The Consortium Report » Live From Main Street

Your Streets, Your Stories: What Live From Main Street Found on the Trail

by ErinPolgreen, The Media Consortium: Fri., Oct 31, 2008
Filed under: Live From Main Street

I’ve been wondering how I and other women can together turn our national narrative around to one of peaceful cooperation, economic creativity and healing our environment so we can thrive. … I think so many of us are tired of living in fear, tired of having our creative hopes marginalized, tired of war talk and war plans. We’re ready to brainstorm together and build.

I hope that The Media Consortium can continue Live From Main Street. It is really powerful. … I felt like I was part of a meaningful conversation with other citizens and great, down-to-earth journalists. You are helping us become involved. Please keep up this great work–this is journalism at its very best.

-Audience member’s response to Live From Main Street Seattle.

In a world of political sound-bites and talking heads, it’s nearly impossible for everyday people and grassroots leaders to get the attention of the media. In June, The Media Consortium launched Live From Main Street, a five-episode town hall series hosted by Laura Flanders that set out to overcome that challenge. We wanted to go beyond horse-race campaign coverage to uncover how issues like the housing crisis are impacting communities around the country–and to shine a light on the grassroots activists that are making a difference. Live From Main Street traveled to Minneapolis, Miami, Denver, Columbus and Seattle to seek out the voices ignored by the mainstream media.

Along the road we encountered a lawyer organizing in advance of massive citizen and journalist arrests at the Republican National Convention, a homeowner who had to choose between living in decrepit and dangerous public housing and taking a bad loan to give safe shelter to their children (guess which one they picked), individuals leading the way for a new green economy, organizers who were working to stop illegal voter purging, and last but not least, women military experts who put a new spin on national security.

This past weekend, Live From Main Street concluded with “Beyond Hockey Moms and Palin Politics: Women on Real National Security” in Seattle. And for this town hall, we tried something a little different: We convened a series of panels comprised solely of women experts in national security. Live From Main Street brought together mothers, soldiers, scholars and journalists with new perspectives to the national debate over our security strategy.

The town hall was a success. In the words of one audience member, the experience was unique because “You don’t usually hear security discussed from a woman’s point of view.” Another said “Forums like LFMS and grassroots organizations play the essential role is in bringing to the fore the notion that the people must be the dog, and the party the tail, and the party should wag as WE decide. To this I believe there should be no compromise. LFMS is a great way to encourage we, the people, to have our voices heard, and it should continue regardless of who gets to spend his/her days in the oval office.”

Live From Main Street’s goal was to develop new ways for independent media to work collaboratively to inform and support the democratic process–while bringing truth and the voices of everyday Americans to the current national election conversation. The series is a critical example of The Media Consortium’s mission: we seek to build the strength of independent media through collaboration. Each town hall was broadcast on television, radio and satellite channels, streamed live on the internet and written about in print and online outlets. We even produced articles for free syndication related to the town halls–all available open-source and free of charge. (For Seattle’s article, click here.)

Below are some additional clips from LFMS Seattle. For more information about Live From Main Street, visit www.livefrommainstreet.org.

What would real national security look like for women?
Host Laura Flanders asks Rep. Maralyn Chase, Washington’s 32nd District, and Martha Burke, Money Editor at Ms. Magazine, what real national security would look like for women–and why the presidential candidates aren’t talking about it.

Live From Main Street Seattle: Threats at Home and Abroad
Where are the front lines? Carol Kessler, Director of the Center for Global Security for Pacific Northwest National Lab, and Mako Fitts, assistant professor of Sociology at Seattle University, discuss how war abroad affects families at home.

Women, Foreign Policy and War: Do women deserve a say?
Iraq War Veteran Sarah Mott and Sarah Rich, mother of Suzanne Swift—the Army Specialist who spoke out on rape and sexual harassment by her commanders in Iraq, discuss the ongoing treatment of women in the military.

Live From Main Street Seattle, Q&A
Host Laura Flanders and panelists Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Gael Tarleton, Martha Burke, Maralyn Chase and Mako Fitts respond to a question from the audience: What can we do to break the stranglehold that the arms industry and the war profiteers have on our national security policy?

Other episodes in this series include:

Minneapolis: Getting Heard This Election Season: What Stands Between the Public and a True Story?
Miami: Magic City, Hard Times
Denver: So You Say You Want Change? Exploring the Conflicts and Opportunities Ahead
Columbus: Voting Rights and Voter Engagement: Will Your Vote Count?

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Real National Security Begins at Home, Say Women Leaders

Has defense spending become the new patriotism? Even as homeland security funds dwindle, the Pentagon now sucks up 54 percent of the federal budget. Yet politicians rarely challenge the current formula, fearful of being tagged as “weak.” Meet the leaders who say it will take women to fix our nation’s defense priorities.

By Adele M. Stan
The Media Consortium

Times are tough. Wall Street has tumbled, and Main Street is squeezed. As housing values plummet and people lose income, governments are also feeling the pinch. Despite it all, there’s one area of the federal budget that continues to grow: defense spending.

A growing chorus of women leaders are rising in protest, seeking to educate voters on the perils of a dangerously unbalanced set of priorities. From spending cuts in state budgets in such bread-and-butter areas as public health and sheltering the homeless, to a dangerous underfunding of port security and an exodus of first responders to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, women are seeing the Pentagon’s growing share of the federal budget take a toll on the well-being of their own families. Yet an absence of women in the halls of power helps maintain the status quo, say activists, and a failure to enlist military women as allies in the cause of national security reform has held back the progressive funding agenda.

Women are paying attention to who’s getting federal dollars, says Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster who leads Lake Research Associates. In focus groups, says Lake, “we do have women volunteering …that they wonder how we could find overnight all the money to fight a war and to bail out Wall Street, but we can’t find enough money to provide national health care reform. And there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence of that.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, a consensus is building among defense experts that something needs to be done to straighten out those priorities for the very sake of what all that spending is supposed to buy us: real national security. While tax dollars are poured into the pockets of defense contractors for projects of debatable value or documentable waste, homeland security budgets are starved, leaving the nation vulnerable in the face of attack. Yet defense spending sops up more than half of the federal discretionary budget.

What’s pie got to do with it?

At Women’s Action for New Directions, field director Bobbie Wrenn Banks has taken to the road with a victual demonstration of the classic pie chart that WAND calls the Great American Pie project.

“We actually use a pumpkin pie — literally, a pumpkin pie,” Banks explains. “And we go into groups and we slice the pie; it represents the discretionary budget.” The discretionary budget is the piece of the federal budget that gets negotiated between the president and Congress (unlike such programs as Social Security and Medicare, whose costs are mandatory expenditures). “And over half of that pie — 54 percent of that pie — that slice goes to the Pentagon,” says Banks. “Then we have very small little slivers of pie that go to environmental concerns, income security, affordable housing…” And that doesn’t even cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Banks says. Add in the nearly $200 billion that taxpayers have anted up for the wars in this year alone, and “we’re spending nearly $700 billion a year on the military,” she says.

Banks’ pie show is headed this week to Mississippi, where she’ll visit the district offices of Sen. Thad Cochran, the Republican ranking member of the appropriations committee.

Absent a pie-bearing visit from Banks herself, she advises women to take a look at an effort at reform outlined in the Unified Security Budget proposed by the left-leaning group, Foreign Policy in Focus (part of the Institute for Policy Studies), which looks at how the budget is divided among various security needs. “[W]hen you look at the overall security spending pie, it’s just so staggeringly lopsided, because 90 percent of our security money goes to the offense, with a 6 percent slice of that pie going to… homeland security, and only a 4 percent slice going to (conflict) prevention.” Prevention includes diplomacy, foreign assistance in the form of infrastructure-building, and activities such as those done by the Peace Corps.

States starved for security

As president of the Women Legislators’ Lobby, Nan Grogan Orrock, a state senator in Georgia, knows all too well how the dearth of homeland security funding plays out on the ground. “You’ve got an array of issues around homeland security, around the railroads, and the freight containers, you know, the ports and the whole baggage and cargo screening,” says Orrock. “They need another $ 1.25 billion just to meet what are considered appropriate standards for cargo and baggage screening.”

Earlier this year, 339 women state legislators signed WiLL’s letter [PDF file] to members of Congress, asking them not to increase the Pentagon’s budget. “At least 22 states in the country have budget gaps, and 29 states…have had to cut their budgets to try to balance them,” Orrock says. “We have seen cuts to rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, cut anywhere from 38 to 42 percent of their state funding…and yet, under these Bush military budgets, we’re spending more than at any time on the military since World War II.”

But Lorelei Kelly, policy director for the White House Project’s Real Security Initiative and a member of the task force that put together the Unified Security Budget, cautions against riding roughshod on the military itself. “The first thing you shouldn’t say, always, is ‘Cut the military’s budget, cut the military’s budget,’” asserts Kelly, who co-authored, with Army Reserve Lt. Col. Dana Eyre, A Woman’s Guide to Talking About War and Peace [PDF file]. “Talk about the need for national security reform, and within that, that military’s budget has to change. And let’s not just go in with a bunch of hacksaws and blindly start whacking away at things.”

Members of the military, Kelly contends, can be progressives’ best allies when trying to enact reform. Too often, she says, progressives have lumped in with the institutional military everything bad about the military-industrial complex, alienating potential partners. Among the real culprits in the budget dilemma are the procurement process and the contracting out of work that used to be done by soldiers. “It’s appalling, the level of privatization that’s happened within the military budget, and of the service,” Kelly explains. “The institution itself has been very badly damaged in many ways.”

Service members, especially women, are often less than happy with the ways in which contracting and privatization affect their mission, and can be helpful to the cause of reform if asked the right questions in a respectful way, says Kelly. She notes a 2005 House hearing on possible exit strategies for the Iraq war at which former Air Force Under Secretary Antonia Chayse testified. In hearings convened by Sen. Byron Dorgan, chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the highest-ranking civilian in the Army Corps of Engineers, blew the whistle on waste and fraud committed by contractors to the military in Iraq. In fact, if you scroll through the report issued by Dorgan’s committee, you’ll find that in the course of the last three years, many of the the whistleblowers on abuses by military contractors have been women.

Women could change the national security equation

One could argue that the lopsidedness in the federal budget that favors defense contractors exists in inverse relationship to the number of women in the halls of power. (Among the 188 countries listed in the International Parliamentary Union’s index of Women in National Parliaments, the U.S. ranks number 69 in its representation of women in the national legislature; Afghanistan’s rank is 27.) “While there’s nothing being biologically special about women being able to champion peace, I do believe that the life experiences and perspectives that women bring serve these issues well,” Banks says. When it comes to domestic spending, she says, women tend to lean to the progressive side.

Then there’s the matter of Iraq itself. “You have a pretty big gender gap on the war,” Lake explains, who co-authored, with Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, the book, What Women Really Want. “You have men thinking it was worth it to go in, women thinking it wasn’t — which is interesting, given that both men and women are against the war…”

In an August Lake Research Partners/Tarrance Group Battleground poll, likely voters were asked the question: “All in all, do you think the war in Iraq is worth fighting, or not?” Among men, 50 percent said the war was worth fighting, 45 percent said it was not. However, only 35 percent of women said it was worth fighting, while 57 percent said it was not — a double-digit spread on either side of the equation.

Even women in the military see the war differently from their male counterparts. As early as 2005, a poll by Military Times found that 63 percent of men among the active service members they surveyed “said they believe(d) the United States should have gone to war in Iraq, but only 42 percent of the women believe(d) that.” Less than half of the women service members said they approved of the way President Bush was “handling the war,” while 65 percent of the servicemen did.

If more women were in Congress, says Banks, you’d see a difference in the ordering of priorities. “Women in Congress vote more progressively on many issues,” Banks says. In the 109th Congress, WAND reports, women voted for progressive policies in 67 percent of those votes, compared to 48 percent for men. The votes WAND examined fell within the categories of national security, and legislation affecting children, women, and the environment.

Women are naturals at the sort of skills required to effect real security, Kelly asserts. In Afghanistan, the U.S. counterinsurgency plan calls for the creation of constituencies that have a stake in seeing democracy succeed, she explains. “Women are really good at creating stakeholder constituencies in the public,” Kelly says. “Doesn’t everybody know a woman who holds the neighborhood together? That’s a strategic security skill in today’s world.”

# # #

This article is part of The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series, and is published in conjunction with the next Live From Main Street program, “Beyond Hockey Moms and Palin Politics: Women on Real National Security.” Hosted by Laura Flanders of GRITtv, the town hall will feature a number of progressive women leaders, including Ports Commissioner Gael Tarleton; Erin Solaro, author of Women in the Line of Fire: What you should know about Women in the Military, Carol Kessler, director of Center for Global Security for Pacific Northwest National Lab and co-chair of Women in International Security; Rep. Maralyn Chase, Washington’s 32nd D;strict and Washington State director for the Women Legislators’ Lobby; Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of Moms Rising; Rosalinda Guillen, co-founder and executive director, Community to Community Development; Martha Burk, author and money editor at Ms. magazine; Sarah Van Gelder, executive editor at Yes! magazine.

This edition of Live From Main Street will tape on Sunday, October 26, 2008, at 7:00 p.m. EDT/6:00 p.m. CDT/4:00 p.m. PDT in Seattle. The town hall will be streamed live and can be viewed at www.livefrommainstreet.org. The taping is open to the public: click here for more details; Click here to RSVP to this event.

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Live From Main Street
What Will the Green Economy Look Like?

by addiestan, The Media Consortium: Thu., Aug 21, 2008
Filed under: Green • Live From Main Street • Media Consortium: journalism project

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We all say we want to go green, but do we all see the same kinds of change when we imagine an eco-friendly economy?

By Adele M. Stan
The Media Consortium

In Denver, Colo., Tom Plant, director of the Governor’s Energy Office, is practically giddy. It’s just days before the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Colorado’s biggest city, and a long-sought goal in Gov. Bill Ritter’s New Energy Economy program has just been met: Vestas, the Danish wind-turbine manufacturer, has announced its plan to open a new manufacturing plant just outside the city limits — its second in the state.

Plant reels off some numbers: 1,350 new jobs at the new Vestas plant; 650 employees already employed at another the Vesta plant that opened last March, and the prospect of an additional 400 workers at a plant expected to open two years from now. Colorado now generates more than a gigawatt of energy through renewable energy sources — three-quarters of that created in the 18 months since his boss took office.

And how many people does he expect to arrive with the convention?

“About a gazillion, I think,” Plant says, laughing. “Maybe two gazillion.”

A cleaner, greener future has long occupied the dreams of progressives. With an historic “change” election upon us and a crisis in fuel pricing and climate change, the moment appears at hand for the public to accept profound changes in our way of life and the very structure of our economy.

Economists and philosophers, community organizers and labor negotiators, all see in the current crisis an opportunity to create change that reaches beyond the immediate boon of a cleaner environment. Some look through the green crystal ball and see new opportunities for industry or a revitalized labor movement. Others see a new role for government as a change-maker, and still others see a quantum leap in the evolution of the human soul. As goals, they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. But the paths imagined by green advocates don’t always converge. Already the sound of dissonance is audible between those who envision a completely new economic model, and those who seek to work with and clean up the old one.

Democratic Party officials surely had the “change” theme of this year’s presidential campaign in mind when they chose Colorado to host their convention. The Colorado legislature swung from its traditional red to blue when Ritter, the state’s first Democratic governor in 50 years to enjoy a legislative majority, rode into office in 2006, promising a new and vibrant state economy that capitalized on the crisis of global climate change.

Ritter’s New Energy Economy plan got a jump start before he was even elected, with the passage of a ballot measure in 2004 that called for the state’s utilities to bring the level of renewable energy sources in their portfolios up to 10 percent by the year 2015. Executives at Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, protested loudly, then went on to meet the standard eight years ahead of schedule. This year, Xcel’s lobbyists urged a doubling of the standard.

While Colorado’s mandate for renewable sources from its energy providers may have caught the attention of Vestas and other green technology companies, Plant sees something much bigger in their expansion. “When a company like Vestas locates 2,500 jobs in Colorado, it’s not to feed an entirely Colorado demand; I mean, they’re looking at the entire country,” Plant says.

Plant isn’t alone in seeing an opportunity to improve the economic fortunes of everyday Americans in the climate crisis.

Carla Din, Western field director of the Apollo Alliance, doesn’t think she’s asking for much: all she wants is a raft of green energy projects in California that build partnerships between organized labor, developers, environmentalists, social justice advocates and government. The Apollo Alliance seeks to build coalitions among interests that often conflict — such as labor and business — with a focus on meeting the needs of a green economy.

“We’re talking about retooling existing structures, but also about utilizing the workforce that has been in these areas … forever,” Din says.”For instance, the sheet metal workers, the plumbers and pipe-fitters… A lot of these workers are working in targeted industries that will need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions for compliance with climate change laws.”

Legislatures in 25 states have passed laws like Colorado’s that require utilities to meet new standards for a minimum percentage of renewable energy sources in their portfolios. (California has the most comprehensive law, designed to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30 percent over the next 12 years.) The Apollo Alliance also advocates legislation that sets efficiency standards for the energy used by state government facilities and weds those requirements to fair labor standards for the workers who will do the required construction.

Asked if the labor movement will need to reshape the industrial-era structure of its trades sector, characterized by individual unions for distinct specialties, Din bristles a bit. “I don’t necessarily think things have to be restructured; I think things have to be done strategically and efficiently with a lot of cross-pollination.”

But a revolution on the scale required to reshape the economy and save the planet just won’t happen without a fundamental change in the way people regard their place in the world, says Oakleigh Thorne II of the Thorne Ecological Institute, an education center he founded more than 50 years ago in Boulder, Colo. Applying the old economic principle of unbridled growth to green industries just won’t do, he says. Thorne argues that the same principles that govern ecological systems control economic systems, as well. “If you violate ecological principles you might be able to make a fast buck on the short term,” he says, “but long-term, you’ll have an economic disaster.”

Van Jones, president of Green For All in Oakland, Calif., wants nothing less from a new green economy than the alleviation of poverty — and a few other things. Voicing a more urgent imperative in the threat of global climate change, Jones, who will be featured as a panelist at The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street program in Denver on Sunday, sees a world of possibilities in an economy gone green.

The revitalization of urban America could reach into the city’s core, says Jones, with green-collar jobs for those who today struggle to find good-paying work — not to mention the health benefits for residents who today choke with asthma on fumes and city soot. While Green For All advocates legislative remedies, that’s just where its efforts begin. If the kind of change he’s talking about is to be made, Jones says, the current economy will need some radical adjustments.

Models used by today’s economists, Jones explains, are based on notions developed in the 19th century. “Whether left or right,” Jones says, “[these models] had one almost unspoken assumption, which is that you’re going to have an awful lot of nature and very few people. So you find these weird terms, like ‘inexhaustible resources’… Now you’re living in a world where you have an awful lot of people and shockingly little nature left.”

You can’t tinker with the equation to fix the flaw in that model, he says. “If you … have to break up with oil and coal, you may as well break up with poverty and a bunch of other stuff, anyway,” insists Jones, whose book, The Green-Collar Economy, is due from HarperCollins in October.

Economist James Galbraith is frustrated by the lack of attention to the climate crisis by his colleagues. “Where is the economic school of thought that addresses the impact of climate change?” he asks. Except for the work of one or two economists, he says, “it doesn’t exist.” Galbraith, a professor at University of Texas (Austin), says solving the crisis will require a complete reordering of universities to foster collaboration across disciplines.

In his recently released book, The Predator State, Galbraith pleads a case for Democrats to abandon the so-called free market system, since Republicans have clearly done so over the last eight years, as demonstrated by a series of bailouts, manipulations and deficit spending. Galbraith suggests, the challenge of heading off the perils of global climate change offers a jumping-off point from which to launch a new, more beneficial economic system. “It’s a sensible application,” he says. That new system will feature of hybrid of government planning, regulated markets and institutions that foster innovation.

Like Jones, Galbraith sees in the current economic and ecological crises the potential to reinvent decaying societal structures and create entirely new ones. But when asked if it is time for a new New Deal, Galbraith offers a caution against “reaching back to a glorious moment and calling for the revival of an old solution.” One thing the next president and Congress should do, Galbraith says, is to create national-level institutions on the order of our great national laboratories, like the National Institutes of Health or NASA, designed to address the climate crisis.

Nothing less than the sort of effort the U.S. mounted when mobilizing for World War II will create the enterprise needed to address climate change and energy independence in ways that will restructure the economy for the better, Galbraith adds. Folded into that enterprise, he says, should be a goal for universal broadband access (”It’s carbon-neutral”) and a national infrastructure project that does not simply repair decaying structures, but completely redesigns roads, bridges and transportation in ways that are energy-efficient and create sustainable communities.

For his part, Jones sees more creative energy for reinventing the economy coming from the human heart and mind — what he calls “the revolution within” — than from existing institutions. “Why be stuck with these little single-issue not-for-profits and broken-up academic departments trying to solve this thing from inside of it?” he asks. Thinking about this crisis needs to be simplified, not made more complex, he explains. “You know, the reason that Green For All has the name it has is ’cause it’s what a child would say… You gotta get back to the complete innocence of childhood.”

Where Jones calls for a return to innocence, Thorne calls for simplification of our lives, a goal Galbraith also seeks through his economist’s lens, noting, for instance, the efficiency of shortening the food chain.

But Thorne’s philosophy, the “deep ecology” first proposed by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, hangs on more than simplicity; it urges humility in human interaction with the rest of creation. “This integral consciousness is the next step… Out of the consciousness will come the cultural change. Consciousness is always ahead of culture.”

Yet even within the green economy movement, consciousness has its limits. Where thinkers like Jones and Galbraith see a sort of creative destruction in allowing the structures of yesterday fall away to make room for the new, pragmatists like Din and Plant have high hopes for greening the industrial model. Conflicts inherent in these two visions could be the next big test of the progressive movement.

This article is part of The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series, and is published in conjunction with the next Live From Main Street program, “So You Say You Want Change? Exploring the Conflicts and Opportunities Ahead.” Hosted by Laura Flanders of GRITtv, the town hall will feature Van Jones of Green For All, who is interviewed in the article, and a number of other progressive leaders, including Rep. Donna Edwards, Polly Baca, David Sirota, Faye Wattleton, Andre Banks and Lee Camp of Laughing Liberally. This edition of Live From Main Street will tape on Sunday, August 24 at 4:00 p.m. MST in Denver. The town hall will be streamed live and can be viewed at www.livefrommainstreet.org.

The taping is open to the public: click here for more details; Click here to RSVP to this event.

See more tagged with: Apollo Alliance, Carla Din, Colorado, Democratic National Convention, DNC, James K. Galbraith, Live From Main Street, Oakleigh Thorne, renewable energy, The Predator State, Thorne Insititute, Tom Plant, Van Jones, Vestas and wind power

Live From Main Street
What Will the Green Economy Look Like?

by addiestan, The Media Consortium: Thu., Aug 21, 2008
Filed under: Economy • Green • Live From Main Street • Media Consortium: journalism project