Episodes will be posted online shortly after the airtime, and the water program is scheduled for Tuesday, April 17. The first three in the series are available here.
Weed, CA water rights, Mount Shasta and the topic of water bottling and water privatization will be the focus of the fourth episode of an upcoming series on food and water, produced by UK's Fusion/LightBox Productions. Here's a one minute trailer advertising the 8-part series. While the Weed area water protectors are only on screen for 5 seconds, starting at 0:34, they make their point, and the whole series looks like it will be worth checking out.
Episodes will be posted online shortly after the airtime, and the water program is scheduled for Tuesday, April 17. The first three in the series are available here.
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![]() Town meeting season in Maine got off to a great start for Local Food RULES! Four towns passed the ordinance in just one week--Starks, Jonesport, Westmanland, and Parkman. Montville soon followed, raising the number of towns voting to protect local food to 29, with great potential for many more. These latest five towns are in five different counties, so this is not a case of near-by towns playing follow the leader. Campaign organizers are hoping to pass ordinances in clusters of towns, however, by adding a section to the model Local Food and Community Self-Governance ordinance language titled “Mutual Recognition and Inter-Municipal Government Collaboration,” allowing food producers in one ordinance town to operate in others as well. Supporters hope to see some creative ideas coming out of this. These town-level victories are especially sweet after last year's fight to retain most provisions of the Maine Food Sovereignty Act, a state bill that was passed and signed into law but then came under criticism by the USDA. “Getting to this place took a great deal of work with our allies to write an amendment to the Maine Food Sovereignty Act that would satisfy the USDA’s objections and still give us most of what we wanted,” said Bonnie Preston, Local Food RULES! Organizer and Alliance co-Vice Chair. “We succeeded! The Dept. of Agriculture and their lobbyist friends were shocked when the legislature voted for our amendment and not theirs, which had managed to remove all food from the Food Sovereignty Act. Once that was done, we had to work even harder to revise the LFCSGO to incorporate the changes in the law, but we got that done, too.” News about the ordinance is also spreading thanks to Richard King, who homesteads with his wife Maria and who introduced the ordinance to his town in 2016. He has updated the website with a map of all the towns that have passed the ordinance, color-coded for dates, and more helpful material is on the way. The campaign also has an ally in Maine's Granges. “The first one we visited was in Madison, a town that passed the ordinance in 2016,” Bonnie noted. “We learned that they had a farmers’ market that does not require venders to be licensed, and they were happy with the fact that they therefore had 'poor people buying from poor farmers,' a local economy that works well in very rural areas. No $6.00 lattes at that market! “One person who attended the meeting was a selectman from a near-by town who is a lawyer, and he came in very skeptical about the ordinance, and left eager to pass it in his town, and happy to have us refer towns with questions about legal issues to him. He is truly one of our most valuable supporters.” The Local Food RULES! Campaign is making great progress in Maine, but to change the way we do agriculture in this country, more towns and states must be involved. They are beginning to reach out to inform more people about this work; the more places that pass the ordinance, the more successful we will all be. What is now being called regenerative agriculture must take over from the industrial model. It will have huge benefits for the health of people, animals, and the environment. The Alliance's three sponsored campaigns for public banks—the DC Public Banking Center, the Portland Public Banking Alliance, and Hub Public Banking—made progress this winter on democratizing finance in their cities and state.
In Washington, the DC Public Banking Center is keeping an eye on the request for proposals process for the city's public bank feasibility study, as well as continuing to reach out to constituents through a recent forum on “Banking for the Public Good, Not Private Profit.” The forum participants, including Alliance co-Vice chair Ruth Caplan, looked at what a public bank could do for Washington, the ethical concerns around the business practices of large banks, especially Wells Fargo, and the potential impact of a proposed revolving loan fund for environmental projects. In Portland, public banking advocates have met with city council candidates and expect to have a majority on the five-person council who are friendly to the idea of a public municipal bank. In Massachusetts, a bill to create a state infrastructure bank has been moved from the legislature's joint committee on Small Businesses to the committee on Financial Services, and advocates are mustering support for it from mayors, town managers, advocacy groups and citizens. Since the Finance committee's deadline for either moving bills to Ways and Means or asking for an extension on a decision is this week, proponents should know soon whether their bill has a chance of passage this term. The Alliance's campaigns were also part of the discussion at a recent strategy meeting on public banking, organized by the Public Banking Institute, which brought advocates from across the country together in Colorado. The vitality of many of these new campaigns is inspiring, especially those that have drawn a connection between municipal divestment from Wall Street banks and fossil fuels, and reinvestment in local economies and environment via a public bank. Check out our public banking campaign page for more resources and links to individuals projects online and on social media. The Weed Area Water Alliance (WAWA) is a newly-formed California non-profit consisting of local citizens and supporters who have come together to protect their source of clean water and other related conditions in their town of Weed, located northeast of Mt. Shasta city and Mt. Shasta.
WAWA is trying to protect the town’s water supply, originating at nearby Beaughan Springs, which has supplied water to the city for over a century. But a local timber company, Roseburg Forest Products, claims ownership of the spring. Roseburg's plan is to cut off water to the town of Weed, while selling it to Crystal Geyser LLC, owned by a French investor and Japanese pharmaceutical company. This New York Times article looks at the corporate actors claiming water rights and the community response, and this Sierra Club article goes into competing legal claims for ownership. It's a sadly too-classic tale of water rights, water privatization and environmental review that pits the corporate "right" to profit against the community rights of 2,700 Weed citizens. Most recently, residents have focused on expansion plans for the Crystal Geyser bottling plant, which is located just adjacent to the city, but is hooked into the city sewer system from discharging toxic waste water. Citizens lost on a 3-2 vote that an environmental impact report was needed and that Crystal Geyser failed to disclose the harmful chemicals because this would have triggered the need for this environmental review. You can read more about this latest battle here and here. And to get a sense of the community and how determined they are to protect their water, watch the trailer for the short documentary "Water Town." California's recent severe drought convinced many in the state of the importance of securing water for human needs, and there have been protests around expanded bottling operations as well as renewed scrutiny of water rights claimed by bottlers and exporters. The Alliance is proud to support WAWA's fight for water for people, not for profit. ![]() Call your state and federal legislators and demand funding for an accurate, comprehensive 2020 census and the removal of the citizenship question. Last December, the Department of Justice requested addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Census. They claimed this data was needed to make sure all voting-age citizens are counted under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Yet this question hasn’t been asked since 1950—five years before the Voting Rights Act was passed. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s announcement that the citizenship question would be included lead to a storm of protests and lawsuits by states, cities, and citizen groups. Despite reassurances that people who don't answer the citizenship question will still be counted, the question's inclusion, plus the threat of fines for returning false or incomplete forms, will doubtlessly discourage migrants from responding. In turn this undermines the government’s constitutional responsibility to count every person every 10 years. In a recent two-hour hearing, legislators emphasized migrants' legitimate fears of deportation could lead to a serious undercount. Other problems with the census include lack of permanent leadership at the Census Bureau and of funding shortfalls, which could also impact a reliable census. Why do we need an accurate count? Redistricting, based on total resident population, occurs after every census, so it’s important to have accurate numbers of citizens and non-citizens alike. Combine an inaccurate count with gerrymandering and you can deliver a district to one or another major party. Plus, the census determines state government share of federal dollars for vital programs including healthcare, housing, and emergency planning and relief. Please call your Representatives and Senators to ask that the 2020 Census be fully funded and that the citizenship question be dropped. You can find contact information for the House here and the Senate here. On Tuesday's edition of "Corporations and Democracy," Steve and Annie welcomed Kathryn Donahue, retired board member of the California Nurses Association (CNA), and Martha Kuhl, secretary/treasurer for National Nurses United (NNU) for an election year update on single payer health care in California, and where the candidates stand on this issue. You can listen or download the show here, and catch up with past broadcasts on the show's archive page.
"Corporations and Democracy" airs at 1 p.m. Pacific time on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month, on KZYX&Y, Mendocino Public Radio. You can stream it from the website live, and podcasts are posted here a few days after the show airs. VoterGA reports that the Georgia Senate has taken its first major step toward voter-marked paper ballots, with its Ethics Committee voting to abandon both unverifiable electronic voting and “new wave” technology that counts votes in computer-generated barcodes rather than human-readable marks. The committee's vote, which came during a hearing on Senate Bill SB403, was unanimous.
"Some ballot marking devices employ a touchscreen to create bar coded selections of voter choices that are interpreted internally by a scanner and accumulated when the votes are cast. The unverifiable bar code technology, promoted by certain vendors and the office of the Secretary of State, enables a 'new wave' of hacking possibilities and significant potential for undetectable errors," writes VoterGA in this press release. Possible cyberattacks on state voting databases are not the only problem with US electronic voting. As this article notes, and as a 2015 edition of Corporations and Democracy noted, much of our nation's electronic voting equipment is too old to be consistently reliable. According to the story:
A ProPublica analysis of voting machines found that over two-thirds of counties in America used machines for the 2016 election that are over a decade old. In most jurisdictions, the same equipment will be used in the 2018 election. In a recent nationwide survey by the Brennan Center for Justice, election officials in 33 states reported needing to replace their voting equipment by 2020. Officials complain the machines are difficult to maintain and susceptible to crashes and failure, problems that lead to long lines and other impediments in voting and, they fear, a sense among voters that the system itself is untrustworthy. The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was a source of state funding after its passage in 2002, with $3.6 billion given to states and territories to upgrade systems and administration. But since then, there has been no federal level financial support for states to maintain or replace voting machines, and few states still have unspent HAVA funds. (HAVA had its issues, too--its primary author, Rep. Bob Ney, resigned after pleading guilty to conspiracy and making false statements in relation to the scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff, whose lobbying clients included touch-screen voting manufacturer Diebold, a big beneficiary of HAVA procurement regulations). It's clear that paperless electronic voting machines have to go. Even in the absence of any kind of pre-election manipulation, these machines aren't foolproof, and have been documented to occasionally "flip" votes. Without a backup paper trail, the real results, in a recount, are anyone's guess. Beyond that, there are two ways to deal with obsolescence of our electronic voting machines. First, we could upgrade old systems with new ones, insisting that new machines also allow for easy, efficient paper-based recounts. But even with improved security and audits, remember that the "hack-proof" voting machine is a myth. But the second is to go back to hand-counted paper ballots. There are advantages and disadvantages to a purely paper system. Counting ballots is time-consuming, especially when states or cities also use a ranked-choice system. It's debatable whether voters would also step up as volunteer ballot-counters. Ballot-box stuffing is a possibility as well--the results are only going to be as valid as the counters are honest. However, as electronic voting expert Jonathan Simon has noted, ballot counting could bring volunteers from different parties together in support of a basic exercise of democracy, reducing partisanship and increasing local cooperation. The time it took to count and verify the results would defuse the "Super Bowl-style" hype around elections. If it took a day or two to learn who was the next mayor, governor, or president, so be it--it's an important decision that we'll be living with for a while. The Alliance's Peoples Vote Must Count project is a three-step program to institute hand-counted paper ballots, beginning with a look into election hacking, followed by studying how your elections are conducted, and then introducing a hand-counted-paper-ballot initiative to either replace your current system or provide a robust audit of results, depending on local needs. You can find out more here, and read more about election protection and voter rights in this issue of Justice Rising. You can't just complain about business as usual without thinking about and promoting alternatives. One is The General Agreement on a New Economy (GANE). GANE was developed by the Economics Working Group, while a project of the Tides Foundation. It was the result of a robust discussion among forward thinking economists and policy advocates taking place over several years, and became an Alliance project as part of the Corporate Globalization/Positive Alternatives campaign.
GANE is a way of thinking about the economy which centers on the local and builds outward to regional and national levels. It focuses on full employment, equity, and environmental sustainability. This systemic approach is described in GANE as “community federalism.” First published after the 2008 crisis and Wall Street bailout, GANE envisions policy that meets the needs of people in relation to their community, rather than corporate profits. While not a new document, the conditions in which it was written--a casino economy, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the rich and everyone else--are still with us. You can read the full GANE document, as well as articles and reading lists on communities, local capital, meaningful work, corporations and the federal role in transitioning to a new economy at the GANE website. The town of Starks, Maine, will hold a public hearing on a proposed Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance on Monday night, February 19, at 7 p.m. at the Town Office. The ordinance will be voted on at Town Meeting on March 10.
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