doors to reach local voters — have sometimes given progressive candidates the edge over more lavishly endowed opponents who rely on the “air war” of political attack ads. While neither solution is perfect, movements offer candidates the option of trying to win by energizing the base, rather than triangulating toward the center.

    To disrupt a culture of insider expertise, movements can both inoculate incoming officials and elevate alternate sources of policy know-how. Networks such as People’s Action have invested in political education trainings for rank-and-file members and prospective candidates alike. Others, such as Movement School and re:power (formerly Wellstone Action), have invested in creating pipelines for campaign managers and legislative staffers rooted in movement values. Finally, community-based groups can organize progressive academics to craft alternative proposals for public policy.

    When flak comes in, having a movement at your back can make the difference between robust defense and abandonment by your own party. And, ideologically, movements create a new sense of the possible. They work to move the Overton Window and bring ideas that might initially be considered verboten into acceptable public discussion: Same-sex marriage, millionaires’ taxes, the Green New Deal, a $15 minimum wage, and student debt cancellation are just a few such ideas.

    As bolder demands are mainstreamed, attempts to ostracize their advocates as radical extremists lose their potency — to the point where even politicians who were once fearful to be associated with a cause may suddenly “evolve” in their consciousness, as a wave of public officials did in 2013 after same-sex marriage was shown to be a winning issue. Movement politicians who share in a set of collective beliefs are less likely to back down from principled positions, because they have a clear sense that these stances are rooted in the values of their community.

    A basic tenet of social psychology is that if someone is surrounded by others who accept the same set of norms and rules of behavior, that person will find it very difficult to avoid internalizing this dominant set of values. “Honestly, it is a shit show. It’s scandalizing, every single day,” Ocasio-Cortez has reported of her experience in Washington. “What is surprising to me is how it never stops being scandalizing. Some folks perhaps get used to it, or desensitized to the many different things that may be broken,” she says. And yet she emphasizes the need to guard against such desensitization and resist deferring to the supposed “adults in the room” who have made their peace with the system. “Sometimes to be in a room with some of the most powerful people in the country and see the ways that they make decisions — sometimes they’re just susceptible to groupthink, susceptible to self-delusion,” she notes.

    That this conventional groupthink prevails is no accident. It is a product of political economy and cultural influence, the forces that make up the five filters. Movements provide a structural counterbalance that makes resistance possible. The institutional support of grassroots organizations gives movement politicians a chance to avoid being absorbed into the system. And for those interested in social change, it is likely the best chance we have.

    Inside the underground network supporting asylum seekers in Scotland

    Every Sunday for the past six weeks, far-right protesters have been gathering in the small Scottish town of Erskine to complain about plans to house some 200 asylum seekers in a local hotel. However, they are not alone. Asylum seekers in Scotland and their local allies have also been protesting the use of these hotels, and for a much longer time.

    Scotland takes in thousands of asylum seekers each year: 4,000 in 2019. Normally Scotland is not the first stop for asylum seekers. The Home Office — the arm of the U.K. government that deals with immigration — processes most asylum seekers in England, and spreads people out around the U.K. Since the pandemic, it has become harder to ascertain exactly how many asylum seekers are in Scotland at the moment, likely because local governments are given less control in the matter. 

    The pandemic also marked the start of hotel detention, the practice of putting asylum seekers into hotels in Glasgow for an indefinite period of time. Whereas conservatives protested that these hotels were an extravagant waste of taxpayer money, the reality of poor, cramped conditions led to the June 2020 George Square protest against hotel detention. It was interrupted by counter-protesters who feared the statues in George Square were at risk, after a statue of slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol. The Park Inn tragedy also happened in June 2020, when a man in hotel detention stabbed several other residents and was then shot dead by police. 

    In May 2021, the community peacefully stopped an immigration van from deporting two men in the Kenmure Street raid. An older English man named Nick was one of three people who first blocked off an immigration van set to deport two men on Kenmure street. (Nick and the other activists I spoke to for this story preferred to go by their first names only.) Like many Glasgow locals, Nick speaks about the action, which received significant mainstream attention in Scotland, with a pride for his community. 

    Protesters surround and stop a U.K. Home Office van from deporting two men on Kenmure St. in Glasgow in May 2021. (Twitter/@JCWI_UK)

    Along with the current protests in Erskine, these major events have dominated the media coverage of asylum seekers in Glasgow. However, the media has overlooked an overarching narrative. Starting with the Home Office’s decision to send asylum seekers from other parts of the U.K. to Glasgow, conditions and policies have gotten progressively worse, especially following the introduction of lock-change evictions and the use of hotels as long-term accommodation. Speaking to three grassroots groups in Glasgow revealed insidious and consistent patterns of abuse and injustice of asylum seekers by the Home Office and its subcontractors. It also revealed an underground network of support that is having a tremendous positive effect within Glasgow’s immigrant community. 

    In May 2012, the Home Secretary Theresa May declared to The Telegraph that she wanted to create a “really hostile environment” for irregular migrants in the U.K. With a majority of the resulting policies approved in law, hostility towards immigrants has become an integral piece of the architecture of the U.K. immigration system as it stands today. 

    Asylum seekers arrive here in the clothes they left home with — normally thinner, lighter clothes than what is needed to live in Scotland, sometimes wearing flip-flops. If you were sent by the Home Office to Glasgow from another part of the U.K., you might not even know where you are headed until the doors of your transport open.

    The person who brought up the flip-flops was Nick, who is involved with No Evictions Glasgow and has been an activist for nearly 50 years. As its name suggests, No Evictions has a core aim, which has shifted and expanded over time. It is led by people with lived experience of the asylum and immigration system.

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    No Evictions started in 2018 in response to the Serco lock-change evictions. Serco, a housing company on-hire from the Home Office, was doing the dirty work of changing the locks on evicted asylum seekers, leaving many homeless with little notice. “They would come back from a doctor’s appointment or shopping or signing at the Home Office, to find that their stuff was gone, the locks were changed, they couldn’t get back in,” Nick said. 

    Asylum seekers are not legally allowed to claim benefits and housing assistance, like a U.K. national faced with sudden homelessness. This means that if you aren’t granted asylum status, you can end up on the street with no support overnight. 

    At first, members of No Evictions would respond by volunteering to sit in peoples’ homes while they were out. Soon No Evictions began instead to place emphasis on building community awareness on the issue. Nick explained that if the housing community showed up when the locksmiths came, “just the very fact of our presence was preventing people being evicted.” Beyond evictions, housing was often in very poor condition, with leaks, mold or a total lack of insulation, posing health risks. Group members would assist in submitting complaints to Serco, and connect them with organizations for housing help.

    At the start of the pandemic, in an apparent victory, the lock-change evictions were paused. This was after repeated appeals from Glasgow City Council to the Home Office, citing health concerns and the council’s inability to offer support. Failed asylum seekers, along with any new arrivals, were then moved en masse into local budget hotels. Some people were also forced from apartments they had lived in for several years into hotels. “They said that was because of COVID, and that they couldn’t source enough apartments,” Nick explained. “I don’t think it really added up.” 

    The hotels, thought to be temporary, came with myriad problems. Like the apartments before, rooms were kept in poor conditions with very slow or no response to maintenance issues. The food provided tended to lack nutrition or be culturally inappropriate. Layout and organization of hotels made social distancing difficult or impossible. And most things a person might need besides food — like toiletries, clothing, phone top-ups and child-care necessities — were not provided. 

    Whereas the weekly allowance for an asylum seeker staying in an apartment was over $40, once they were moved to a hotel it dropped to less than $9. For context, a day’s bus pass, which costs more than $5 is out of reach — as are shoes that aren’t flip-flops. “I think some people, the [right-wing] Daily Mail readers, have got this idea that asylum seekers are living in the lap of luxury in hotels with … room service,” Nick said. 

    People in hotel detention are also kept ill-informed of their rights. Many are not told how to access health care, or that they can access health care. Several people mentioned having to ask permission to even leave the building. Nick described one call No Evictions Glasgow got from a man having serious chest pains. He had been told by hotel staff to just lie down, and that a nurse would be called after the weekend. He was not aware that he was within his rights to call an ambulance. 

    Yvonne Black speaks at a march for migrant justice during COP26 in Glasgow. (#COPCollab26/Lauren Waterman)

    Migrants Organizing for Rights and Empowerment, or MORE, another prominent grassroots group in Glasgow, responded quickly to hotel conditions at the start of the pandemic. Yvonne Blake, one of MORE’s founding members, describes it jokingly as a “military operation.” She is hard to pin down, good-humored and deadly serious at the same time. Along with other MORE founders and members, Yvonne has lived experience of the asylum system. 

    Yvonne explains how MORE was the first on the ground, quickly setting up a fundraiser that raised roughly $37,000. They then gave people staying in the hotels $30 each. They also arranged dignified access to food, topped up phones, shopped for people in quarantine and distributed funds. There was an incoming call handler and a befriending team. MORE also quickly set up cycling groups that would visit the hotels, and a bike library so that anyone could access a bicycle. This was done with speed and efficiency, involving as many people as possible to provide a holistic network of meaningful support. 

    Times were also dark. People were growing desperate with their situations. Some families crowded into single rooms, with low morale and no word on how long anyone might be stuck there. “People would call us and say that they’re on the verge of committing suicide,” Yvonne said. She told one story of having to stay on the phone with a person who had sent a photo of himself with a rope around his neck, while a colleague took a taxi to intervene. Looking at the tragedies in the hotels during that time period, it is easy to imagine how it could have been much worse without a network of support. 

    On June 17, 2020, MORE planned a protest with No Evictions in Glasgow’s George Square. Word spread that a far-right group was planning to attend, but demonstrations went ahead as planned. According to Nick, police did not keep the “fascists” down on one end, and were more concerned about protecting the statues in the square. Bottles were being thrown by the far-right group at protesters, and scuffles broke out. What had been intended as peaceful protest quickly became dangerous. Police marched through the crowd, separating the groups and drawing the protest to a premature end. 

    On June 26, 2020, a man named Badruddin Abdalla Adam stabbed six people in the Park Inn Hotel in Glasgow, and was shot dead by police. He had sought help with his mental health 72 times. The night prior to the attack, Adam had told another resident that he wanted to stab people, and the resident reported this to hotel management, who took no action. 

    After the attack at 12:50 p.m., residents were evacuated onto the streets, many in thin clothing. At 10:30 p.m. that evening, MORE reported on their Facebook page that people were still waiting outside, with no food or water, and no word on where they would be sleeping that night. Support fell again to grassroots groups, who gathered donations of food and warmer clothing. Although it was widely described as an “avoidable tragedy,” the Home Office and the housing company Mears did not implement any significant changes. 

    Previous Coverage
  • We must turn solidarity with Ukraine into the new normal for all refugees
  • With the Glasgow City Council seeking to distance itself from the scandals and misery of the hotels, routine dispersal was halted in 2021. In practice, this meant that the city no longer had plans to accommodate asylum seekers who continued to arrive. Mears was supposed to halt the use of hotels. However, MORE, Unity Sisters, No Evictions and other voluntary organizations are still providing support to asylum seekers being kept in hotels long-term in Glasgow. 

    Although the Home Office states that asylum requests are normally granted within six months, independent inquiry by the Refugee Council shows requests are taking an average of one to three years to be processed. It is not unheard of to wait upwards of a decade. I spoke to Virginie, one of the founding members of Unity Sisters, a group of women going through the asylum and immigration system. The group is both a support group and a campaigning group. By holding workshops on public speaking, guiding members to ESL classes, facilitating translation and funding peer research, Unity Sisters are aiming to speed up the asylum process for those in hotel detention. 

    Unity Sisters is often welcoming new arrivals, as well as saying goodbye to those who have had their status approved. As a community group, they hold sewing groups and collect donations for specific cases. Group meetings serve as a kind of therapy, and also a way of spreading important information — from where to buy food or learn English, to explaining legal rights. New asylum seekers are not given much information, although there are serious repercussions for things like working illegally. For issues with Mears or Serco, they often refer members to No Evictions, which might then refer women-specific issues to Unity Sisters. Children are a common concern. 

    Families are often given one room for everyone to share, making it difficult for children to nap or parents to get time apart. Food is an issue — with three meals at set times, it is hard to accommodate for a child that might need snacks or milk in between meals or during the night. Schooling becomes difficult as well, Virginie explains. She described to me how one of the Unity Sisters was moved into a hotel, after the apartment she was living in had become flooded and full of mold. The hotel was very far away from her childrens’ school, and without money for transport it became a major issue to get them there and back every day. Asylum seekers are also not allowed to pursue higher education, something Unity Sisters are actively campaigning about through social media, educational videos and protests, together with MORE. 

    From her work at Unity Sisters, Virginie seems most worried about the amount of time people are spending in limbo, something Nick and Yvonne echoed as well. They have all seen first-hand how years of waiting to be granted asylum can impact people. “Sometimes I’ve noticed that after people get granted [asylum], you wouldn’t believe that these are the strong resilient people that you knew previously,” Yvonne said. She describes how people become withdrawn and can take years to recover from the physical and emotional toll of the process. “So people’s lives have kind of evaporated in front of them, because it’s not something that you can claim back.” 

    “Little Amal,” a 12-foot puppet of a Syrian refugee child made an appearance at a protest in Glasgow in November 2021. (Facebook/No Evictions Glasgow)

    Issues with hotel detention cannot be chalked up simply to an overloaded system, as the Home Office often claims. They reflect a more sinister mechanism, designed to dissuade people from coming to, or staying in the U.K., and whose cost is human lives. Lives lost in tragedy, like in the Park Inn case, and lives lost in endless waiting. 

    Following Glasgow City Council’s withdrawal from the dispersal system, the Home Office began to open up hotels outside of the city, without notifying local authorities as is customary. That means that local doctors, schools and other public services are not prepared for a large influx of people. A letter from a member of the Scottish parliament to the Home Secretary in October 2021 complained that Scottish Ministers had not been informed of the plans, and were only informed by local authorities concerned about essential services like health care. Clandestine hotels have been confirmed by members of MORE and No Evictions in East Kilbride, Falkirk, Aberdeen, Paisley and Greenock. 

    The practice of clandestine hotels makes it harder for asylum seekers to access already limited support. MORE’s biking volunteers for example cannot make it much further than Paisley. Isolation from immigrant communities also means new arrivals are less likely to hear about groups that provide support. Nick didn’t even know there were hotels outside of Glasgow until he got a call from a young man looking for medical help in East Kilbride. He added that it becomes a lot harder to find a sense of belonging, to use the bus, or participate in social events, meetings and community meals when you’re in East Kilbride. 

    The ineffectiveness of the new system casts suspicion on the intentions behind it. The small towns and cities opening clandestine hotels have strained resources and infrastructures compared to Glasgow, and are likely to be facing their own challenges. Yvonne feels this makes inhabitants less likely to be sympathetic to refugees and asylum seekers. “So for me, that’s just a technique from the home office to isolate and further dehumanize the community, instead of ensuring that they’re in places where they can be supported to participate fully in the society.” 

    On top of moving new arrivals to clandestine hotels, a MORE Facebook post from September 2022 notes that many people in hotel detention “are afraid to complain formally or submit a relocation [request] because they say ‘it is the practice of [Mears] to transfer people who complain to hotels outside of Glasgow.’” Just the presence of these new hotels then could be enough to discourage people in unsafe housing to reach out for help. 

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    Despite the mounting difficulties for asylum seekers in Glasgow, grassroots groups here seem to be just as busy as the Home Office is. Unity Sisters is launching their Community Peer Advocacy project which aims to empower women who are refugees and asylum seekers to communicate their experiences with their wider community. They also plan on continuing their sewing meetups, as well as campaigning for faster asylum processing, for including refugee topics in school curriculums and for access to higher education for asylum seekers. After various initiatives aimed at helping members communicate more confidently, the hope is that members’ protests, social media and raising awareness by word-of-mouth start to affect change in these areas. 

    Bolstered by donations, No Evictions is also continuing their work as before. Their presence at the Kenmure Street raid has increased their visibility, although they are currently fighting legal implications for some protesters involved. Instead of simply changing locks, the group is concerned that Mears plans to un-pause evictions, now with police and court orders, and they are currently arranging an urgent action plan. 

    Yvonne’s plans with MORE in the coming year include starting a blog with weekly stories told by asylum seekers on their experiences to ensure a paper trail. “I feel like these stories are lost — they are being told, but they’re not being recorded,” she explained. MORE is also planning a demonstration at the August 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships in Glasgow, to raise visibility on the issue of freedom of movement. After learning to cycle out of necessity during the pandemic, Yvonne has discovered a love of long-cycle. 

    “I think the beautiful thing is sometimes you stop and just listen to the birds. And it’s really an empowering thing that you are making your own decision,” she said. “Sometimes we talk about resistance as chaining ourselves outside the Home Office. But resistance is having the mindset that I’m going to be free, in spite of the barriers that you erect around me. So I’m still going to cycle and enjoy this beautiful landscape in spite of what is happening. That is one of the greatest forms of resistance.”

    Louisville’s multiracial tenant union is at the forefront of a growing national movement

    Private police officers guide a line of late-model SUVs through the January morning’s cold rain into a lane of Louisville’s Grinstead Avenue, specially cleared to ease their path to the entrance of Collegiate School. Brake lights shine through the gloom as children in plaid uniforms climb out and head inside. Collegiate, founded by a plantation-owning Kentucky family and led by a board president who is the heir to the Brown-Forman liquor dynasty, has an annual tuition of $26,000 per year.

    Just to the west of a new, modern Collegiate playground is the Yorktown Apartments, separated from school grounds by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Outside one of the Yorktown buildings, where the monthly rent averages $845, two dozen people stand in the rain. Jasmine Harris, her winter coat partially open to show a crimson red Louisville Tenants Union T-shirt, steps to a microphone facing a couple of television cameras.

    “Everyone deserves a home that is safe, but too many of us are choosing between medicines and food and paying the rent,” she said. “And that ain’t right!”   

    “That ain’t right!” repeat the people assembled behind Harris. Most of them are wearing the same shirts.

    “Landlords think they can treat us however,” Harris continued. “They keep us living in terrible conditions, and evict us if we speak up!”

    “That ain’t right!”

    “Our landlords are nameless, faceless corporations like Collegiate School, and they want to demolish our homes to build parking lots!”

    That, it turns out, is why these people are gathered this morning. A few years ago, Collegiate purchased Yorktown, which has 35 low-cost apartments in a community with a need for 31,000 more affordable housing units. But Collegiate has other priorities: It is seeking government permission to tear down the Yorktown Apartments to clear the way for a 56-car parking lot.

    This time, the reply chant to Harris includes a guy with a bullhorn, and is a lot more specific.

    “We need housing in this spot. Not a rich kid parking lot!”

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  • How activists are making the right to housing a reality
  • Harris introduces several of the Yorktown residents, who speak facing a ground level apartment with a 2 foot-by-3 foot hole in its front door and broken windows surrounding it. The residents show the media mold, rodent tracks, water and fire damage, and describe futile efforts to get maintenance responses from Collegiate. “Since we got the notice in October that they want to tear the buildings down, they just quit taking care of the place,” Yorktown resident Patrick McCarthy said.

    Harris returns to the microphone, changing the theme from grievance to power. This press conference was scheduled to be a prelude to a show of resistance later that day at a local architectural review commission meeting set to review Collegiate’s demolition application. But Collegiate pulled its request the day before, the second time it has done so when word of a protest was leaked.

    Harris lists the demands of Collegiate — help tenants with moving costs and the likely increased rents for nearby living, and stop demolition plans until all are safely relocated. These demands will be met, Harris insists. (Collegiate responded to a request for comment for this article by saying it has pushed back the tenant relocation date and is offering to help residents with their moves, including some costs. On March 8, at a meeting attended by Yorktown residents and other Louisville Tenant Union members, a local architectural review committee voted 3-2 to deny Collegiate’s request to demolish the Yorktown buildings.

    “We are poor, we are working class, we are old, young, Black, brown, white and everything in between. We are organizing across lines others use to divide us,” Harris said. “We know the people who run Collegiate are the descendants of wealthy plantation owners and they are used to pushing people like us out of the way.”

    ‘Tenants will no longer be silent’

    The March 2020 killing of medical worker Breonna Taylor in her apartment by Louisville police led to months of demonstrations, along with renewed charges that the area’s police violence and the raid on Taylor’s apartment were fueled in part by government-funded gentrification and displacement in Louisville’s historically Black neighborhoods. The response to Taylor’s killing also brought together a group of advocates who found that they shared deep and personal interests in the rights of tenants.

    Harris and her children had been struggling to get their landlord to respond to unsafe conditions. Shemaeka Shaw had been assaulted by law enforcement during an eviction. Josh Poe from rural Kentucky and Jessica Bellamy from Louisville’s Smoketown neighborhood had endured their own housing insecurity and were already organizing Black and white tenants. They and several others had been pushing for housing rights on their own or in smaller groups. In early 2022, they came together to form the Louisville Tenants Union, or LTU.

    The original plan was to do a policy-focused effort, likely around a tenants’ bill of rights with a right to counsel in eviction proceedings. But as they talked through these ideas, several of the LTU members reported problems they faced with the CT Group, a Maryland-based private corporation that had a contract with the Louisville Metro Housing Authority, or LMHA, to manage two of the city’s largest public housing sites. LTU members and others were dealing with flooding, mold, rodents and broken lights in parking areas, with little to no response to their outreach to management.

    “We organize through struggle,” Josh Poe said. “Our vision as part of the national tenants movement is a homes guarantee, but when we get a group of tenants together we have to deal with their immediate issues. That is how we build a powerful base — which ties into the larger goals.” So the tenants’ bill of rights plans were put on hold, and the fight to improve public housing conditions began.

    Louisville Tenants Union members delivered petitions to the CT Group’s rent office in May 2022. (Twitter/Louisville Tenants Union)

    So LTU shared tenant complaints on social media, used public records requests to document the pattern of neglect, and staged a “walk in” to present demands at a March 2022 LMHA board meeting. At a demonstration and press conference outside the CT Group’s local offices, Shemaeka Shaw said, “As an impacted resident, my mission is to create housing for every tenant in Louisville that is safe, decent and permanently affordable. We believe that housing is a human right, not a commodity.”

    Shaw describing herself as an impacted tenant was an understatement. After growing up in Louisville, and never having been evicted or arrested before 2016, she endured a nightmarish sequence of events. First, she alleges that she was sexually assaulted by her landlord, who had a Section 8 housing contract with LMHA. When Shaw reported the assault, the landlord retaliated by filing a court action for eviction, despite Shaw being current on her rent.

    A mediation agreement with the landlord gave Shaw and her two-year-old son 30 days to move. But, just 10 days later, the landlord and two deputy sheriffs showed up at the home to put her out. When Shaw tried to explain the agreement, one of the deputy sheriffs knocked her to the ground, carried her out of her home in her nightgown and without underwear — and charged her with criminal trespassing and resisting arrest.

    A jury eventually exonerated Shaw on all charges, and the sheriff deputy was later convicted of perjury and tampering with evidence on multiple cases. But Shaw had already spent time in jail and then the hospital for the injuries she sustained, and lost most of her possessions in the process. She and her son were homeless for eight months. “We were pillar to post, just living with what family would take us in,” she said.

    Shaw’s next rental home failed four inspections for exposed wiring before catching fire in April 2018. Again, she lost all of her belongings. Remarkably, her renting troubles were still not over. Shaw and her son, along with a teenage niece, moved into yet another Section 8-subsidized home. Her landlord, who owned hundreds of properties, had been branded Louisville’s worst landlord by a local television station investigation a few years earlier. When Shaw filed complaints about serious mold and mildew problems, the windows being nailed shut and some of the electricity was not functioning, her landlord responded with an eviction filing.

    In mid-May 2019, Shaw was forcibly removed from the home and the locks changed. When she and some family and friends tried to pack up some of her items the landlord and deputies had thrown into the yard, Shaw was again arrested, this time charged with felony burglary. Shaw spent six days in jail and is still fighting the criminal charges, which are set for trial in April. Shaw and other LTU members point out that these were acts of state-sponsored violence visited on Shaw when she challenged real estate capital, a response they say is part and parcel of the structural violence routinely visited on Blacks in U.S. communities.

    Shaw and her son now live on Louisville’s west side. She is convinced that tenants coming together is the best way to prevent what happened to her from being inflicted on others. “I’ve learned to redirect my trauma into fire,” she said. “I would have had different outcomes if I had the tenant union behind me. The powers that be told me I was crazy, but that’s harder to say when I am standing next to 100 other people who have gone through the same thing.”    

    So Shaw and other LTU members kept up the pressure on CT Group and LMHA. When they made a presentation to the Louisville Metro Council about the crisis, they gained the attention of Metro Councilor Jecorey Arthur. Arthur ended up joining LTU members at an August press conference to announce he was filing a resolution calling for LMHA to terminate its contract with the CT Group.

    “The LTU is showing tenants they have power,” Arthur said. “I’ve seen tenants who were hopeless about change get motivated by the union. Even if they haven’t joined it yet, they are seeing a group of people who live where they live and go through what they go through get wins.”

    On Oct. 19, the Metro Council unanimously passed Arthur’s resolution. Less than a week later, CT Group announced it was walking away from its contract with LMHA. The city’s top newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, made it clear that the decision was due to “consistent pressure from members of the Louisville Tenants Union.”

    Arthur agrees. “The LTU made an example out of the CT Group,” he said. “The example was that tenants will no longer be silent about housing injustice. They believed in a better future, organized for it and won.”

    Demanding a ‘Fair Lease’

    Jasmine Harris’ path to a microphone in front of Yorktown Apartments traveled through her own housing struggles. She and her children have endured homelessness, including a period of several nights where the only spot they could find was the lobby of a family shelter where every bed was already full. Harris, then eight months pregnant, and her infant daughter huddled up in a chair, with Harris’ coat for a blanket. Finally, she persuaded a relative to let them sleep on her couch, and eventually got an apartment owned by an organization called New Directions.

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    The apartment was better than being homeless. But, from day one, when her daughter crawled on the carpet and came up with her leggings stained black from the dirt, Harris experienced problems with the home. She and other residents called for maintenance help with mold, discolored tap water, and roach, mice and bed bug infestations. They say the responses were slow at best, and Harris received the same reaction when she notified management about her ceiling caving in and clothes being ruined by water damage. “At one point, the manager told me, ‘Ms. Harris, if you don’t like it here, you can just turn in your keys.’”

    Harris had a better idea. She already had experience as a community activist in campaigns against police brutality and for healthy food options in the neighborhood. “I knew that the more people who speak up, the better,” she said. “I knew there was power in numbers.” She began reading about the history of tenant organizing, and then pulled her neighbors together to form the New Directions Tenant Union.

    They began by putting together a list of demands, mostly focusing on maintenance response. Harris had learned that the landlord-tenant transaction is at its core a contractual relationship, so they decided to start changing the terms of that contract. “The landlords have tons of lawyers who write up the leases in a way that gives them all the power and nothing to the residents,” Harris said. So they began organizing over the demand that the landlord sign a new, “Fair Lease.” The lease, variations of which have been included in demands in other national tenant campaigns, limits rent increases to no more than 2 percent each year, requires fast and full response to maintenance requests, and provides tenants with automatic renewal to prevent against eviction by lease non-renewal.

    The union gathered together other tenants and community supporters and held a rally, marching to the complex office to present the Fair Lease, waving signs like “No more bugs/No more mold/Bring our buildings up to code.” A New Directions spokesperson reached for this article denied Harris’ claims that it did not respond to tenants’ complaints, and pointed out that its properties pass regular federal housing inspections.

    The Fair Lease has not yet been accepted, but the New Directions union has had other victories. It fought off the landlord’s plans to allow police unrestricted access to enter the residents’ apartments, and it helped one union member resist three separate attempts to evict her. “I have never had anyone to support me like this,” she told a local television station as the union members occupied the complex office until her new lease was signed. “If things aren’t right, speak up,” she said to the TV cameras. “There are people out here who have your back.”

    The brutal legacy of plantation culture

    Jessica Bellamy grew up on Lampton Street in Smoketown, a neighborhood southeast of downtown Louisville where thousands of formerly enslaved Black people moved from rural areas after the Civil War. Her mother owns Shirley Mae’s Café, a soul food restaurant on the corner of Clay and Lampton streets, where Bellamy has worked off and on since she was 12 years old. The restaurant founded by Shirley Mae Beard, Bellamy’s grandmother, is well known for hosting the Salute to Black Jockeys festival during Kentucky Derby week, which has attracted the likes of B.B. King, Morgan Freeman and Whoopi Goldberg. “I grew up seeing what is possible when people come together in community,” Bellamy said.

    But when the notorious HUD HOPE VI program triggered the 2012 demolition of more than 300 units of public housing in Smoketown, gentrification forces emerged from the rubble. “Developers started swarming the community,” Bellamy said. Trained in design at the University of Louisville and bolstered by years of working at the school’s Neurodevelopmental Science Lab, Bellamy started researching her neighborhood and organizing residents under the umbrella of a social enterprise she created called Grassroots Information Design Studio, or GRIDS.

    “In Louisville, they like our Black smiling faces. They will paint pictures of us on murals but take no steps to prevent our displacement.”

    The experience provided Bellamy with a surprising realization: Community members were often at odds with churches, schools and other non-profits that were tearing homes down and flipping others to the highest bidder. “It turned out that the main gentrifiers are non-profit developers funded by the city,” she said. Bellamy points to multi-million dollar projects in historically Black neighborhoods where city dollars were going to developers aiming to create market-rate housing, despite that housing being unaffordable for current residents. She points to Census figures showing that one historically Black neighborhood in Louisville, Russell, lost almost 2,500 Black residents from 2010 to 2020, with a corresponding influx of white, likely wealthier, residents.

    Bellamy and Josh Poe co-founded the Root Cause Research Center, where they created story maps like “Public Lands to Private Hands” chronicling the way Black families were being displaced, and an ambitious report, “Redlining Louisville: Racial Capitalism and Real Estate.” Their work tracks the connection between private discrimination and the public policy that sustained and even encouraged it, from the pre-Civil War era to today.

    “Louisville, Kentucky is one of many cities throughout the South that still celebrates the brutal legacy of plantation culture,” Bellamy and Poe write on the Roots Cause Research Center site. “From an economy dominated by the plantation dynasties of bourbon, horse racing and tobacco, to the centering of bourbon whiskey as a culturally significant economic development engine and tourist attraction.”

    “In Louisville, they like our Black smiling faces,” Bellamy said. “They will paint pictures of us on murals but take no steps to prevent our displacement.”

    So community members have teamed up with Councilman Arthur to propose a Historically Black Neighborhood Ordinance, which would require review of any proposed development projects in the designated neighborhoods. Any projects with a potential to cause displacement, including projects that would create housing unaffordable to most of the community residents, would be blocked from any local government assistance, in particular land grants or financing. The ordinance would also create a process for Black residents to file claims for land and properties already taken from them by the government, along with home repair, downpayment and business investment assistance for those who establish claims for prior displacement.

    “Neighborhoods like Smoketown need protection from exploitation and a way out of this extractive economy,” Bellamy said. “The city needs to stop giving away our land, money and staff time to support development projects that will directly or indirectly displace us.”

    ‘Shared self-interest’ from Appalachia to Louisville

    Poe was born in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky when his mother was just 15 years old. Raised mostly by his grandparents, Poe lived in a home without an indoor bathroom and started working in the tobacco fields at the age of seven. But none of that prevented his family and community from providing him a model of advocacy and solidarity. Tobacco farming, Poe points out, was essentially a socialist enterprise with price supports and quotas that benefited smaller farmers. “That did not come from any big farmer’s benevolence, it came about because farmers organized. And that shaped my understanding of political power,” he said.

    Poe eventually made his way to Seattle, where he organized housing and labor campaigns. Upon his return to Kentucky, he met Bellamy, and they bonded over how their seemingly dissimilar backgrounds were not so different after all. “I learned the geography of Smoketown and Appalachia have a lot of material commonalities,” Poe said. “It just showed how much shared self-interest poor white people have with Black people.”

    Although many of LTU’s current campaigns center around historically Black communities, it has several white members and has helped organize mostly white trailer park residents on Louisville’s south side and elsewhere in Kentucky. LTU member Steph Smith grew up poor in Appalachian eastern Kentucky, where her family was often forced to move from dilapidated trailers when lot rental fees spiked or mold or other conditions got too bad. They often slept in other family members’ living rooms or in an old church.

    “I come from ‘Trump country,’ and I know some people hear my accent and wonder if I am racist,” she said. “But it became clear to me that poor white people in Appalachia being taught to hate Black people was a way to make it easier for the capitalist ruling class to exploit all of us generation after generation.”

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    The LTU meetings feature testimonials, where Black and white tenants have the opportunity to see their own experiences reflected in other people’s stories, including people they have been taught to see as their enemy. LTU members says their experience gives lie to any narrative that Blacks and whites can’t be organized together in a tenant movement. “That is why the LTU and tenant organizing in general is so dangerous, “Smith said. “I’ve never been a part of something that gives me so much optimism and keeps racking up tangible, material wins.”

    Even Bellamy and Poe, who created the wealth of material under the Root Cause Research Center banner, say this LTU multiracial organizing is the real key to reform. “There is not a report that Josh and I have written that brought material change,” Bellamy said. “It is going to take people standing up as their own political class to get these wins.”

    ‘We are the ones to keep us safe’

    When the LTU stands together in that advocacy, they do so on the shoulders of several generations of tenant activists. The 20th-century tenant rights movement in New York City was arguably the most consistent and insistent such movement in the U.S., using tactics from rent strikes to lobbying to win multiple individual struggles with landlords on issues of rent increases and poor conditions, as well as the enactment of broader rent regulation and tenant control of housing. After the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s final Poor People’s Campaign both featured demands for housing rights, the St. Louis Rent Strike of 1969 helped create changes in federal housing law that reduced public housing rents. Then, successful rent strikes and other actions across the country in the 1970s led to the forming of the National Tenants’ Union.

    Now, a current wave of campaigns, including those led by LTU’s partners at KC Tenants in Kansas City, are winning rent control measures, affordable housing fund commitments, and tenants’ bill of rights. They have a model to follow beyond our borders: Activism by tenant and labor unions have helped cause housing rights to be far more developed internationally than in the U.S., with nations like France, Germany and South Africa all enforcing a human right to affordable housing.

    Outside the White House, LTU leader Shemaeka Shaw joined dozens of tenant organizations from across the country to demand (Homes Guarantee)

    LTU is affiliated with the People’s Action Home Guarantee campaign, which mobilizes tenants across the country under the “Rent is Too Damn High” banner to demand a tenants’ bill of rights. LTU members including Shemaeka Shaw traveled to the White House with People’s Action to demand that President Biden issue an executive order on rent control and other tenant relief measures. Biden responded with a “Blueprint for a Renter’s Bill of Rights” that was short on tangible guarantees but a statement of federal commitment to protecting tenants that organizers believe can serve as a foundation for continued pressure.  

    Tara Raghuveer, the leader of the national Homes Guarantee campaign and of KC Tenants, says that LTU is at the core of the national movement, proving that tenants can have success even in the challenging political geography of a southern city. “The Louisville Tenant Union represents a new edge to the tenant movement, with deepening roots throughout the South and the Midwest,” she said. “They are building durable infrastructure that is already transforming political terrain in Louisville and will continue to set the pace for tenants across the country.” 

    So the LTU has kept one eye on its broader goals, even as it was winning the CT Group campaign and other interim victories for local tenants. In addition to their national work, they push for statewide laws instituting rent control, good-cause requirements for evictions and a block on landlords with pending code violations being allowed to evict tenants. They aim to transform the community’s landlord-tenant dynamic so they can start dictating the terms of the relationship, especially through the Fair Lease terms.

    Almost every LTU leader has experienced homelessness and retaliation for speaking up for tenant rights, so they have too many battle scars to harbor any illusion that the process will be an easy one. In a conversation among LTU leaders, Shaw swept her hand toward the entire group: “We are all traumatized,” she said. The others nod in agreement. But their response is to tangibly embrace the power of a union. “We are the ones to keep us safe,” she added.     

    Back at the Yorktown Apartments, Harris describes to the crowd how LTU members were part of the Home Guarantee campaign that traveled to Washington D.C. multiple times to pressure the Biden administration to take action on rents, which led to the president’s promise to institute new federal protections for tenants. “If we can take on the White House, we are not afraid to take on wealthy Louisville elites,” Harris said into the microphone. “We are here to promise that if Collegiate does not meet the tenants’ demands, the next time we will be back with hundreds of our neighbors from across the city. That’s right: We are here now, and we will keep coming back until we win!”

    We need a climate movement that addresses the trauma of fighting for a burning planet

    I used to think trauma was something that only applied to people exposed to extreme situations like war, genocide, abuse or crime. Yet, living on planet Earth pretty much guarantees you some trauma. 

    Trauma comes from the Greek “traumat,” which means “wound.” It is an emotional wounding that results from experiencing or witnessing a highly stressful, horrifying event or series of events where one feels a lack of control, powerlessness, and threat of injury or death. This sounds disturbingly similar to what humans are increasingly living through with climate change. 

    Being pushed beyond my own limits by the climate crisis forced me to take its traumatic impacts more seriously. As I witnessed the continent where I live burn to the ground during one of Australia’s worst bushfire events, I felt utterly overwhelmed. I’d spent the past decade helping to build the power of the climate movement, hoping to avert disasters like these. It was as though everyone’s work was burning to the ground, taking lives, homes and livelihoods with it. 

    The months that followed were like a dream. I moved through the world numb, unaware that the trauma of the experience had sent me into a dissociative state. As often happens in trauma, my brain switched off my capacity to feel as a way of trying to protect me. 

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  • There’s no place for burnout in a burning world
  • I struggled to know what to do or how to respond. Decisions about tiny things felt momentous, and yet nothing felt like it really mattered anymore. Just months before, I had helped organize the largest national climate mobilization in Australia’s history. As people around me exclaimed that maybe this was the social movement tipping point we had been waiting for, I couldn’t feel a thing.

    I kept believing I was OK, as I watched my body break down. It, more than I, knew I couldn’t keep going. As trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolk teaches, “the body keeps the score.”

    But trauma is not felt equally. There is a deep inequity in its distribution. In his book “My Grandmother’s Hands,” therapist and somatic abolitionist Resma Menakem reminds us of the greater trauma load being carried by bodies of color. The trauma of oppression doesn’t disappear upon death. It carries on across generations. As such, people from marginalized backgrounds tend to have a much bigger load to bear. 

    If I, a middle-class white person living in an affluent country, could experience what I did during the bushfires, I could only begin to imagine the trauma experienced by those on the frontlines of climate injustice — the Black Indigenous and People of Color facing climate impacts first and worst, who are also being required to forge some of the most courageous solutions. 

    Experiences of trauma are becoming all too common among those of us working on climate change. Being repeatedly exposed to an existential threat takes a toll. The trauma of this experience needs somewhere to go. If it isn’t processed or given an outlet, it stores in our bodies, layering atop trauma we had already accumulated prior to arriving at this work. 

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    The four trauma responses in a movement context

    There is scant understanding of trauma in the climate movement. Consequently, people are seldom provided with the support to recognize and process their trauma healthily. And so it builds, eventually manifesting in one or more of the following ways:

    1. Fight. This occurs when someone responds aggressively to something they perceive as threatening. That could be climate change itself, people they perceive as obstacles or a particular experience that triggers past trauma. Examples of a fight response in a movement context include: attacking or blaming, bullying or gaslighting, power-hoarding, unhelpfully polarizing situations or campaigns, and discriminating against people (consciously or unconsciously). 

    2. Freeze. The freeze response is where someone, realizing that resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into dissociation and/or collapses as if accepting the inevitability of being hurt (much like the overwhelm I felt during the fires). Movement examples of the freeze response include: decision/analysis paralysis, scarcity mindsets, stagnation, complacency, apathy, hopelessness and depression. 

    3. Flight. The flight response is where someone responds to a perceived threat by fleeing from it, or symbolically, by launching into a state of hyperactivity, in an effort to ward off the threat. Movement examples of the fleeing mode include: avoidance of feedback/conflict, burnout, and quitting. Examples of the hyperactivity mode include: workaholism; urgency/crisis mindsets; pursuing extreme tactics and strategies; anxiety and obsessive/compulsive tendencies. 

    4. Fawn. The fawn response kicks into gear when someone responds to a threat by trying to be pleasing or helpful in order to appease and forestall an attack. In a movement context, this often manifests as putting the advancement of others’ needs — or the causes’ needs — ahead of one’s own wellbeing. Examples include: code-switching (particularly among folks from marginalized backgrounds responding to discrimination and/or micro-aggressions), people-pleasing, over-working, marginalizing one’s own needs and chronic issues with boundaries. 

    As I reflected on these four responses, I realized that aspects of the climate movement’s culture can inadvertently encourage or incentivize at least three of these responses — fight, flight and fawn — more so than freeze.

    With fight, belligerent language is peppered, almost subliminally, throughout our vocabulary: “fight,” “battle,” “weaponize.” With flight, we are constantly in motion, unintentionally or otherwise, glorifying over-work. And with fawn, we love people who are willing to “step up” to the challenge, to be of service, contribute their all. Putting the issue ahead of the individual is our currency, even when doing so jeopardizes that individual’s wellbeing.

    Over time, as more trauma builds and more people respond in the four ways outlined above, movements come to perpetuate the very systems they exist to transform. Trauma begets more trauma. Hurt people, hurt people. People burn out and leave. Unresolved conflict ends groups. Campaigns stagnate. Activists, now jaded and exhausted, settle for centrist, complacent outcomes rather than the transformative change that movements seek.

    Building a culture of care and healing from movement trauma

    We need movements that support people to process and heal from their own trauma so that we can bring transformed mindsets to the work of transforming injustice. As the saying goes “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” To build an impactful climate justice movement, we must first build cultures that care for the people doing the work.

    Already, there are so many amazing people, programs and groups working to weave cultures of care and wellbeing into systemic justice work — much of it led by First Nations people, people of color, women, gender-diverse folk and others on the frontlines of injustice. What would it look like to lean into their wisdom, to grow care rather than illness, stress and burnout? 

    The origin of the word “care” is from the proto-Germanic karo meaning “sorrow, cry” and the proto-Indo-European gehr, meaning “shout, call.”

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  • As we confront the climate crisis, is bigger and faster always better?
  • Riffing off this etymology, to center care in the climate movement’s culture, surely we need to create space for people to healthily navigate their emotions about climate injustice. We also need to ensure people, particularly those marginalized by the mainstream, feel seen, heard and valued. And we need an active commitment to repairing and not perpetuating further harm and injustice.

    In trying to sketch out the different ingredients that a culture of care might center, a few elements emerged. This is just the beginning of a recipe. As we add more ingredients, the outcome gets richer: 

    1. Space. One of the most damaging aspects of unjust systems and trauma is the lack of spaciousness. The renowned psychologist Victor Frankl once said: “Between stimulus and response is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” 

    A culture of care would protect time and space for people to rest, reflect, recover and repair. As emergent strategist Adrienne Maree Brown says: “There is always enough time for the right work,” and Nap Ministry Founder Tricia Hersey reminds us: “Rest is resistance.” 

    What could this look like in the climate movement?

    • Shorter working hours / 4-day work weeks
    • 80/20 time for reflection, experimentation and creativity
    • Campaign plans and timeframes with ebbs and flows
    • Communities of practice and learning circles
    • Sabbaticals and long service leave for both staff and volunteers

    2. Love. Cornell West said that “justice is what love looks like in action.” At the heart of injustice is an absence of love. Healing climate injustice requires us to love ourselves, others and the earth. bell hooks reminds us: “to begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling.” It is, as M Scott Peck says, “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” If we don’t act with love towards ourselves and others in our work, we can’t bring more love to the systems causing climate injustice. 

    What could this look like in the climate movement?

    • Regular praise, positive feedback and celebration of people and their work (I distinguish people from their work, as we need to get better at celebrating people’s inherent worth, independent of their work)
    • Investing more capacity in people’s leadership, growth and development
    • Regularly checking in on people’s wellbeing and building communities of support for people when they are going through difficult times
    • Time and space for people to attend to their own inner work 
    • Eldership, mentoring and buddies

    3. Diversity. Diversity is life. Insight and learning lies in understanding not just the things we share in common but how each of us is beautifully unique. According to social movement research, a few people connected across difference have greater potential for creating the social growth of an idea or process than large numbers of people who think alike. 

    Diversity enables greater sense-making, because it widens the pool of vantage points and sense-makers. This is especially beneficial when navigating the complexity of climate change. A culture of care would encourage and celebrate diversity in all its forms — race, class, gender, sexual orientation, body type, health and all their intersections. It would also actively encourage divergence of opinion, rather than rushing to convergence and unity. 

    What could this look like in a movement?

    • Leaders from a wide range of different backgrounds
    • Time and space given to building relationships across difference
    • A movement ecosystem comprising a diversity of theories of change, strategies and groups, each of which is respected by the other
    • Actively encouraging a diversity of perspectives, feedback and opinions 

    4. Boundaries. Therapist and political organizer Prentis Hemphill defines a boundary as “the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” We have arrived at the unjust juncture we find ourselves in today precisely due to a lack of boundaries — of treating the world and ourselves as limitless resources. A culture of care would celebrate and foster a practice of boundary-setting to help bring us all back within happy and healthy limits.

    What could this look like in a movement?

    • Respecting work hours and supporting people to switch off when not working
    • Asking rather than assuming someone can take on more work/responsibility
    • Limiting exposure to vicarious climate trauma 
    • Setting and holding clear goals to avoid feeling the need to do everything
    • Encouraging everyone to set their own personal boundaries and communicate these to those they work with

    5. Awareness. We can’t change what we can’t see, yet our most painful trauma is often stored subconsciously — our worst biases often hidden from view. A culture of care would provide support and space for everyone to build greater individual and collective awareness of their blindspots and pain, so that we can move forward in the world with more holistic perspectives. 

    What could this look like in a movement?

    • Providing support and resources for everyone to process their trauma. In certain sectors this takes the form of supervision. We need a version of this for climate trauma, and we need to build networks of climate-informed mental health practitioners to support those who spend their days addressing climate injustice
    • Training and communities of practice to address unconscious bias 
    • Creating space for regular feedback and reflection

    6. Compassion. Compassion is the sense of concern that arises when we are confronted with another’s or our own suffering and feel motivated to see that suffering relieved. It has four components: 1. noticing; 2. feeling; 3. caring; and 4. doing. Compassion is different to empathy in that it moves beyond feeling to doing, however it is not about fixing others’ suffering for them, rather creating the conditions for suffering to be alleviated. Like love, a lack of compassion is at the heart of injustice. By building a movement’s compassionate capacity, we strengthen its capacity for justice.  

    What could this look like in a movement?

    • Seeing mistakes as a crucial part of learning, rather than fuel for shame 
    • Being clear about each other’s needs and supporting one another to ensure those needs are met
    • Learning to let go of judgement — of ourselves and others; in Buddhism, negative judgement about our feelings (the “second arrow”) is viewed as more damaging than the original feelings themselves
    • Checking in when we can see someone is struggling
    • Coaching to help people build capacity for their own solutions
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    7. Vulnerability. When we share deeper parts of ourselves, the parts that are not “resolved,” we open up a door in other people’s hearts to feel a little more able to do the same. And in the sharing of the deepest parts of ourselves, we build greater compassion, space for diversity and in turn more transformative movements. Vulnerability also calls on us to work on/for the things we know are needed, even if we know these things are likely to be attacked or ridiculed by the mainstream.

    What could this look like in a movement?

    • Leaders who act with radical honesty about when they are struggling, have made a mistake or don’t know what to do 
    • Properly welcoming new people into movement spaces, taking time to really understand and support the whole person — their strengths, fears and needs 
    • Campaigns and movements that demand and strive for what is needed, not just what they think they can get, despite fear or external attack

    8. Joy. Why do this work if not to generate joy? How we feel when we work, matters. It determines whether or not people keep showing up for the long arcs required to sustain social change. In her book “Pleasure Activism,” Adrienne Maree Brown says: “Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.” 

    What could this look like in a movement?

    • Building play — defined as “time without purpose” — into work
    • Regular social time and celebration
    • Identifying the feeling states associated with different types of work and ensuring that everyone has plenty associated with pleasure and joy 

    9. Fluidity. Change is constant. The most effective movements seek to “be like water,” evolving as the issue does. But movements only evolve as effectively as their members do. Cultures of care ensure space and support for everyone to evolve and grow over time, avoiding the creep of stagnation and resentment.

    What could this look like in a movement?

    • Strategy, groups and campaigns that have ambitious goals but are always open to change and responsive to what is going on around them
    • Reflective practices to learn and iterate strategy
    • Support for people to develop in their roles and evolve over time
    • Sharing and learning to enable cross-pollination of knowledge and skills

    10. Imagination. Imagination is an act of both courage, and intelligence. Far from naivety, it arises from a place of deep sensing — of how the world is, how it was, and how it could be better. Imagination can never end at the point of sensing, it must extend to action, not only one’s own, but the inspiration of others to act collectively. Imagination is a form of care because it refuses to accept the way things are, and instead dares to both dream of and create different systems, structures and worlds. 

    What could this look like in a movement?

    • Celebrating ambitious ideas and plans and those who generate them
    • Creating space in our work to dream, reflect and co-create new ideas together
    • Welcoming more art and artists into movements
    • Seeking to learn from spaces outside of our immediate circles

    This is just a starting point. Building more of these 10 ingredients into the climate movement will be an iterative and emergent process. But one thing’s for sure, we can’t afford to shy away. The more traumatic load we build, the more conflict, burnout and status quo outcomes we will get. Showing the climate crisis the care it is calling for starts with caring for ourselves and each other. 

    How to beat the ‘fracking frenzy’ — lessons from the campaign that ended fracking in Ireland

    The reality of the climate crisis makes it clear that we must leave the “oil in the soil” and the “gas under the grass,” as the Oilwatch International slogan goes. The fossil fuel industry knew this before anyone else. Yet the industry continues to seek new extractive frontiers on all continents in what has been labeled a “fracking frenzy” by campaigners. 

    In Australia, unconventional fossil gas exploration has been on the rise over the last two decades. Coal seam gas wells have been in production since 2013, while community resistance has so far prevented the threat of shale gas fracking. The climate crisis and state commitments under the Paris Agreement means that the window for exploration is closing. But the Australian economy remains hooked on fossil fuels and the industry claims that fossil gas is essential for economic recovery from COVID, “green growth” and meeting net-zero targets.  

    The Northern Territory, or NT, government is particularly eager to exploit its fossil fuel reserves and wants to open up extraction in the Beetaloo Basin as part of its gas strategy. The NT recently announced a $1.32 billion fossil fuel subsidy for gas infrastructure project Middle Arm and greenlighted the drilling of 12 wells by fracking company Tamboran Resources as a first step towards full production. 

    Gas exploration is inherently speculative with high risks. The threat of reputational damage is high enough that large blue chip energy companies like Origin Energy — a major player in the Australian energy market — are turning away from shale. This leaves the field to smaller players who are willing to take a gamble in search of a quick buck. This is precisely how Tamboran came to prominence in Australia. After buying out Origin Energy in September 2022, Tamboran is now the biggest player in the Northern Territory’s drive to drill. 

    NT anti-fracking campaigner Hannah Mekin described this point as “a really key moment in the campaign to stop fracking in the Beetaloo basin.” For over a decade, “Traditional Owners, pastoralists and the broader community have held the industry at bay, but we are now staring down the possibility of full production licenses being issued in the near future.”  

    Despite this threat, Tamboran has been stopped before. In 2017, community activists in Ireland mobilized a grassroots movement that forced the state to revoke Tamboran’s license and ban fracking. Although the context may be different, this successful Irish campaign has many key insights to offer those on the frontlines of resistance in Australia — as well as the wider anti-extraction movements all over the world.

    (Twitter/@Love_Leitrim)

    Tamboran comes to Ireland

    In February 2011, Tamboran was awarded an exploratory license in Ireland — without public knowledge or consent. They planned to exploit the shale gas of the northwest carboniferous basin and set their sights on county Leitrim. The county is a beautiful, mountainous place, with small communities nestled in valleys carved by glaciers in the last ice age. The landscape is watery: peat bogs, marshes and gushing rivers are replenished by near daily downpours as Atlantic coast weather fronts meet Ireland’s western seaboard. Farming families go back generations on land that can be difficult to cultivate. Out of this land spring vibrant and creative communities, despite — or perhaps because of — the challenges of being on the margins and politically peripheral.

    The affected communities first realized Tamboran’s plans when the company began a PR exercise touting jobs and economic development. In seeking to understand what they faced, people turned to other communities experiencing similar issues. A mobile cinema toured the glens of Leitrim showing Josh Fox’s documentary “Gasland.” After the film there were Q&As with folks from another Irish community, those resisting a Shell pipeline and gas refinery project at Rossport. Out of these early exchanges, the grassroots community response Love Leitrim, or LL, formed in late 2011. 

    Resisting fracking by celebrating the positives about Leitrim life was a conscious strategic decision and became the group’s hallmark. In LL’s constitution, campaigners asserted that Leitrim is “a vibrant, creative, inclusive and diverse community,” challenging the underlying assumptions of the fracking project that Leitrim was a marginal place worth sacrificing for gas. The group developed a twin strategy of local organizing — which rooted them in the community — and political campaigning, which enabled them to reach from the margins to the center of Irish politics. This combination of “rooting” and “reaching” was crucial to the campaign’s success. 

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    5 key rooting strategies

    The first step towards defeating Tamboran in Ireland was building a movement rooted in the local community. Out of this experience, five key “rooting strategies” for local organizing emerged — showing how the resistance developed a strong social license and built community power.

    1. Build from and on relationships. Good relationships were essential to building trust in LL’s campaign. Who was involved — and who was seen to be involved — were crucial for rooting the campaign in the community. Local people were far more likely to trust and accept information that was provided by those they knew, and getting the public support of local farmers, fishers and well-known people was crucial. Building on existing relationships and social bonds, LL became deeply rooted in local life in a way that provided a powerful social license and a strongly-rooted base to enable resistance to fracking.

    2. Foster ‘two-way’ community engagement. LL engaged the community with its campaign and, at the same time, actively participated as volunteers in community events. This two-way community engagement built trust and networked the campaign in the community. LL actively participated in local events such as markets, fairs and the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which offered creative ways to boost their visibility. At the same time, LL also volunteered to support events run by other community groups, from fun-runs to bake sales. According to LL member Heather (who, along with others in this article, is quoted on the condition of anonymity), this strategy was essential to “building up trust … between the group, its name and what it wants, and the community.”

    3. Celebrate community. In line with its vision, LL celebrated and fostered community in many ways. This was typified by its organizing of a street feast world café event during a 2017 community festival that saw people come together over a meal to discuss their visions of Leitrim now and for their children. LL members also supported local renewable energy and ecotourism projects that advanced alternative visions of development. Celebrating and strengthening the community in this way challenged the fundamental assumptions of the fracking project — a politics of disposability which assumed that Leitrim could be sacrificed to fuel the extractivist economy. 

    4. Connect to culture. Campaigners saw culture as a medium for catalyzing conversations and connecting with popular folk wisdom. LL worked with musicians, artists and local celebrities in order to relate fracking to popular cultural and historical narratives that resonated with communities through folk music and cultural events. This was particularly important in 2016, the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, which ultimately led to Irish independence from the British Empire. Making those connections tapped into radical strands of the popular imagination. Drawing on critical counter-narratives in creative ways overcame the potential for falling into negative activist stereotypes. Through culture, campaigners could present new or alternative stories, experiences or ideas in a way that evocatively connected with people.

    5. Build networks of solidarity. Reaching out to other frontline communities was a powerful and evocative way to raise awareness of fracking and extractivism from people who had experienced them first-hand. As local campaigner Bernie explained, “When someone comes, it’s on a human level people can appreciate and understand. When they tell their personal story, that makes a difference.” 

    Perhaps the most significant guest speaker was Canadian activist Jessica Ernst, whose February 2012 presentation to a packed meeting in the Rainbow ballroom was described by many campaigners as a key moment in the campaign. Ernst is a former gas industry engineer who found herself battling the fracking industry on her own land. She told her personal story, the power of which was heightened by her own industry insider credentials and social capital as a landowner. Reflecting on the event, LL member Triona remembered looking around the room and seeing “all the farmers, the landowners, who are the important people to have there — and people were really listening.”

    (Twitter/@Love_Leitrim)

    4 key reaching strategies 

    With a strong social license and empowered network of activists, the next step for the anti-fracking movement was to identify how to make their voices heard and influence public policy. This required reaching beyond the local community scale to engage in national political decision making around fracking. Four key strategies enabled campaigners to successfully jump scales and secure a national fracking ban.

    1. Find strategic framings. Tamboran sought to frame the public conversation on narrow technical issues surrounding single drilling sites, pipelines and infrastructure, obscuring the full impact of the thousands of planned wells. As LL campaigner Robert pointed out, this “project-splitting” approach “isn’t safe for communities, but it’s easier for the industry because they’re getting into a position where they’re unstoppable.” Addressing the impact of the entire project at a policy level became a key concern for campaigners. LL needed framings that would carry weight with decision makers, regulators and the media. Listening and dialogue in communities helped campaigners to understand and root the campaign in local concerns. From this, public health and democracy emerged as frames that resonated locally, while also carrying currency nationally.

    The public health frame mobilized a wide base of opposition. Yet it was not a consideration in the initial Irish Environmental Protection Agency research to devise a regulatory framework for fracking. LL mobilized a campaign that established public health as a key test of the public’s trust in the study’s legitimacy. The EPA conceded and amended the study’s terms of reference to include public health. This enabled campaigners to draw on emerging health impact research from North American fracking sites, providing evidence that would have “cache with the politicians,” as LL member Alison put it. Working alongside campaigners from New York, LL established the advocacy group Concerned Health Professionals of Ireland, or CHPI, mirroring a similar, highly effective New York group. CHPI was crucial to highlighting the public health case for a ban on fracking and shaping the media and political debate.

    2. Demonstrate resistance. Having rooted the campaign in local community life, LL catalyzed key groups like farmers and fishers to mobilize their bases. Farmers in LL worked within their social networks to organize a tractorcade. “It was all word of mouth … knocking on doors and phone calls,” said Fergus, the lead organizer for the event. Such demonstrations were “a show of solidarity with the farmers who are the landowners,” Triona recalled. They were also aimed at forcing the farmer’s union to take a public position on fracking. The event demonstrated to local farmers union leaders that their members were opposed to fracking, encouraging them to break their silence on the issue.

    Collective action also enforced a bottom line of resistance to the industry. Tamboran made one attempt to drill a test well in 2014. Community mobilization prevented equipment getting to the site for a week while a legal battle over a lack of an environmental impact assessment was fought and won. Reflecting on this success, Robert suggested that communities can be nodes of resistance to “fundamental, large problems that aren’t that easy to solve” because “one of the things small communities can do is simply say no.” And when frontline communities are networked, then “every time a community resists, it empowers another community to resist.”

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    3. Engage politicians before regulators. In 2013, when Tamboran was renewing its license, campaigners found that there was no public consultation mechanism. Despite this, LL organized an “Application Not to Frack.” This was printed in a local newspaper, and the public was encouraged to cut it out and sign it. This grassroots counter-application carried no weight with regulators, but with an emphasis on rights and democracy, it sent a strong signal to politicians. 

    Submitting their counter application, LL issued a press release: “Throughout this process people have been forgotten about. We want to put people back into the center of decision making … We are asking the Irish government: Are you with your people or not?” At a time when public sentiment was disillusioned with the political establishment in the aftermath of the 2011 financial crisis, LL tapped into this sentiment to discursively jump from the scale of a localized place-based struggle to one that was emblematic of wider democratic discontents and of national importance.

    Frontline environmental justice campaigns often experience procedural injustices when navigating governance structures that privilege scientific/technical expertise. Rather than attempt an asymmetrical engagement with regulators, LL forced public debate in the political arena. In that space, they were electors holding politicians to account rather than lay-people with insufficient scientific knowledge to contribute to the policy making process. The group used a variety of creative tactics and strategic advocacy to engage local politicians. This approach — backed up by a strongly rooted base — led to unanimous support for a ban from politicians in the license area. In the 2016 election, the only pro-fracking candidate failed to win a seat. Local democratic will was clear. Campaigners set their sights on parliament and a national fracking ban.

    4. Focus on the parliament. The lack of any public consultation before exploration commenced led campaigners to fear that decisions would continue to be made without public scrutiny. LL built strategic relationships with politicians across the political spectrum with the aim of forcing accountability in the regulatory system. A major obstacle to legislation was the ongoing EPA study, which was to inform government decisions on future licensing. But it emerged that CDM Smith, a vocally pro-fracking engineering firm, had been contracted for much of the work. The study was likely to set a roadmap to frack. 

    Campaigners had two tasks: to politically discredit the EPA study and work towards a fracking ban. They identified the different roles politicians across the political spectrum — and between government and opposition — could strategically play in the parliamentary process. While continuing a public campaign, the group engaged in intensive advocacy efforts, working with supportive parliamentarians to host briefings where community members addressed lawmakers, submitted parliamentary questions to the minister, used their party’s speaking time to address the issue, raised issues at parliamentary committee hearings, and proposed motions and legislative bills. 

    While the politicians were also not environmental experts, their position as elected representatives meant that regulators were accountable to them. Political pressure thus led to the shelving of the compromised EPA study and paved the way for a ban. Several bills had been tabled. By chance, the one that was first scheduled for debate was from a Leitrim politician whose bill was backed by campaigners as the most watertight. With one final push from campaigners, it secured support from lawmakers across parties and a government motion to block it was fought off. In November 2017, six years after Tamboran arrived in Leitrim, fracking was finally banned in Ireland. It was a win for people power and democracy.  

    Love Leitrim supporters showing solidarity with Standing Rock water protectors. (LL/Dervilla Keegan)

    Building a bridge to the Beetaloo and beyond

    Pacifist-anarchist folk singer Utah Phillips described folk songs as “bridges” between past struggles and the listener’s present. Bridges enable the sharing of knowledge and critical understanding across time and distances. Similarly, stories of struggle act as a bridge, between the world of the reader and the world of the story, sharing wisdom, and practical and ethical knowledge. The story of successful Irish resistance to Tamboran is grounded in a particular political moment and a particular cultural context. The political and cultural context faced by Australian campaigners is very different. Yet there are certainly insights that can bridge the gap between Ireland and Australia. 

    The Irish campaign shows us how crucial relationships and strongly rooted community networks can be when people mobilize. In the NT, campaigners have similarly sought to build alliances across the territory and between traditional Indigenous owners and pastoralists. This is crucial, suggests NT anti-fracking campaigner Hannah Mekin, because “the population affected by fracking in the NT is very diverse, and different communities often have conflicting interests, values and lifestyles.” 

    LL’s campaign demonstrates the importance of campaign framings reflective of local contexts and concerns. While public health was a unifying frame in Ireland, Mekin notes that the protection of water has become “a real motivator” and a rallying cry that “unites people across the region” because “if we over-extract or contaminate the groundwater we rely on, we are jeopardizing our capacity to continue living here.”  

    The Beetaloo is a sacred site for First Nations communities, with sacred song lines connected to the waterways. “We have to maintain the health of the waterways,” stressed Mudburra elder Raymond Dimikarri Dixon. “That water is alive through the song line. If that water isn’t there the songlines will die too.” 

    In scaling up from local organizing to national campaigning, the Irish campaign demonstrated the importance of challenging project splitting and engaging the political system to avoid being silenced by the technicalities of the regulatory process. In the NT, the government is advancing the infrastructure to drill, transport and process fracked gas. This onslaught puts enormous pressure on campaigners. “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Mekin noted. “We are constantly on the back foot trying to stop each individual application for a few wells here, a few wells there, as the industry entrenches itself as inevitable.” 

    In December 2022, Environment Minister Lauren Moss approved a plan by Tamboran Resources to frack 12 wells in the Beetaloo as they move towards full production. But campaigners are determined to stop them: the Central Australian Frack Free Alliance, or CAFFA, is taking the minister to court for failing to address the cumulative impacts of the project as a whole. By launching this case CAFFA wants to shift the conversation to the bigger issue of challenging a full scale fracking industry in the NT. As Mekin explained, “We want to make the government listen to the community, who for over a decade now have been saying that fracking is not safe, not trusted, not wanted in the territory.”

    Hannah Mekin of the Central Australian Frack Free Alliance and Love Leitrim contributed to this article.

    Prisoners reignite movement to end mass incarceration

    On Dec. 5, I sat in a circle with 30 prisoners at the Washington Correction Center in Shelton, Washington. As we looked around the room, anticipation, resolve and relief reflected in our eyes — yet we were all eager for this moment.

    Unable to meet due to COVID restrictions, we watched the world change around us for nearly three years. During this time tragedies like the murder of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor and countless others took place, and justice reform became a dinner-table conversation for many Americans. As incarcerated activists, we sat silenced, unable to convene — even though, as stakeholders, experts in the field and leaders in justice reform efforts in Washington state, we have a lot to contribute. Nevertheless, our passion for the work smoldered, and this circle was the oxygen needed to light the fire of our movement once again.

    I looked around the room with pride, then uttered the most powerful five words I will ever speak, “Welcome to Concerned Lifers everyone.” To those of us familiar with this call-to-order, they were words we thought would never be spoken again.

    This circle, a true microcosm of America, was filled with people of every ethnicity and representatives from various socially active groups. As we introduced ourselves, people in the circle identified themselves by name, membership and other affiliations.

    Represented amongst the prisoners were members of the Black Prisoners Caucus, Tribal Sons, Asian Pacific Islanders, Look2Justice and Liberation Media. Among the groups’ sponsors (free citizens who come into the prison and share our circle) were representatives of the University of Washington, the Washington Sentencing Guidelines Commission, and United Church of Christ In Works.

    We met with ambitious goals in mind: to end mass incarceration, redress grievances of marginalized groups and form community, against all odds.

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    The Concerned Lifer’s Organization, or CLO, last met in the spring of 2020 at the Washington State Reformatory, or WSR, in Monroe — where it had existed since its founding in 1972. Over the years, thousands of prisoners have been CLO members, with Monday night meetings attended by 30 people or more. After COVID shut meetings down — but before the veil of lockdowns lifted — WSR unexpectedly closed in 2021. This left CLO members without hope we would ever meet again. Despite its 50-year history in Washington state, no other prison had ever allowed the CLO or any kind of organizing among Lifers (people serving life without parole and sentences that they cannot outlive). But now that’s finally changing.

    Breaking into a new prison puts CLO on unfamiliar territory, a fact not lost on the members who have been around a while. While some contemplate whether this precedent represents a sea-change in correctional philosophy or is just an anomaly, others prefer to focus more on the work ahead.

    The need for the CLO today is just as strong as it was a half century ago. Henry Grisby, a founding member of the CLO, recalls that initially the group met as a way to establish positive relationships with prison administrators in hopes to improve prison conditions. Over the years, CLO has successfully advocated for higher quality food and mattresses, while also helping facilitate access to rehabilitative and educational programs. Now 82-years-old, Grisby slightly closes his eyes as he discusses the early days of the CLO. He recalls that it didn’t take long for early members to realize that “in order to get change it would have to come from the outside.” And in order to enact change from the outside, prisoners needed to engage with the public.

    Towards this goal, no single person worked harder — or longer — for the CLO than the late Rev. Jonathan Nelson. He would incessantly advocate for the Lifers. Originally coming to the prison as a Lutheran Minister, Nelson quickly realized people inside needed more than spiritual food. Through his advocacy in the community, free citizens would learn about the CLO and be invited into the circle. By word of mouth, Nelson would invite curious people in and they would be blown away by the sincerity and fellowship of the prisoners they found inside. Through a model of meeting with people and sharing their stories, the CLO grew in community.

    Rev. Corey Passons was a young citizen — not yet on a path of public service — when he heard a man at church named Darel Grothaus give thanks for the time spent in a CLO meeting. Interested in his experience, Passons accepted an invitation to WSR. On his first ride into the prison, he met Nelson, and soon after was moved to become a sponsor for the group. Passons sponsored the CLO from 2004-2016 and asserts that the CLO was a learning experience for him. He also says learning about the justice system — the biases and racism in society — changed his life trajectory and put him on a path of public service. Now, with the CLO restarting, he is once again a sponsor.

    Recalling his first meetings back in 2004, Passons said “I had never heard stories like these, and it didn’t take me long to realize that if I grew up in a setting like those it could just as easily be me staying behind when the sponsors walked out of the room.” Through interactions with regular people, professionals and other organizations in the community, the CLO has impacted society in countless positive ways.

    As stakeholders and impacted people, the CLO serves as a resource for professionals and works with them to enact change. Katherine Beckett, who heads the Law Society and Justice program at the University of Washington, has been a sponsor of the CLO since 2014. In her time with the organization she works alongside the CLO to raise public awareness and further understanding on the human cost of mass incarceration. Beckett says that her work is undoubtedly inspired by the time she has spent in the CLO, and members of the CLO say that their work would be much harder without the ardent support of professionals like Beckett.

    The fruits of this relationship can be seen in the About Time report, published in collaboration with ACLU Washington. This report proves racial bias in Washington’s judicial system with regard to long-term and life sentences. Beckett credits the CLO and Black Prisoners Caucus as instrumental allies in compiling the stories and data for this report. Working relationships like the one formed between the CLO and professionals like Beckett are critical to achieving informed social policies that work towards equitable solutions that dismantle mass incarceration.

    In addition to reports, Beckett points to the work done within the CLO to dismantle the foster-care-to-prison pipeline as another example of the organization’s impact. In 2016, Arthur Longworth, Jeff Fox and other prisoners (including me) founded the State Raised Working Group as a committee within CLO to address disproportionate representation of former foster youth among the prison population.

    As the founders of the committee, and former foster youth ourselves, we knew all-too-well the trappings of the “state raised” experience. Reaching out to community members, community organizations, politicians and professionals, we raised awareness of the intersection between foster care and mass incarceration. This work culminated in strong relationships with organizations like Treehouse — which helps foster youth navigate educational development and graduate high school — and people like Secretary Ross Hunter of the Washington Department of Children, Youth and Families. Working with Treehouse and Secretary Hunter, the State Raised Working Group helped develop and fund a mentorship program for at-risk foster youth that aims to pull those youth out of the foster-care-to-prison pipeline.

    Over the years the CLO community has grown strong — in true grassroots fashion, by word of mouth, by personal connection and by achieving consensus on principled positions with a view towards reform.

    The CLO held yearly conferences at WSR titled “Ending the Crime Cycle.” Every year these conferences would feature lawmakers, policy wonks, lawyers, advocates, community organizers and concerned citizens. Around 150 people who had shared Monday night meetings throughout the year fill these conferences. Speakers, both prisoners and free professionals, would give talks, and people would leave with a call to action — simple steps to take to achieve change.

    In 2018, the CLO had built enough political capital to push post-conviction relief legislation. The CLO Legislative Committee drafted a bill, and the community mobilized around it. Senate Bill 5819 (SB5819), as it came to be called, would have created a post-conviction review process for prisoners who had served over 15 years in prison. Prior to the bill being voted on, members of the CLO gave public testimony via Zoom on the impact this bill would have on society and on the criminal justice system. Although the bill did not succeed, valuable lessons were learned that day.

    Nick Hacheney, then-chair of the CLO Legislative Committee, notes that we had stuck together through a tough time, kept our word to each other, and maintained solidarity based on our principals. From this moment Hacheney was sure we could “build upon that foundation and keep pushing for comprehensive sentencing reform for all.”

    With lessons learned from the fight for SB5819, the CLO was more determined than ever. The organization went to work on new strategies to push for much needed change. On Jan. 20, 2020, the CLO, in collaboration with Prison Voice Washington, organized the Rally to End Mass Incarceration on the steps of the Capital building in Olympia. That night we held a candle light vigil for the 1,300 people sentenced to die in Washington prisons. A candle for each person lined the steps, guest speakers addressed the crowd, and live music was performed for the nearly 400 people who attended that cold winter night.

    “That night was a moving experience,” recalled, Chelsea Moore, executive director of Look2Justice, an organization focused on civic education started by members of the CLO advocacy community. “It was great to see so many people that have been working on criminal justice reform all there looking to further the movement. Knowing we were there because of the work the guys inside did to organize it made the night even more powerful.”

    The Rally to End Mass Incarceration was a first step in an escalated strategy for the CLO — a strategy that the organization intends to pursue as it begins to work again. This strategy focuses on wielding political capital in ways that are impossible for lawmakers to ignore, like rallies in public spaces. It is not enough to bring reasoned arguments for change if those arguments can then be ignored by people with power. While one way to achieve change is to disrupt spaces, another is to fight battles asymmetrically — changing the conditions around the issues to achieve desired outcomes, as opposed to tackling the issues head-on.

    This year, Rep. Tara Simmons, the first formerly incarcerated member of the state legislature, introduced HB 1024, a law that will stop forced labor and pay prisoners minimum wage in Washington prisons. This legislation is yet to pass, and while we remain hopeful, the CLO is currently developing an asymmetric strategy to achieve the same result.

    Our approach will first be to reach out to free citizens in the community and educate them on the 13th Amendment, which allows for those convicted of crimes to be slaves under the U.S. Constitution. Next, we are going to draft legislation that proposes an amendment to the Washington constitution prohibiting all forms of slavery, since state constitutions can be more — just not less — protective than the federal constitution. Therefore, the amendment would supercede provisions for legal slavery currently carved out in U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment. We then plan to collaborate with lawmakers like Simmons to introduce our legislation in the next session.

    This approach will change the legal landscape, in effect producing the same conditions that HB 1024 is now attempting to create. It is easy for lawmakers to oppose a law paying prisoners minimum wage, and much harder for those same lawmakers to stand against prohibiting slavery.

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    According to longtime CLO member Look2Justice co-founder Christopher Blackwell the pendulum is swinging back. “The narrative around crime now in local and national news is reminiscent of that from the early 1990s. This narrative was foundational in the construction of the carceral state. Countering this narrative is our number one goal.”

    Members of the CLO agree that the tide is turning. But there is yet time to stall, or disrupt its pull. For Lifers, this is more than a matter of right and wrong; it’s a matter of life and death.

    Our backs are truly against the wall. We fight for change, or we roll over on a bunk and wait for a miracle — for mercy — while hoping not to die in prison. We Lifers know the difference between a life sentence and a death sentence: merely duration and method. In Washington State, we have death by hanging, death by lethal injection and death by incarceration — the most prevalent and most overlooked form of state sponsored execution. They call it a life sentence, but that is a misnomer. Any prison sentence that a person cannot outlive is a sentence to death.

    As long as there is a CLO, we will fight to end mass incarceration. We will fight because it is the right thing to do and because we are fighting for our lives. We will do it as we always have done — by connecting with people, sharing our humanity, working for and with community, and holding true to principals that allow diverse people to coalesce and have unity. There is work to be done.

    There’s a big pot of climate bill money waiting to be seized — activists can’t miss the opportunity

    Yes, the Inflation Reduction Act is the most consequential piece of climate legislation in the U.S. Yes, it’s also the only federal legislation. Yes, it’s imperfect. Yes, parts of it are downright vile. Yes, the negotiations exacerbated tensions between insider green organizations and those on the frontlines. 

    But let’s be real, nothing more is going to pass at the federal level in the foreseeable future. So now that the IRA is the law of the land, how do organizers and movement players work with it? 

    As long-time organizers and climate justice activists, we see organizing opportunities in the roughly $390 billion in climate funding available. As an analysis from Just Solutions points out, the bill was not written for climate justice. But there’s a ton of money that suddenly we can access for poor and disenfranchised communities — and it would be a wasted opportunity to leave that money on the table.

    With all its limitations, the IRA can further our campaigns if we use the opportunity.

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    The public knows there is a problem

    Bills are like an ecological indicator species — in this case, showing how the times have changed on climate. The bill was not passed because of Democrats’ deep commitment to climate justice — otherwise they would not still be offering up public lands for oil and gas, begging Saudi Arabian tyrants for discounts, or entertaining fast-tracking provisions written by fossil fuel companies. If they understood climate justice, they’d be declaring that fossil fuel companies should save the globe and kill themselves.

    But like a creaky weathervane, Democrats are following the changing winds. People know climate change is a problem and are ready to see action on this.

    In his Movement Action Plan, movement organizer and activist Bill Moyer charts the course of major social movements. He talks about three times the public must be convinced: 1. that there is a problem; 2. that current conditions and policies created this problem and have to be opposed; and 3. that alternative policies need to be embraced and implemented. 

    Somewhere in the last couple of years there’s a marked change where it’s now clear that we are winning the first two. Though your county or state may be a little further behind or ahead than others, the overall shift has accelerated. U.S. polling shows consistently wide support for climate policies. The largest investment firm, BlackRock, says it’s time to start preparing for a net-zero economy. Amazon is throwing up advertising touting climate action. After each climate disaster, mainstream media are more quickly linking it to climate change and local politicians are often urging climate action afterwards.

    This greenwashing creates new problems as it advances false solutions — but it is also a signal that the weathervane has shifted. Even though some remain climate change deniers, the majority of the country has shifted.

    Democrats sensed this and cobbled together a bill. 

    The bill is remarkable, given the givens

    To understand what’s in the IRA, it’s wise to respect the political conditions that shaped it. 

    Previous Coverage
  • Why climate activists need to celebrate — even if we’re not feeling like it
  • We have to start with the grassroots groups who built the political pressure. The Sunrise Movement spent its entire organizing cycle fighting for a (better) version of this bill. They engaged in direct action, smart electoral campaigning and built a huge organization with hundreds of hubs. More importantly, they changed the zeitgeist and made the Green New Deal something that cool young elected officials saw as vital.

    This led to the “inside ball game,” where the designers of the bill knew they would get no Republican support. That made the bill very vulnerable to being undone whenever Republicans retake the House, Senate and/or presidency.

    Not that getting the support of Democrats was easy. Sen. Joe Machin’s highly reluctant vote required accommodations and a promise from Sen. Chuck Schumer for a bill — the so-called “side deal” to fast-track his pipeline and other preferred projects — which is currently dead but risks a zombie-like reintroduction. At the same time, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s vote required major carve outs for the business community (largely in the non-climate portions of the bills).

    The bill’s creators accommodated this political reality in a couple of ways. One, they made this bill all carrots. There were almost no sticks (apart from a minor methane fee under specific circumstances). Early drafts to punish coal plants pollution were discarded — and only financial encouragements for doing the right thing remained. 

    This made the bill easier to digest. Even climate skeptics will take the money. It is a vast experiment in modern day neo-liberal industrial policy. Government creates the incentives, and they are flowing primarily to major corporations alongside tiny amounts to consumers, places of worship and school districts.

    In this sense, the bill buys constituents. It spreads money to solar and wind companies, carbon capture researchers, heat pump manufacturers, investors to retrofit schools, communities living near climate disaster zones, home energy efficiency auditors, and the list goes on and on

    The IRA could be one pathway to delivering something real and tangible in communities where progressives do not usually organize.

    These benefits are not spread evenly, and that’s an important criticism. The largest chunks of money go toward large corporations and flow to regular people when they’re acting as consumers. But from the perspective of establishing a bill that can withstand Republican opposition, buying new constituents makes it harder for Republicans to kill it. Any Republican changes to the bill require taking money from people.

    The second method was that the law’s creators never made it implemented by a single body or policy change. It is a hard-to-kill multi-headed hydra. Think about how the Affordable Care Act, despite being wildly popular as policy, was regularly on the chopping block by Republicans. Only a lack of a political alternative prevented Republicans from killing the popular bill. 

    Instead, the Inflation Reduction Act is more like 50 bills packed into one. Each one is targeted differently and moves differently. Bureaucratically, money moves through the EPA (like the Green Bank), the IRS, the Departments of Interior, Energy, Labor, Transportation, Agriculture, FEMA, the USPS ($3 billion for their electric fleet), and even the Department of Defense gets $500 million to grow their “clean technology manufacturing.”

    This makes a lot of targets — a maze of funding rabbit holes, which will be a challenge for even the aggressive Republican machinery to catch them all.

    This bill was designed to survive.

    Another key note here: Regularly the bill is described as somewhere between $369 and $390 billion. That isn’t a hard limit. It’s based on estimates on how the bill will play out by the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO.

    Certain parts of the bill are capped, such as the $4.3 billion to states to provide rebates for home energy upgrades (like getting better insulation in houses) or the $50 million in grants to address air pollution in poor and low-income areas.

    But the cost of many of the bill’s provisions are estimates and have no upper limit. For example, the “Clean Energy Production Tax Credit” gives bonuses for new energy projects that do not contribute to carbon emissions. It offers 0.05 cents per kilowatt hour that each project produces. But if more projects come online, then the government will pay more than the $62.2 billion projected by the CBO. 

    For the savvy long-term organizer, targeting these “no upper limit” areas avoids the zero-sum game of fighting for limited resources.

    Some people believe the CBO’s figures are low. The investment bank Credit Suisse took a look at the numbers and said actual costs would be double. They contend that the bill will actually lead to over $800 billion in spending, largely because they believe the private sector is going to rush into these new profitable areas far faster than the CBO estimates. This bill “definitively changes the narrative from risk mitigation to opportunity capture,” the Credit Suisse report claims.

    However it unfolds, this bill was designed to survive and massively shift our economy.

    What is an activist to do?

    Activists are already experimenting with some ways to leverage that money on the table. 

    Previous Coverage
  • How young activists turned the old idea of a Green New Deal into a powerful movement
  • Comrades over at Sunrise Movement have charted one pathway: building local Green New Deals and investing in the people and political power to make the next iteration of big policy possible. 350 Minnesota thinks that IRA funds can be leveraged as part of a Peoples Climate Equity Plan in Minneapolis that will actually implement a local Green New Deal prioritizing African-American neighborhoods in North Minneapolis first.

    In Detroit, organizers right now are door knocking low-income and working-class folks with offers to help deliver weatherization and solar. Since those benefits can only be accessed when taxes are due, they are working on upfront financing. By receiving those services, people are being brought into an organizing model that teaches about our unfair tax system and politicizes them for more organizing power.

    And there are many more doors available. The IRA offers money that liberal, urban-centered organizations can use to move out of our progressive big city organizing bubble and organize different constituencies. The IRA could be one pathway to delivering something real and tangible in communities where progressives do not usually organize. 

    Even in places that are often densely organized, there are opportunities that may get missed. Nonprofits and churches now can benefit from the bill’s uncapped solar funds (no longer do they have to pay taxes to get their savings). Or cities and school districts can get access to pools of money for renewable energy, weatherization and dealing with air pollution. 

    As organizers we can help deliver particular benefits situated in a larger campaign around educational justice or policy changes at the city or county level. 

    Coming out of labor, a group called Bargaining for the Common Good provides a good template for campaigning not just on the specifics of your “targeted win” but incorporating community demands. In 2019, the teachers union in Los Angeles entered into testy contract negotiations. Rather than just ask for better wages and health care for their own members, the teachers union demanded changes in class size, green spaces, health and how students were policed.

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    Following this model, school unions could demand that the district transition to solar, provide easier pathways for local solar jobs, and create a community-owned solar project on school district-owned land, as part of contract negotiations. 

    Accessing the money around the IRA puts us in a little bit of a footrace with the corporate sector. Would we rather have JP Morgan Chase or British Petroleum accessing the tax incentives to convert to renewable energy, or city governments and school districts across the country? Our ability to come out of the gate fast and get that money is critical here.

    If we make things work, we can build relationships not just with the most progressive of governments, but with political leadership that wants to do right by their people. We can work with government to do door-to-door outreach and help folks access benefits, but we can also provide a push for the direct pay provisions, where school districts can get up to half of their solar installation paid for directly by the government.

    Despite the lack of strong climate justice provisions inside the bill, as organizers we can use this moment to center racial and economic justice in our work. BIPOC and Indigenous led Groups like the Climate Justice Alliance are both pushing the administration to ensure that racial justice is centered in implementation and helping their groups capture the money needed for community run transitions.  

    While utilities are going to continue resisting rooftop solar, stymying community-owned projects, and engaging in price-gouging — we can keep organizing. Even as we propose using the IRA’s carrot, we encourage wielding our sticks, challenging utility companies to democratize their governance, preventing people from getting their energy shut off and enabling all the new solar to sell energy back to the grid. 

    The IRA has something for movement groups of all sizes and shapes. We can use it to expand and educate our base while still increasing our militancy and relational power. We want to hear what others are doing and keep sharing our experiments — but most importantly let’s not miss the opportunity.

    Northwest climate activists fight a new front in the movement to stop fossil fuels

    On Monday, people across the Pacific Northwest convened online and at two in-person gatherings for a “people’s hearing” on what has become the latest front in the resistance to large fossil fuel projects in the region: a proposed massive capacity expansion of the Gas Transmission Northwest, or GTN, pipeline. Operated by Canadian corporation TC Energy, GTN connects to natural gas fracking fields in British Columbia and stretches across 1,354 miles of Idaho, Washington and Oregon. It is already one of the largest existing fossil fuel pipelines in the region. However, a new proposal called GTN Xpress would see the volume of gas flowing through GTN expand dramatically by 150 million cubic feet per day, an amount roughly equivalent to 26,000 barrels of oil.

    “The same company that’s behind the Keystone and Keystone XL pipelines now wants to use GTN Xpress to increase its transport of fracked gas into the Pacific Northwest,” said Audrey Leonard of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility at the hearing. “We’re fighting this dangerous proposal because our climate cannot afford to lock in more fossil fuels.”

    Activists and concerned members of the public assembled for the hearing at in-person locations in Phoenix, Oregon and Sandpoint, Idaho, or tuned in via Zoom to register their concerns. Comments recorded from the event will be delivered to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which is soon expected to make a decision on whether or not GTN Xpress can move forward. The people’s hearing — convened in response to the fact that FERC has declined to hold any official public hearings on GTN in the Northwest — put a spotlight on how energy companies are trying to get around grassroots opposition to fossil fuels in the region and how activists are fighting back.

    In fact, the natural gas industry’s focus on expanding the capacity of the existing GTN pipeline can in many ways be seen as a response to activists’ successful efforts to oppose new fossil fuel infrastructure in the region. Since the beginning of last decade, climate groups, Indigenous nations and their allies have defeated over 20 proposed new fossil fuel transportation projects in the Northwest, including coal and oil export terminals, natural gas pipelines and methanol plants.

    The efforts of climate activists have contributed to establishing Oregon and Washington State’s reputations as places where new climate-wrecking projects will be challenged through the official permitting process, lawsuits and even with direct action. That development is one of the great climate success stories to come out of the region in recent years — however, it is now provoking a new response from industry, as companies like TC Energy shift their focus to trying to expand existing projects.

    A GTN Xpress protest banner. (Facebook/Rogue Climate)

    A new kind of pipeline fight

    “Unlike with new pipeline projects, GTN Xpress doesn’t need many permits from state or local government,” said Maig Tinnin of Rogue Climate in Southern Oregon. “The decision on permitting is really up to FERC, which has a history of rubber-stamping fossil fuel projects. That makes this a different kind of animal from other pipeline fights we’ve been part of.”

    Although GTN Xpress wouldn’t require laying any new pipe, the impacts for communities along the pipeline route would still be profound. The proposed expansion involves building a new gas compressor station in northern Oregon and upgrading existing stations in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. This would increase the volume of gas TC Energy can send through the pipeline, leading to greater potential for leaks and other accidents. In a worst-case scenario, a major gas explosion along the pipeline route could cause widespread destruction in areas ill-equipped to respond to such an emergency.

    “GTN passes very near to residential areas and tourist attractions in Idaho,” said Helen Yost, an organizer with Wild Idaho Rising Tide. “In the community of Sandpoint, it goes directly under the parking lot at the base of the popular Schweitzer Ski Resort. This project is a dire threat to the Idaho tourism and recreation industries if anything goes wrong.”

    Then there is the climate impact of transporting and burning so much extra gas, a process expected to result in 3.47 million metric tons of new carbon emissions per year, equivalent to adding 754,000 new cars to the roads. It is this danger to the climate, more than anything, that has galvanized opposition to GTN Xpress — not only from grassroots organizations but from top elected officials in a region that is doing more than almost any in the country to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.

    A region transitioning to renewables

    “All along the pipeline route, our Northwest communities are already seeing the impacts of climate change,” Tinnin said. “The climate crisis is here now, and we’re trying to make the changes needed to prevent it from getting worse. GTN Xpress would undermine those efforts.”

    Tinnin was inspired to get involved in climate organizing after devastating wildfires swept through Southern Oregon in 2020, destroying more than 2,300 homes and forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate. In addition to longer, more intense fire seasons, the Northwest has suffered in recent years from record-smashing heat waves and reduced snowpack that contributes to lower water flow in streams used by salmon. For over a decade, activists have fought back by working to stop new fossil fuel projects and close existing coal-fired power plants. More recently, these efforts have been bolstered by a raft of groundbreaking climate policies enacted by state and local government decision makers.

    In 2019, Washington’s legislature passed what was at the time one of the strongest renewable energy laws in the country, mandating electric utilities source 100 percent of their energy from carbon-free sources by 2045. In 2021, Oregon passed its own, even more ambitious law requiring all renewable electricity by 2040. Both states have taken a variety of other steps to curb their carbon emissions, including incentives for home renewable energy installations, efficiency standards for buildings and appliances and regulations to encourage the shift to electric vehicles.

    Last November, the Washington State Building Code Council passed one of the nation’s strictest regulations to prevent natural gas hookups in new residential buildings, a move coming on the heels of similar standards for commercial structures. If implemented as planned, these policies will result in dramatically reduced demand for fossil fuels, including natural gas, over the next couple of decades.

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    Oregon and Washington policymakers’ push for renewable energy also aligns with the goals of many Indigenous governments. For example, the Columbia River Intertribal Fishing Commission has announced its own vision for a renewable energy future in the region and opposes the GTN expansion. “This project threatens our way of life,” said Alysia Aguilar Littleleaf of Littleleaf Guides, an Indigenous-owned flyfishing guiding business on the Warm Spring Reservation. “Our guide service allows us to continue living off the land and sustain ourselves as Indigenous tribal members. GTN Xpress puts that in danger.”

    Such concerns have prompted high-ranking elected officials to raise objections to the pipeline expansion. Last summer, the state attorneys general of Oregon, Washington and California filed a motion requesting FERC deny GTN Express’ permit, arguing the project’s draft environmental impact statement fails to adequately consider climate impacts and a lack of public need for the project. Both of Oregon’s U.S. senators, Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, also oppose GTN Xpress.

    Yet, despite such wide-ranging opposition, the fate of efforts to stop the pipeline expansion remains unclear. This underscores the difficulties involved for grassroots organizations seeking to pressure a remote federal agency with little built-in accountability to the broader public.

    Growing the fossil fuel resistance

    “There are challenges involved in grassroots organizations in the Northwest trying to interact meaningfully with federal agencies based on the other side of the country,” said Yost of Wild Idaho Rising Tide. “Still, we believe FERC has a responsibility to consider whether the GTN expansion and its global impacts are truly in the public interest.”

    The controversy over GTN is not the first time Northwest climate activists have struggled to influence FERC, an agency many climate groups say is beholden to fossil fuel interests. In 2020, the agency approved the Jordan Cove LNG export terminal in Southern Oregon, which climate groups had been fighting for more than a decade. In a major climate victory, Jordan Cove’s developer later withdrew its permit application after failing to obtain key approvals from Oregon state agencies. However, the fact that states have little authority to stop GTN’s expansion gives climate groups and their allies more limited options for stopping the project.

    Activists celebrate the defeat of the Jordan Cove LNG export terminal. (Facebook/Rogue Climate)

    Even so, FERC’s soon-to-be-announced decision on GTN Xpress is unlikely to be the last word on the project, regardless of the outcome. “Thousands of people have already weighed in to FERC by signing petition, submitting comments and calling on the agency to do its job by listening to Northwest communities,” said Dan Serres of Columbia Riverkeeper, an organization that has played a key role in the regional fossil fuel resistance. “All along the pipeline route we’re raising the alarm about GTN Xpress, and we’re not going to stop.”

    Exactly what the next stage of the resistance to GTN Xpress looks like remains to be seen. However, developers of other major fossil fuel projects in the Pacific Northwest have been met with large protests and even civil disobedience. Climate groups can also petition FERC for a rehearing or challenge the pipeline expansion in court, which would further delay work on the project and allow additional time for organizing.

    “At a time when our region is moving away from fossil fuels, the gas industry is trying to push its stranded industry on the Northwest with GTN Xpress,” Yost said. “If FERC rubber stamps this project, we’ll keep fighting it.”

    To avert crisis, UK health care workers stage largest strikes in NHS history

    For the first time in the 75-year history of the U.K.’s National Health Service, nurses and ambulance workers held strikes on Feb. 7 — and members of the Royal College of Nursing, the nation’s largest nursing union, went on its first ever walk-out. Tens of thousands of nurses went on strike and picketed in favor of an increase in wages, which are 10 percent less today in real terms than in 2011. 

    Every ambulance service in the U.K. has also had an active strike mandate as of Feb. 8, according to the general trade union GMB.

    “We’re trying to keep maximum pressure on the government, but also have to pace ourselves a little bit so it’s not too much pressure on the members in terms of the amount of money they’re losing, and also pressure on the service,” said Jamie Brown, regional manager and head of health for London Ambulance Service branch of Unison, the U.K.’s largest ambulance workers’ union.

    Brown’s branch has recruited about 800 new members in the last six weeks and a higher percentage of workers have turned out on each successive strike date. At first, they began with road crews only but expanded to include emergency call handlers, education teams and non-urgent call handlers.

    Physiotherapists also held their first ever strikes last month, with 4,200 workers in 33 medical districts walking out.

    While government and many larger media outlets frame the issue as a pay debate, health workers are calling for safe staffing levels and improved provision of patient care. But better pay is the means to correct the crisis in staffing. 

    “Yes, there’s hospital beds, there’s ambulances, but if you don’t have people to drive them or to attend to patients then you can’t deliver the care that people should expect from the NHS.”

    “The pay is really the main thing, because it’s the incentive for retention and new recruitment,” explained a dermatology nurse protesting outside St. Thomas’ Hospital in London during her scheduled clinic shift. According to the 20-year veteran of the National Health Service, or NHS, who cares for patients with severe skin diseases and cancers, caseloads for nurses are more than double the normal amount and many nurses died during the pandemic. “If they’re stressed and exhausted, then that takes a toll on their mental health and performance,” she added. 

    More people are staying longer in hospitals with 94 percent of beds in the country occupied in the last week of January, and ambulance response times continue to rise, according to the NHS. 

    “The way that the service is run at the moment, they can’t provide the care that they were employed to provide, and therefore they can’t do their jobs,” Brown said. “So it’s as much about protecting the service and sounding an alarm to the general public that there’s a crisis in the service, which is largely a staffing crisis.” 

    There are currently 145,000 job vacancies across the NHS, and 25,000 nurses left just last year. Aside from attrition, the service has also struggled to recruit new employees. This is borne out by new figures showing a 19 percent decrease in applications to nursing school over the past two years. 

    Despite the pandemic inspiring many people to become health care workers, they’ll need a minimum of three years of education, which current nurses don’t feel is reflected in their pay.

    “If you didn’t have a workforce there wouldn’t be a service,” Brown said. “Yes, there’s hospital beds, there’s ambulances, but if you don’t have people to drive them or to attend to patients then you can’t deliver the care that people should expect from the NHS.” 

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    While care has suffered, so have the workers, both through mental and physical exhaustion on the job and from increasing financial insecurity with inflation currently over 10 percent in the U.K.

    Burnout in the ambulance corps is constant, and workers fear for their immediate financial needs and future prospects, according to Jess, a paramedic in Waterloo, London who declined to give her full name. “That’s a very scary feeling not knowing where your next meal is going to come from,” she said. “Having been there myself, it’s just a terrifying experience.”

    Still, she always wanted to serve on an ambulance team and couldn’t imagine doing anything else, but she said she never expected to have to turn to collective action. 

    Although she’s only been on the team for four and a half years, she says the extraordinary turnover rates have made her a senior team member. “It shouldn’t be like that. I shouldn’t be seen as one of the more experienced members because I’m not; I haven’t been out there for long enough.”

    For the 2022-2023 fiscal year, the government offered a pay raise of 4 percent for the NHS, but organizers consider it an effective pay cut in light of current inflation.

    The Royal College of Nursing, or RCN, initially wanted 5 percent above inflation but has since said it would accept an offer of 7 percent, which would still amount to a 3 percent cut in real terms. 

    But the government has so far refused to even discuss the current year’s pay with unions.

    A recent letter by the RCN General Secretary Pat Cullen concerning the care and staffing crisis received no answer at all from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, prompting her to retort that perhaps the government itself is on strike. 

    Therefore, the current situation is at a standstill, with the government waiting for what organizers described as a miracle in the economy and various unions voting on additional strike actions.

    In the meantime, the government issued recommendations that citizens not engage in potentially dangerous activities on strike days.

    A growing threat to the right to strike

    The government has proposed new legislation that would make it harder to strike by setting “minimum safety levels” for workers in essential services like ambulances, firefighters and some transportation workers. The January 2023 bill had its roots in the Conservative Party’s 2019 election manifesto, but has expanded its initial focus on transportation to other sectors.

    Ambulance workers on strike in February. (Twitter/Marcus Chown)

    Organizers consider it ironic and insulting that the government wants to mandate minimum staffing on strike days when low staffing on normal days is a main reason they are striking in the first place. And they certainly consider this move a threat to their ability to protest.

    “If they get it their own way, it will be horrendous for us because we won’t be allowed to do anything,” said Eddie Brand, a 37-year EMT veteran and trade union representative for 25 years, now Unison branch secretary at the London Ambulance Service. “This government is finished. I’ve never seen such hatred toward a government.”

    Brown also made the case that the bill would effectively destroy the right to strike, since it seeks to prevent any disruption to entire essential sectors. It also sets no standard for dispute resolution between unions and governments and allows ministers to determine who the concerned parties are for conversations.

    The existing strike legislation in the country is already very strict, particularly when it comes to coordinated action. “Both the general strike but also secondary picketing was banned by Margaret Thatcher in the 80s, so it’s very difficult to coordinate unions to take strike action,” Brown explained. 

    Different departments must also share the work that remains while workers strike. 

    “We’re trying our best not to put people at risk, but we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to stand up for ourselves at the end of the day and fight back against this government.”

    According to Brown, responders at the Waterloo branch of London Ambulance Service had to cancel their participation in strikes planned for Feb. 22 because they’ll have to balance out the workload of departments striking in other parts of the country.

    Departments in different locations also have different caseloads, so the minimum service that needs to be maintained during industrial action must be negotiated locally. 

    All of this complicates industrial action and especially the prospects for cooperation across units and industries. 

    Unison members have arranged for a strike fund to pay striking workers at a rate of 50 pounds per day. That’s far less than they would make during a full day’s work, “but it will ease the burden,” Brown said.

    So far, ambulance workers are only going out for half of their scheduled shifts on strike days.

    “As it goes on it’s tricky cause not everyone can afford to strike, and that’s completely fair,” Jess said. “I feel like those of us who are standing on the picket line, we’re standing for everyone, whether they want to strike or can strike, and that’s definitely the mentality that I feel from pretty much everyone.”

    Government miscalculation

    Previous disputes like the ones over NHS pensions didn’t resonate as much with the public because they seemed remote, Brown said. But the current strike over preserving the popular NHS and fairly rewarding those who helped save lives throughout the pandemic is garnering more sympathy.

    Brown said the government has accused the ambulance services of not providing “life and limb cover” during strikes, meaning that it is not responding to the most extreme calls where lives are at immediate risk. 

    “[That] is an utter, total lie, because basically the leaders of this ambulance service branch have negotiated with the employer very, very strict life and limb cover,” Brown said.

    “They don’t wanna put people at risk,” Brand said. “We’re trying our best not to put people at risk, but we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to stand up for ourselves at the end of the day and fight back against this government.”

    At the moment, ambulance departments are waiting for other groups that very narrowly missed the 50 percent legal threshold for strike action to vote again. 

    Brown explained that it’s better for the departments to wait for others to ballot so they can strike together on the same day, which is now planned for March 8. With strikes becoming more frequent the longer the government withholds an offer, strikes by different groups will be more likely to coincide. Junior doctors, for instance, are also balloting now.

    He predicts the dispute will continue to escalate, since the unions are demanding an acceptable pay raise by April 1 for both this year and 2024. 

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    Alongside continued balloting, Unison will continue encouraging members and citizens to write letters to their government and keep turning up the pressure. Brown thinks the government miscalculated, hoping the public would turn on — or slowly forget about — the striking workers, but he feels support remains high in the country. 

    For Brand, the best hope may be for an eventual general election to discard the proposed strike law and enact necessary pay raises. 

    Workers are also thinking long term. “It’s really about the future and the youth,” said Abdul Faruk, a manager in ambulance maintenance services striking alongside paramedics. While noting that he was fortunate to be more established, Faruk is still worried for the future of the service. “My daughter is training to become a midwife. She wants to help in that way. But I’m not sure she’s made the right choice.”

    Outside of St. Thomas’ Hospital a striking nurse named Mark said, “It’s given me hope for the profession, standing up for ourselves for the first time.”

    Harnessing the enormous untapped power of celebrity to help social movements

    Today there exist significant numbers of celebrities with progressive politics and a desire to support movements for social justice. These people bring unique resources to the table, including the capability to activate new bases and access new sources of power. Given the immense cultural power of celebrities in our society, and the degree to which artists of all kinds skew progressive, one would think that this would be a great advantage for progressive movements.

    And yet, something seems to be missing. Why don’t social movements get more traction from their association with celebrities who are willing to move from being mere spokespeople for charity into positions of genuine solidarity?

    Addressing this issue requires action on both sides of the equation: Movements need to think more carefully about why and how they might collaborate with celebrity allies to advance their work; and, for their part, well-known artists and musicians who want to support change must invest in building the relationships that facilitate long-term engagement.

    On the movement side, organizers are often averse to thinking about celebrity power for a variety of reasons. Grassroots groups are based on the idea of organizing ordinary people, giving voice to the voiceless, and coming together to collectively lift up those without fancy connections or insider influence. Feeding into a culture of celebrity is antithetical to this orientation. Even if they wanted to enlist well-known supporters, most groups have little to no access to rarified celebrity circles. Moreover, movements based on people power take pride in distinguishing themselves from glitzy, star-powered charities that exist to raise money for feel-good causes but do not take on structural issues of corporate power, racism or patriarchy.

    All of these concerns are valid. But there is good reason for movement leaders to take a second look at the issue, and for organizers to consider whether the influence afforded to celebrities can be used in the service of social and economic justice.

    Organizers should recognize that many performers come from creative subcultures which are generally progressive and bohemian, or from countercultures that celebrate non-market values.

    Since the early days of Hollywood, studio executives have understood that stars possess extraordinary charisma and ability to attract a devoted following. The market is adept at learning how to commodify celebrity to affect consumer behavior, using endorsements and the allure of association with fame to build brand identities and sell products. This influence has only grown in the past decade with the rise of social media. Today’s celebrities are no longer just distant, idealized figures whose public identities are carefully controlled by corporate managers. Instead, they now have a two-way relationship with their public that is historically unique.

    Social media platforms allow them to influence behavior and markets by communicating directly with fans, and by inspiring large numbers of fans to communicate with one other. More easily than ever, bands, artists, and “influencers” are able to create new social bases and to affect the behavior of these bases. Compared with how the commercial mainstream has deployed celebrities to advance its interests, the potential power that celebrities might lend to social movements has barely been tapped.

    Celebrities are often not asked to show up for movements, because grassroots groups lack the relationships and capacities to make these requests. Still, the willingness among actors, artists and musicians is often there. Organizers should recognize that many performers come from creative subcultures that are generally progressive and bohemian, or from countercultures that celebrate non-market values.

    Conservatives are well aware that creative communities tend to be aligned against them, which is why they blast those actors, artists, athletes and musicians who dare to speak out on social and political issues — except in the relatively rare cases when celebrities support the right, and then are eagerly embraced (for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dr. Oz, Kanye West or Donald Trump). Learning from these adversaries, progressive social movements should think creatively about how to leverage the advantage that prominent supporters can provide.

    Rev. Jessie Jackson and actor Mark Ruffalo show their support for the Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. (Twitter/@AmericanIndian8)

    If the previously mentioned issues represent hurdles for movements to overcome, there are two key challenges on the celebrity side. First, well-known entertainers are surrounded by handlers and associates who in most cases do not want them to spend their social capital helping movements, because it does not increase the bottom line for everyone who is getting a cut of their profits. Yet many celebrities manage to work around that, hiring teams who are aligned with their political and social values. The second problem is that there has not been enough strategic thinking on the real nature of celebrity power and how those with it can most effectively help make social change. As a step toward addressing this, it is worth mapping out some key opportunities for collaboration.

    Five opportunities for action

    Among prominent entertainers, there are already a variety of individuals who are well known as progressive activists — think Tom Morello, Jane Fonda, Talib Kweli or Mark Ruffalo — and who are making significant contributions to social justice causes. There is much to be learned from their examples. And yet, we must recognize that they are the exception to the rule.

    While a great number of celebrities aim to somehow “give back” to the community, their default actions involve charity and social service that is generally apolitical in nature. Not many celebrities speak loudly on social justice. Among those who try to take stands on social media, show up at benefits, wear branded clothing in public, or mention social justice issues in interviews, most are only loosely connected with organized movements — if they are linked at all. Because their actions are not part of coordinated movement strategies, their actions have limited consequence.

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    Actors, artists, athletes and musicians who want to maximize their impact — as well as the movements that want to join with them in using celebrity power to advance campaigns for social justice — have a variety of intriguing options for how to remedy this lack of coordination and devise effective action. Five areas they can explore in developing more creative and impactful interventions are:

    1. Making better political endorsements

    One common form of celebrity engagement involves entertainers making endorsements of individual candidates for elected office. This form of action is tied to what is sometimes called the “monolithic view of power.” A mainstream understanding of history, which is widely reinforced in the American media, teaches that change comes about through the actions of a small number of powerful individuals — senators and generals, presidents and CEOs who hold positions of great consequence.

    The best way to affect change, in this view, is to lobby those in charge and urge them toward a personal epiphany. Following this model, celebrities are enlisted to use their access and nudge the positions of prominent individuals in the right direction. Or, in the case of electoral campaigns, famous friends are used to bolster the credibility and glamor of monolithic leaders, who are meant to “do the right thing” once in office.

    Social movements look at the process of change in a different way, and therefore possess a different vision of how to best take action. In contrast to the monolithic view of power, the social view of power understands that those in positions of authority are dependent upon the cooperation and support of the governed. It recognizes that the major egalitarian changes of the past century have come about through popular mobilization — through organized people confronting the power of organized money.

    Accordingly, movement activists emphasize how the combined efforts of grassroots organizations and disruptive protest can set the terms of debate and compel authorities to respond in ways they would not otherwise. While it is true that politicians sometimes change their minds in ways that lead to progress, evidence suggests that they are more often followers than leaders. Their views typically ​“evolve” only after a shift in public opinion alters the political calculus of what stance might advance their political careers. It is social movements that are decisive in prompting such shifts.

    Those who are armed with a social view of power will approach their activism differently — and this extends into how they look at making political endorsements. If an endorsement is merely tied to the advancement of a single, monolithic candidate who is meant to enact changes once elected, the impact of these endorsements is limited. We know all too well that candidates who profess social justice values commonly do not live up to those ideals when they are in office. How then, can we develop better criteria for choosing endorsements, so that they have the greatest impact in propelling movement causes?

    In 2019, Cardi B endorsed Bernie Sanders for president and interviewed him. (Twitter/@FemaleRapRoom)

    Celebrities should aim to support electoral interventions that attempt to bring social power into the realm of mainstream politics. To this end, they can look to social justice organizations for guidance as to which candidates have listened to them and committed to processes to govern in the best interest of their communities. They can focus in particular on supporting the campaigns of “movement candidates” that come from the ranks of these organizations rather than through conventional party channels.

    They can publicize their partnership with grassroots groups, signaling that politicians who want their support need to seek approval from movement and social justice organizations. And if celebrities are meeting the candidates, they can bring leaders from these movements with them to further drive home this point. Celebrities can also encourage their followers to give donations to these organizations in connection with an appeal to vote for a candidate. These actions are a way of transferring some of the celebrity’s power to organizations representing people on the ground, thereby boosting their efforts.

    Electoral campaigns oriented toward building social power have several distinctive traits: They champion politicians that attempt to realign local, state or national party structures to be more responsive to poor and working-class constituencies. They seek to leave behind organizational infrastructure after the end of a particular political cycle. And they focus on volunteer organizing and field mobilization, rather than just expensive ad buys. Celebrities that look for these qualities and grant endorsements based on them have the ability to contribute to important electoral upheavals, rather than being just another famous name shaking hands with a potential senator or president.

    2. Amplifying trigger events

    Occasionally a highly publicized event — whether a political scandal, natural disaster, viral footage or shocking incident — captures the public spotlight and shines attention on an unresolved social problem. These incidents, known to social movement scholars as “trigger events,” can draw people with no prior interest or experience in politics into mass protests. They create periods of intense consciousness-raising in which new bases of potential allies emerge and become ripe for politicization. The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 was one such recent trigger, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was another — prompting the expansive Women’s March the day after his inauguration.

    Trigger events provide organic opportunities for engagement and mobilization. In each of the previously mentioned cases, the protests featured participation from many celebrity supporters, which helped to increase overall turnout. That said, more should be done to realize the full potential of the whirlwind moments that can emerge in the wake of prominent trigger events.

    Tom Morello plays at Occupy Wall Steet in New York City. (Twitter/@dhimsums)

    On the celebrity side, there are several things that famous supporters can do: For one, they can try to intervene earlier, so that nascent protests have a better chance of reaching a critical mass. Second, beyond showing up themselves, they should try to actively mobilize their fans and get them involved. (Musicians inviting their followers to join them for impromptu performances in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street was an example of this type of contribution.) Finally, it is helpful if celebrities take steps to integrate their actions with the efforts of an organization, so that the loose ties that are temporarily organized in the wake of a trigger event can be absorbed into more lasting structures — whether through something as simple as a mailing list or as robust as a mass training program that provides an onramp for new recruits into future activism.

    On the movement side, it is crucial for organizers to learn how to harness the spontaneous responses of well-known supporters in order to make them deeper and more sustainable. And it is also important to think ahead and develop relationships in advance. Although some public crises are truly unpredictable, we know that other types of triggers are likely to recur — whether the rolling back of previously won rights, a natural disaster prompted by climate change, a graphic video of police abuses, or gross impropriety from an elected official. Knowing that these are uniquely powerful moments in terms of shaping public opinion, movements can work to anticipate future triggers and plan how to maximize their potential.

    3. Boosting organizing campaigns

    Separate from spontaneous trigger events, there are occasional strikes and demonstrations that benefit from gaining public attention. Structure-based organizations such as unions and community groups generally focus on organizing their core constituencies, and they are often not concerned with reaching out beyond that. However, there are times when these groups arrive at key points in their campaigns and need to make their case to wider audiences. At these pivotal junctures, celebrity power can be very important.

    It can be difficult to convince the media or outside participants to take interest in a local protest or workplace picket line. Having a star with a large following show up to such an event can make a world of difference, with a celebrity potentially drawing hundreds or even thousands of people and widely increasing the popular appeal of an action. In these cases, the presence of a famous person can do much to elevate other speakers — including movement leaders and other voices from the grassroots. 

    Some celebrities already make these sorts of appearances, but this type of involvement could be greatly ramped up. This would involve both celebrities and movement organizations investing in developing the types of relationships that make this possible. One challenge here is that social movement organizations often do not know how to reach out or where to market their events in order to draw attention from those outside of their base.

    The Beastie Boys perform at the first Tibet Freedom Concert in 1996. (Twitter/@JackCanalPlus)

    Some of the most powerful examples of mobilizing “outside of structure,” as this type of outreach might be called, have come when celebrities themselves help create and publicize an event, with input from movement leaders. The involvement of the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch in creating the Tibetan Freedom Concert in the late 1990s serves as just one example. It is important to note that celebrities need not — and often should not — present themselves as issue experts or spokespeople for a cause; their role, instead, is to use their platform to legitimize and amplify frontline leaders that may otherwise be ignored.

    4. Shifting the Overton Window

    The Overton Window refers to the range of public policy positions considered ​“acceptable” to politicians who want to stay in power. Stances outside of this window are typically marginalized and considered “out of bounds.” The window shows what is seen as politically possible in a given moment; at the same time, the view it offers is not permanently fixed. Changes in public opinion — whether initiated by historical events, gradual cultural shifts or active agitation — can move it.

    Celebrities typically lend their support to causes that are already popular. But the potential for impact is greater when they lend their support to causes and movements that exist outside of current norms, and thereby work to expand the bounds of public acceptance. Celebrities coming out, standing up for LGBTQ rights, or supporting activism around AIDS in the 1980s helped those causes to gain more widespread acceptance. At a time when bigotry was rampant and ingrained public taboos surrounded these issues, these actions contributed to shifting the window of possible political responses.

    Today, for example, forward-thinking celebrities can help raise awareness of ideas such as restorative justice as an alternative to our broken criminal justice system. By supporting non-mainstream causes that align with their values, they can help pry open the artificially narrow window of debate. Understanding this strategy and joining with groups that are consciously trying to move ideas from the fringes into the mainstream of political discussion allows celebrities to be a part of long-term transformations in public attitudes.

    5. Fueling boycotts

    Celebrities have enormous untapped power to influence consumer behavior. This power can be used to supercharge boycott campaigns aiming to put pressure on corporations.

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    Historically, left movements have been more inclined to focus on production (through strikes and other workplace actions), rather than consumption (through actions such as consumer boycotts). As a result, boycott strategies remain seriously underdeveloped, even as the potential power of the tactic has grown. In recent decades, strike power has declined due to factors including globalization, changing patterns of corporate ownership, and unfavorable labor law; and yet, the ability to turn consumers against a company and to inflict serious “brand damage” has in many ways expanded, with social media providing an important assist. The creation in the early 2000s of the Business Ethics Network — an effort to enhance the strategic sophistication of anti-corporate campaigns — was a promising development. But it was also a short-lived one, and conversations in that network revealed that the field was still in its infancy.

    Today, there are only a handful of people in progressive circles capable of running large, sophisticated brand campaigns. There is now enormous potential for such campaigns to wield celebrity power more effectively, but the right relationships are not yet in place to make this possible.

    Dogging a brand is far more powerful when followers can be pointed to groups that are organizing around corporate abuses and have a strategy in place to win concrete concessions.

    It can be extremely powerful when a celebrity suggests that their fans boycott a particular organization. For example, when musician Harry Styles urged fans to boycott SeaWorld in 2015, groups such as PETA amplified his remarks and the company’s reputation took a major hit. Some even claimed that the stock price of the company collapsed after Styles’ remarks. The support of Rage Against the Machine was important to the success of a 1997 anti-sweatshop campaign that targeted the clothing maker Guess. As Hillary Horn, then spokeswoman for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, or UNITE, explained at the time, the band’s involvement had “been a boost to the campaign because Guess has been trying to market their clothes to the same type of people who listen to their music.”

    Notwithstanding these examples, this kind of celebrity power is massively under-used. Brands have done a far better job of harnessing celebrity power to burnish their reputations and maximize their profits than organizers have of using the same power to take on exploitative companies. Partly, this is because movement organizations with limited capacity are not asking celebrities to do enough. Expanding the ability to collaborate with well-known supporters should be a part of the effort to increase boycott capabilities more generally. For their part, celebrities should recognize that boycotts work much better when they are collectively organized efforts, rather than framed as expressions of individual preferences. Dogging a brand is far more powerful when followers can be pointed to groups that are organizing around corporate abuses and have a strategy in place to win concrete concessions.

    How are celebrities organized into activism?

    Actors, artists, athletes and musicians developing relationships with movements is an important first step in exploring these avenues for engagement. Another key step is when celebrities organize one another.

    In his book “When Movements Anchor Parties,” political scientist Daniel Schlozmann emphasizes the historic importance of “brokers” or bridge figures who could mediate between social movements and political parties. These individuals, who have one foot in the world of social movement activism and one foot in the party structures of mainstream politics, have played a critical role in serving as an interface between the two worlds.

    Harry Belafonte and Joan Baez perform during the March to Montgomery in 1965. (Twitter/Charles Moore)

    A similar argument might be made about the importance of bridge figures who historically have been vital in connecting activists and celebrities. Some of these figures have been well-known entertainers themselves: For example, Paul Robeson, Eartha Kitt, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and Harry Belafonte were among those who played important roles in the civil rights movement, just as performers including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Jane Fonda were prominent figures in anti-Vietnam War activism. In the 1980s, Martin Sheen was an outspoken supporter of the Central American Solidarity movement, while Danny Glover and Bruce Springsteen bandmate Steven Van Zandt became leaders in organizing artists against South African apartheid.

    There are countless other examples, of course, of celebrities taking political stances. But the distinction between a bridge figure and a star who might occasionally speak out on an issue is that bridge figures maintain long-standing commitments, cultivate connections with grassroots organizations and leaders, see themselves as accountable to a movement base, and — crucially — persuade their peers to participate in activist causes.

    A celebrity who wants to grow into the role of being a bridge figure first needs to seek out opportunities to deeply learn about issues alongside movement organizers who are working intensively on them. They should ask questions about the structural impediments to change, as well as how they can use their power and access to help remove those blocks.

    In addition, progressive organizers and movements need to start thinking about how to cultivate more bridge figures and create the kind of long-term relationships that can serve as pipelines for future engagement among new generations of artists and entertainers. It is important that the consultants who sometimes facilitate relationships between artists and social causes are not people who have a monolithic view of power, but instead that more brokers emerge from community organizations that are thinking about using celebrity power in creative ways.

    In the social media era, organizers have only barely begun to think about the prospective ability of celebrities to widen the reach of social movements. And even celebrities wishing to support social justice causes frequently have little idea of how they can use their prominence and influence to elevate grassroots voices. Nevertheless, the possibilities for partnership — and the models of past artists who have moved from charity to solidarity — are potent enough that they should not be ignored.

    How worker ownership builds community wealth and a more just society

    A recent help-wanted ad for a laundry worker in Cleveland contained some unusual language, asking prospective candidates: “Have you ever wanted to work for a company that is 90 percent employee-owned? What about a company that offers a program to help you become a homeowner?” The ad went on to identify Evergreen Cooperative Laundry as the only employee-owned commercial laundry firm in the country, citing a commitment to building the wealth and careers of its employees.

    Founded in Cleveland in 2009, Evergreen laundry lies at the heart of a movement that has now spread around the world. This attention to community wealth building is providing a 21st century model for Gandhi’s “constructive program,” which — along with nonviolent direct action — powered his overall campaign to overcome the political and economic oppression of colonialism.

    The cooperative movement in the Rust Belt city of Cleveland has deep roots in community struggle for shared wealth. Its earliest origins are in the Mondragon co-op movement of the Basque Country in northern Spain, where tens of thousands of workers are organized into a vast co-op network that has flourished since the 1950s. Here in the U.S., when steel companies were closing down throughout the Ohio Valley in the 1970s — and moving to non-union, lower-wage regions in the south, and then overseas — a small band of activists promoted the idea of worker ownership.

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  • It’s time for a new political and economic system – A conversation with Gar Alperovitz
  • Gar Alperovitz, a key player in that campaign, traces its origins to the 1977 shuttering of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube steel mill, which threw 5,000 steelworkers onto the streets, with little retraining help and no other jobs available. A plan by an ecumenical religious coalition for community-worker ownership of the giant mill captured widespread media attention, significant bipartisan support and an initial $200 million in loan guarantees from the Carter administration.

    According to Alperovitz, “Corporate and other political maneuvering in the end undercut the Youngstown initiative. Nonetheless, the effort had ongoing impact, especially in Ohio, where the idea of worker-ownership became widespread … because of all the publicity and the depth of policy failures in response to deindustrialization throughout the state.”

    Now, nearly half a century later, the Evergreen laundry and its sister solar and greenhouse coops are at the heart of the model around which the theory and practice of community wealth building have grown. Developed by the new economy research center Democracy Collaborative, the model is a simple one: First, identify anchor institutions — hospitals, universities, seats of government — that are not going to relocate in search of higher profits and incentivize them to do their procurement of supplies and services locally, so that those dollars stay at home. Then, make regulatory, financing and policy changes that support the growth of cooperatives to supply their needs, so that the business profits stay with the workers. This model has been quietly gaining attention and putting down roots in other places — starting with a jump across the Atlantic Ocean.

    Community wealth building in the UK

    In 2012, it seemed like the run-down industrial city of Preston, in northern England, had come to the end of the road. Its economic base had been bleeding away for years, and the last gasp attempt — a deal to lure in a mall developer — had fallen through. Fortunately, a deep-thinking member of the Preston City Council, Matthew Brown, had heard of an innovative model of community wealth building based in Cleveland, Ohio.

    “Crucially, we need to have more democracy in Preston’s economy — we can’t be at the whims of outside investors who’ll want to extract as much wealth from our community as possible,” Brown told the Lancashire Post. He reached out to Ted Howard from the Democracy Collaborative and, looking back on the last 10 years, the resulting collaboration can be seen as transformative.

    Preston City Council started by working with its own anchor institutions, getting them to prioritize contracting with local companies. It began creating worker cooperatives and paying a real living wage. The city’s government pension fund is now investing locally. Plans for a community bank are in the works. Employment and affordable housing rates are up; child poverty is down.

    Procurement dollars that stayed within the city have risen from $46.8 million to $138.4 million; anchor institutions are more connected to the local economy; and its residents and experience in supporting the development of new businesses and cooperatives have grown. According to Ted Howard of the Democracy Collaborative, the impact and potential of these combined efforts is “creating an ecosystem of change that will be the engine for a new, fairer economy.” 

    In a stunning turnaround, Preston was named the most improved city in the U.K. in 2018, and the “Preston Model” has become a household word. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies, or CLES, which was active in Preston, is now working with dozens of local authorities, anchor institutions, and U.K. nations to develop community wealth building approaches that are appropriate to the context of their place. At the same time, it is also supporting similar efforts across Europe and as far afield as Australia and New Zealand.

    Keeping small businesses alive in Denver

    Back in the U.S., where similar models are spreading, Denver’s Center for Community Wealth Building, or CCWB, has just received a $360,000 economic development grant for a three-year initiative to launch six to nine new cooperatives in Denver and neighboring Aurora. Such worker cooperatives can stabilize jobs and income for those who might otherwise be displaced by gentrification, while also help to keep small businesses — the heart of these communities — alive.

    CCWB Executive Director Yessica Holguin was first hired as a fellow to work on building opportunity in low-income neighborhoods. Coming from a community organizing background, her first step was to go out and talk to the community. “I wanted to understand the experience of gentrification from the perspective of the residents. And I wanted to hear what solutions resonated with them,” Holguin explained in a press release. “When people own their jobs, when they own their businesses, own their lives, the ripple effects are felt throughout the community.”

    Worker co-ops clearly resonated, and she jumped in to help launch two of them — both of which remain successful today: Mujeres Emprendadores, a catering service started by immigrant women, and Satya Yoga Cooperative, a yoga school run by and for people of color.

    CCWB’s three-pronged strategy is modeled on the Evergreen co-ops: democratize ownership through worker co-ops, strengthen entrepreneurial opportunities for people of color and encourage anchor institutions to become local economic engines. To help the University of Denver shift its spending on catering from national chains, for example, CCWB organized a tasting event where over a hundred university event planners met and began building relationships with 11 community caterers.

    To ensure that cooperatives can flourish, CCWB has developed a roadmap to guide various city departments to support awareness, skills and access. “It’s not just potential worker-owners who need to see the benefits of cooperative businesses” Holguin said. “We want the community to understand how widespread democratic ownership will benefit everyone.”

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    An economy like a little stream

    This approach is proving flexible, resilient and effective. It is putting down roots and beginning to have an impact not only in Cleveland, Preston and Denver, but in an ever-growing number of cities around the world. It consistently supports both political and economic democracy, while also addressing the needs for better pay and a sharing of our common wealth.

    We can use the analogy of water to think about how money moves in an economy. One model is like a storm water system, efficiently gathering water from many small sources, with the goal of consolidation and steady movement toward a central location. A very different model is like a little stream meandering through a wetland, cleansing and nourishing everything it touches — an integral part of the ecosystem, not trying to get anywhere else.

    In our current economic system, money functions like the former, steadily being siphoned from the hands of individuals and communities into those of great financial interests. Community wealth building is all about the latter — circulating and recirculating money in the local economy, in no hurry, allowing its benefits to serve all.

    By offering a powerful framework and lever for moving toward greater local control over wealth, community wealth building is simply another way of getting to the roots. It provides an alternative to moneyed interests being in control and their bottom line trumping the common welfare.

    Reflecting on the role of the Evergreen Laundry — established in a neighborhood of Cleveland where the average income is lower than 93.4 percent of U.S. communities — Howard told The Guardian: “A job is not enough. For people to stay out of poverty they need to be able to acquire assets.” Along with a job, the co-op offers pension payments and profit sharing, and has brought the possibility of home-ownership within reach.

    From a new homeowner in Cleveland, to growing connections between university staff in Colorado and local catering co-ops, to the turnaround of a struggling city in northern England and beyond, the promise of community wealth building appears boundless. Bringing together Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent direct action to confront injustice with a constructive program of steadily diverting resources from the powers-that-be back to the people, this model offers a powerful framework for reclaiming our democracy and our economy.

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