Tag: "Prison Reform"

HOW PEOPLE ARE FIGHTING THE WORLD'S RELIANCE ON THE WAR ECONOMY

HOW PEOPLE ARE FIGHTING THE WORLD'S RELIANCE ON THE WAR ECONOMY
Posted by on Nov 17, 2023 in Economic Justice, Environment, Newsworthy, Intersectional Issues
HOW PEOPLE ARE FIGHTING THE WORLD'S RELIANCE ON THE WAR ECONOMY

Many people are already investing themselves in the local peace economy as they divest from the economy of war.

By April M. Short

War is not innate to humanity; it is learned culturally, and intentional systems of peace can prevent it from happening, according to anthropological research. We are living at a critical time in the history of humanity in which preventing and divesting from war are essential to our future existence—especially given the realities of the global climate crisis and the fact that the U.S. military is the worst single polluter that exists (and not even mentioning the unspeakable potential for destruction that nuclear weapons pose). If war is cultural, then we can prevent it by intentionally moving ourselves into a culture of peace. How do we do this? We begin with ourselves. We begin to break our war economy habits, and actively divest ourselves, wherever possible, from the ways in which the war economy takes hold in our lives. And we purposefully invest ourselves at the local level in what is often called the peace economy—the caring, sharing, supportive economies that already exist all around us.

The economy of war thrives on extraction and materialism, so it has—for thousands of years, and by no accident—made trite (or violently stifled) the things that are most valuable and important about living: caring; nurturing; love; art; peace; expression; and connection with nature, our bodies, and each other. The war economy, which is the overarching economic system of our times, promotes a culture that actively devalues play and community, and overly values hard work and individualism—to the grave detriment of mental and physical health. It uplifts money hoarding, competition, and the flaunting of one’s material wealth over generosity, sharing, collaboration, and appreciation. It stifles grief and asks us to harden ourselves against the expression of feeling rather than inviting us into depths of emotion where we can realize the gift of being alive in this world, together, for just a brief time.

The results of this unsustainable and unnatural lifestyle are ugly: Clear-cut, monocropped tree farms where once thrived biodiverse FernGully-esque old grove forests in the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon, and around the world; endless mining and building projects that plunder habitats, natural wonders, and Indigenous communities; worsening mental health afflictions, an opioid addiction epidemic, and soaring suicide rates; toxic chemicals and microplastics in our soils, oceans, streams, and bloodstreams that are causing irreparable damage to the planet and our bodies; people treated like criminals for experiencing homelessness, even amidst a devastating cost of living crisis; racist, militarized police murdering people in broad daylight, and often walking free even when they’re caught on camera; hustle and greed culture and the agony that comes with living a daily grind; so much unnecessary loneliness and stress… and this list could go on and on.

But a movement is building from the commons to break with these war economy ways and replenish ways of being that are actually livable. Around the world, there are projects, people, and organizations creating solutions to the problems of our times. They are actively helping in divesting from the war economy in powerful ways. These examples of the local peace economy in action demonstrate that it is possible to create systems in which wealth and worth are rooted in equitable, community-centered care practices like health care for all, farming and feeding each other, parenting and education that are entrenched in love and engagement, and a culture that uplifts us and inspires interconnection.

The peace economy is built brick by brick, through the commitments of individual people and communities. What follows are some examples (of many more that exist worldwide) showing how people and communities are divesting from the war economy and investing in a future centered in peace, love, and aliveness:

Our globalized, Big Ag, monoculture food systems—which are monopolized by a handful of megacorporations owned by billionaires responsible for the war economy—are unraveling. The COVID-19 pandemic cast a bright light on the fragility of those systems. But the issues the pandemic exposed were present prior to 2020, and they promise to continue into the future. People in communities around the world are relocalizing food supply chains to create food sovereignty and reclaim culture in these times of fraying global food systems:

     Communities in the Pacific Northwest have been working to regionalize food supply chains through relocalized flour mills, sustainable livestock ranches, a         creative chicken farming model, and community garden programs. These efforts have paid off in creating food security for communities while also leading to           greater job opportunities and a thriving ecosystem.

     Palestinian farmers have been rekindling connections with Indigenous farming practices and creating community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs to           resist Israeli colonialism. This has helped Palestinians to reconnect with their land and economically support locally grown food.

     Black, formerly incarcerated people in Chicago are challenging the megacorporations that tend to dominate food contracting with schools and other large         facilities in America by prepping locally sourced meals for schools, nursing homes, and transitional housing. The Chicago worker cooperative ChiFresh Kitchen is       100 percent employee-owned and provides nutritious and culturally appropriate food to these institutions and facilities.

     There are many networks of Indigenous seed savers and others keeping and propagating seeds in community gardens and cooperative programs in the           U.S. and around the world. Indigenous-led communities like Seeding Sovereignty and many others are keeping their spiritual connections and cultural practices       alive through their connections with seeds, and seed savers are challenging the monocrop-based Big Ag industry that is responsible for so much deforestation         and other climate destruction. These networks have also helped bring back “Indigenous foodways that were lost during genocide and forced relocation” inflicted       by European colonizers.

     The Deep Medicine Circle in the San Francisco Bay Area, a women of color-led, worker-directed 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is one group that is rethinking health             care at its roots, and healing the ways U.S. colonial extraction is making people sick. Local community members who make up Deep Medicine Circle are creating       systems of health and care, through the lens of community food justice. They’re planting community gardens and thinking up long-term models of localized             food and community engagement that uplift indigenous practices, provide access to healthy foods in poor urban neighborhoods, and dismantle colonialist ways         of thinking and being in the world.

      Neighbors are voluntarily keeping free-food fridges stocked in cities around the world, in a mutual aid movement that gained speed in response to the          economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. People have fed and cared for each other through the pandemic and beyond, creating a free-fridge movement            that has raised awareness about racial inequity in food systems.

     Sallie Calhoun’s Paicines Ranch in California is working to bring agricultural business and investment up to date with our times and closer to             nature by prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices. The project was founded with the aim of working with           the dynamic natural world to explore ways of building healthy ecosystems while growing crops and supporting community through food. Paicines Ranch is               intentionally creating a model of doing business that is focused on managing complexities rather than solving problems, and is centered on adding true value           over profits.

Outside of the food system, examples of other applications of mutual aid, social justice, creative arts, community resilience, and activism for human rights and the environment that all embrace the peace economy include:

     People are reimagining safety through alternatives to policing. Safety in the peace economy comes from the engagement of community and the                   reallocation of resources and funding into programs of care—not militarized police forces and punitive systems of justice. While many alternatives to policing           already exist, recent initiatives after the murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020 have introduced changes, both big and small, across the US, and the            global uprisings against systemic racism have led to these issues being part of the mainstream conversation.

     Creative cooperatives are reclaiming real estate and bringing access to art, living spaces, and community spaces back to marginalised Black, Indigenous,         and people of colour (BIPOC) in Oakland and elsewhere who have played an integral part in shaping the culture of cities across the US.

     Fire recovery efforts in Oregon, California, and elsewhere have depended on people-led mutual aid projects and local volunteer networks.                 Devastating fires, worsened by climate change and the criminal negligence of public utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), have been increasing in recent       years, some of them incinerating entire towns. Fire recovery efforts in Oregon and California have largely been community-led, and networks have formed               among neighbours to create resilience and support—including grief spaces like those created in Ashland, Oregon, which provide a space for people to share their       experiences of loss.

     People are fighting the fossil fuel industry while building community spaces and support for people who are homeless in New Mexico. The                 grassroots project is part of a larger project in New Mexico. SOL for All has brought solar power to various locations across the state in an effort to support               alternative energy solutions, which are necessary to combat climate change.

     The largest dam removal in history started in 2023 in southern Oregon and Northern California, thanks to years of Indigenous-led community           activism. The Karuk, Yurok, and other Native American groups for whom the Klamath River Basin is their ancestral home since time immemorial have been             organizing against the dams since they were proposed in the 1910s—which have had disastrous results for people, salmon, and other wildlife—for decades.             After multigenerational efforts, the massive dam removal project is expected to be completed by 2024.

      Many people are also building a peace economy through creative sharing efforts and alternatives to money-based exchanges. This includes                community gardens, mutual aid groups, and participation in the solidarity economy, and just transition efforts like those of Americans with jobs sharing their           stimulus checks with those in need in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. People are also creating skill share networks like Kola Nut Collaborative and           others, and millions of people daily are sharing tools and operating in a moneyless economy via “free” signs on street corners, Craigslist’s “free stuff” page,             Freecycle, and other creative routes.​​

The above are just some of the countless examples of the peace economy in action—and most of these efforts were started by just one or two people deciding to do something about the problems they saw happening in their local community.

Author: April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a co-founder of the Observatory, where she is the Local Peace Economy editor, and she is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she was a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Good Times, a weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, LA Yoga, Pressenza, the Conversation, Salon, and many other publications.

 This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

PUBLIC LIBRARIES CONTINUE TO THRIVE DESPITE DEFUNDING and PRIVATIZATION ATTACKS

PUBLIC LIBRARIES CONTINUE TO THRIVE DESPITE DEFUNDING and PRIVATIZATION ATTACKS
Posted by on Jan 19, 2023 in Home Page, Newsworthy
PUBLIC LIBRARIES CONTINUE TO THRIVE DESPITE DEFUNDING and PRIVATIZATION ATTACKS
Efforts by governments and cities across the nation to defund the public library indicate a misunderstanding of the essential role that libraries play.
By April M. Short

The public sector in the U.S. has been shrinking rapidly since the 1990s as a deluge of privatization has, to various degrees, overtaken many so-called public services and institutions. Public education, for example, has been increasingly privatized by way of racist school voucher programs, and the expansion of for-profit charter schools and for-profit education management organizations (EMOs). Private organizations own and operate the nation’s homeless shelters and food banks, and oversee many welfare programs including Head Start programs and child welfare assistance. Medicare and Medicaid systems include government payouts to private managed care organizations (MCOs), process reimbursement claims through private intermediaries, and commonly delegate medical care to private care facilities, private doctors, and private hospitals. Not to mention the nightmare that is America’s private, for-profit prison system.

Public libraries may be the last truly public institution. Linda Stack-Nelson’s essay “The Last Free Space,” published in 2018 by World Literature Today, is a “love letter to public libraries” that details the reasons these uniquely public entities are essential. In it, she salutes the fact that public libraries offer much more than free books, noting the classes, workshops, internet access, resume and tax help, community gathering events, and so forth that libraries provide. However, she argues, this “plethora of resources and opportunities for community” that libraries provide is not the sole reason they are important.

“Libraries are the last place in every town and city that people can simply exist,” Stack-Nelson writes. “Every building one enters today comes with some expectation of spending money.”

She continues:

“In a library, no one is asked to pay anything simply to sit. For those with few resources besides time, this is a godsend. Libraries are unofficial playgrounds for low-income families on rainy days, homeless shelters in cold months, reprieves from broken homes for grade-school-age children. They are the last bastions of quiet and calm where nothing is asked of one but to exist. Many arguments have been made about how the library is an outdated institution offering outdated services—that in the 21st century, how-to books on building sheds and daily newspaper copies are obsolete and the funding used for libraries ought to be reallocated to other programs. I can only assume that those who make such arguments are people who have always been comfortable with the expenditures it takes to move through the world, whose presence has never been questioned. For those people, libraries can be about books. But not everyone has the luxury of seeing past the space.”

The very existence of public libraries, from this perspective, can be seen as an emblem for the people. American Library Association (ALA) President Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada said in November 2022, in an interview with Independent Media Institute, that the public library has been an “enduring symbol of democracy.”

“Democracy is listed as one of ALA’s Core Values of Librarianship,” she said. “Regarding this core value, the ALA Council notes that ‘The publicly supported library provides free and equal access to information for all people of the community the library serves.’ The ALA Council also previously stated that libraries are an ‘American Value’; they are at the heart of the community—a resource for people of any age to find what they need to help improve their quality of life.”

As American generations go, millennials love the public library most of all. A Pew Research Center analysis released in 2017 showed millennials use public libraries more than other age groups.

Pelayo-Lozada said this love affair is likely due to the fact that millennials as a generation were entering adulthood “during a recession and through multiple life-changing world events.”

“Millennials understand the importance of free and equitable access to information as well as the need to support those institutions that provide it,” she said. “From a practical standpoint, as pay increases do not match living expense increases, access to the public library allows millennials to enjoy culture and participate in education and learning at no cost, helping to alleviate some of the financial pressures they may be experiencing.”

While the public library system has remained steadfast in what many Americans would agree is its traditional function—the ALA’s first-listed core value is to be a space that offers access to information—Pelayo-Lozada pointed out that it has evolved significantly over time. In recent years, for instance, many libraries across the U.S. have been doing away with late fees. Studies by various library systems showed late fees primarily impacted people living in poor neighborhoods where the residents are more likely communities of people of color.

“The mission of the library has always been about access to information, literacy, learning, and culture,” Pelayo-Lozada said. “Public libraries have evolved from spaces that included membership fees and practiced exclusion based on class and race to spaces that are open for all. The ability of the public library to reimagine itself to the needs of society has been an ongoing significant achievement.”

The ALA released a Resolution on Monetary Library Fines as a Form of Social Inequity in 2019 that details its decision to support eliminating late fees charged by public libraries.

She notes that because libraries are “hyperlocal institutions,” they have been able to translate the overarching mission of the public library in a range of ways over time, as needs and challenges have arisen.

“As the world navigated the [COVID-19] pandemic, many libraries expanded the range of support they offer for workforce and small business development—including formal coworking spaces, networking events, and programs to assist with the development of business plans or market research,” she said. “As the needs of our communities change, so do the services and resources available through our libraries, from a Library of Things, to mobile technology labs, to vibrant maker spaces.”

She said in recent years the library system added sustainability as a core value of librarianship, and ALA works to support libraries in the development of sustainable models.

“Libraries play an important and unique role in promoting community awareness about resilience, climate change, and a sustainable future,” she said.

Historically, the development of the public library system in the U.S. has in many ways pushed the edges of the concept of public institutions. The small Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire, established in 1833, was the first documented free, public library in the world. In the period between 1870 and 1930, local public libraries emerged as a widespread institution of community life.

Pelayo-Lozada said in comparison to public libraries from around the world, “American libraries often set the standard for the type of experiences and materials offered to patrons.”

“International counterparts have said that the advocacy work we do for all communities such as emerging ethnic communities and services to the incarcerated support their mission to bring these types of demographic-focused services to their own libraries when administrators may interpret more homogenous communities,” she said.

“Because libraries have the ability to serve as innovative and creative spaces, there are opportunities to pilot, test, and launch various types of programming, which can be case-studied, replicated, and adapted to fit the needs of libraries in their respective communities.”

One example of this, she said, is ALA’s Libraries Build Business initiative. For the initiative, 13 libraries received grants to start or grow small business programming, in an effort to provide support, advice, and networking opportunities around small businesses and entrepreneurship. The cohort collaborated to answer questions, pilot projects, develop resources, and share what they learned with the wider library community.

While the international community may look to America’s libraries as exemplary, support for public libraries in the U.S. has been a mixed bag. In the sociopolitical climate in the U.S., especially following four years of divisive Trump administration rhetoric, there has been an increased politicization of information and data. Some states and cities have been in the process of defunding public libraries. There has been a movement by the far right to censor books in schools and efforts to ban some books entirely.

“Public libraries serve everyone in the community, and library collections, by necessity, must reflect the diversity of thought and values that exist in every community,” said Pelayo-Lozada. “Public libraries are the bastions of democracy, access, and critical thinking and are at the forefront of protecting our freedom to read and our freedom to information.”

She said efforts by governments and cities across the nation to defund the public library indicate “a threat and a misunderstanding of the essential role that libraries play in our society and our democracy.”

“By breaking down institutions that support the public good, those who are threatening to decrease funding are breaking down the very fabric of our society and our right to information,” she said.

She said in an increasingly divided world, many people use information and access to information to disenfranchised communities from being full participants in society.

“Libraries and library workers are attacked as a tool of a minority of voices seeking to silence diverse ideas and abolish free and equitable access to information, eroding this country’s commitment to freedom of expression,” she said. “Operating in this world, public libraries are essential public goods that allow individuals to bring these ideas together and learn from each other, at no cost to the individual. As a true public benefit, public libraries are essential to creating an inclusive society where everyone is able to fully participate.”

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio:

April M. Short is an editor, journalist, documentary editor, and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon, and many others.