It’s also worth remembering that Wall Street was the site of New York City’s first slave market, and the first modern financial instruments were developed to collateralize Black bodies in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The roots of the modern financial industry grew strong off stolen land and stolen bodies. Today a growing pipeline divestment movement, catalyzed by the struggle at Standing Rock, is again making the connections clear between Wall Street investment banks and ongoing colonization and racial oppression in this country. Earlier this year, leaders of the Standing Rock Sioux called upon water protectors and those fighting for indigenous sovereignty to take opposition to the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from the burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux to the boardrooms of the financial institutions funding the pipeline. [Read a more in-depth review of the struggle at Standing Rock here.] Where bodies and prayers alone could not stop the pipeline construction, Native leaders tried speaking in a language that Energy Transfer Partners and their financiers might understand better: money.

#DefundDAPL: Prayerful Resistance

The #DefundDAPL campaign was born, taking lessons from past and ongoing social movements that have effectively used divestment campaigns to end Apartheid in South Africa, pressure Israel to end the occupation of Palestine, weaken the tobacco industry, shift university endowments out of fossil fuel companies, and more.

Since the call to divest earlier this year, grassroots campaigns have pushed nearly a dozen cities and tribes across the continent – from Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland to the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota and the Nez Perce in Idaho  – to divest public money from financial institutions funding resource extraction, mass incarceration, and predatory banking practices. To date, roughly $5 billion of public money has been pledged for divestment from the financiers of DAPL, and another $83 million of personal funds have been shifted out of these banks (much of that into local credit unions and community banks).

Here in Huichin, (the Ohlone name for what is now Oakland and Northern Alameda County, California), a coalition of Native leaders, Oakland residents and workers, and community members impacted by nearby fossil fuel refineries recently succeeded in changing the City of Oakland’s banking policies. Banks that wish to contract with the City must now disclose any material support for companies 1) constructing or operating DAPL, 2) operating or profiting from private prisons or detention centers, or 3) otherwise contributing to violations of indigenous sovereignty. Read the full ordinance here. The new policy also requires depositories to address racial disparities in their local lending practices, acknowledging a history of discriminatory, predatory, fraudulent, or otherwise unequal lending practices in Oakland communities of color.

All oppressions are interconnected, all healings are interconnected

Key to success for many of these municipal divestment campaigns has been highlighting the interconnected nature of oppressions funded by a small number of large banks. It is largely the same institutions that are simultaneously profiting off fossil fuel pipelines, private prisons, fraudulent banking services, and home foreclosures – all activities that disproportionately harm communities of color, yet harm all “downstream” communities regardless of race. We all need clean water, clean air, and healthy soil to survive – even bankers.

Our coalition, Defenders of Mother Earth-Huichin, formed shortly after several of us returned from Standing Rock in November and December 2016. Energized by that experience and the early success of Seattle’s campaign to divest from Wells Fargo, our initial coalition quickly realized that we needed to slow down and build authentic relationships of trust and accountability between Native peoples and non-native people working together. After several meetings where we discussed what Native leadership should look like for us in the context of this divestment campaign, at least two things became clear to me: 1) this work was about divesting from far more than just a few corporations, but from an entire worldview and model of leadership rooted in domination; and 2) that our coalition needed to go slow to go far and cultivate patience in moments of perceived crisis.

The way we conducted coalition meetings, our approach to working with City Councilmembers, our understanding of how state power operates and how to build community power all shifted when we took time to slow down and ground ourselves in the understanding of Native peoples in the coalition. It is not just about changing particular laws (though there are thousands that need changing), but changing the very way that policy is made. At the Law Center, we have launched a new project to focus on just that: Transformative Policymakers.

Members of Defenders of Mother Earth-Huichin in front of Oakland City Hall

As more and more cities move to divest from financiers of DAPL and other pipelines, an uneasy conundrum still exists: nearly every financial institution large enough to provide the banking services needed to run a city are in some way invested in the extractive economy of pipelines and prisons.

This is an integral part of the story we need to be telling though: neither Wall Street nor the extractive economy of pipelines and prisons can exist without the other. From the very beginning, the entire system of international banking and finance has relied on extractive economies to drive profits. Thus, the Native-led #DefundDAPL movement is not just about disciplining one bank for funding one pipeline or one private prison – it is about reimagining the role of finance in an equitable, life-sustaining society and redirecting resources to the communities with a vision for creating that society.

Indeed, the call for divestment and reinvestment in community solutions now emanates loudly from a diversity of frontline coalitions, including the Visions 4 Black Lives policy platform, ReFund Oakland, Freedom Cities movement, Defund DAPL, Appalachian Transition initiative, and more.

Reinvesting in frontline leadership

So what could a finance system not reliant on the plunder of people and planet look like?

Frontline communities understand the challenges and threats better than anyone, and have developed cultures and ways of thinking that we all must learn from in the collective project of transitioning to a life-sustaining economy and society. As Patricia St. Onge, indigenous grandmother and co-leader of Idle No More SF Bay and Defenders of Mother Earth-Huichin, says: “Indigenous people are the antidotes to annihilation.”

On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest communities in the country, the Lakota-led Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation is developing a completely sustainable community development model. On the Standing Rock Reservation, the Standing Rock Sioux are now working to build community-owned solar and wind farms, while the Native-led Native Renewables is working with the Navajo Nation to transition from coal to solar. Across the Southeast, the Southern Reparations Loan Fund is raising money divested from Wall Street to finance worker-owned businesses in communities healing the centuries-old legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In Richmond, California – in the shadow of the Chevron Refinery, California’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions – Cooperation Richmond is similarly developing and financing worker cooperatives, like Rich City Rides, that enable community members to use their labor to heal rather than harm the community.

Ultimately, the fossil fuel and pipeline divestment movement must be about redistribution as well as resistance: redistribution of financial capital and the material resources needed to sustain life in an equitable economy, and of the political power and social platforms needed to elevate the voices, visions, and wisdom of frontline communities.

Want to join the # campaign and the broader divest/invest movement? Move your personal money into a local credit union or community bank (more resources here); join or start a local #DefundDAPL campaign (more resources here); follow and support indigenous-led organizations like Mazaska Talks, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Lakota People’s Law Project; learn more about other intersectional divest/invest efforts on the New Economy Coalition’s new “Move Your Money to the New Economy” page.

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Photo by Stephen D. Melkisethian

The post Why the #DefundDAPL movement is about more than divesting from Wall Street appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Last August, 200 people from across Oakland, California came together to envision and design a development plan for a small parcel of public land. For months leading up to that day, community members and neighborhood coalitions had been organizing against a controversial – and possibly illegal – plan to develop a luxury high-rise apartment complex on land owned by the City of Oakland, in a neighborhood where 75% of residents are low or very-low income and 75% are renters. Having succeeded in pressuring the City to back out of the initially proposed deal with UrbanCore Development through creative direct action and sophisticated community organizing, organizers with the E12th St Coalition wanted to create a visionary community-driven alternative – and the E12th WishList People’s Planning Forum was convened. On a sunny Sunday afternoon near Oakland’s Lake Merritt, hundreds of people shared their visions for what could be done with this public land – and not a single person envisioned a market-rate housing complex on that site.

Photo by Save the E12th Parcel for the People

The result of this community planning process: The E12th St. People’s Proposal. This visionary plan, compiled by the E12 St. Coalition in partnership with nonprofit developer Satellite Affordable Housing Associates, includes a 100% affordable housing complex, a public park, commercial space for local businesses, and more. (The grassroots coalition has formally submitted the People’s Proposal to the City of Oakland for consideration and is currently competing against two other proposals, neither of which include anything close to 100% affordable housing.) All of this has been motivated by the radical idea that public land should be used for public good. Radical indeed in a region with one of the fastest increasing land values in the country.

This is just one of many hopeful stories of communities coming together to simultaneously challenge the conventional profit-driven process of economic development, and assert community-driven alternatives that do not displace existing communities. What is foundational to the call for “development without displacement” is a claim to community self-determination, that communities have both the right and the capacity to set their own priorities and pathways for creating more equitable neighborhoods. In other words, communities have the collective right to participate in the processes that shape their future, particularly those most impacted by those processes. The E12th St People’s Proposal is visionary both in what it imagines – a 100% affordable housing development in the heart of one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country – and in who it allowed to imagine and shape the development process.

At this point, there is widespread acknowledgment that the Bay Area is experiencing a housing crisis. However, proposed solutions to the crisis rarely seem to identify or address its root causes, and are most often framed in a market-vs-state binary. But what if that framework – that it will be either the market or the state that solves the housing crisis – is one of those root causes? What if communities themselves, particularly those that have been historically neglected by both the state and the market, were enabled to create their own solutions?

The initial E12 St controversy perfectly illustrates the problematic relationship between the state and the market. It was in the City’s narrow financial interest to try to sneak through a deal with a for-profit developer to build a “market-rate” high-rise apartment complex with one-bedroom apartments starting at over $3,000 per month. To put this in perspective, “market-rate” is now only affordable to household making $113,000 or more in yearly income, while the median income for the area surrounding the Eastlake neighborhood is $38,363. Particularly in a country where wealth is so unequally distributed – wealth initially accumulated through the theft of land, labor, knowledge, and natural resources of Indigenous, African, and other non-European people – the provision of a basic right such as housing should not be left solely to a system where money buys power and certain groups of people are systematically dispossessed.

The state, supposedly the counterbalance to the market, actually creates the necessary conditions for the market to operate in this way. In the case of the East 12th St Parcel, it has taken almost a year of sustained organizing, direct action, community engagement, investigative journalism, and legal analysis to even get the state to consider a proposal for affordable housing, something it is in fact required to prioritize under the Surplus Lands Act.

Perhaps it’s time we collectively acknowledge that the traditional model of profit-driven economic development tends to be part of the problem, rather than the solution. “Economic development,” writes Shawn Escoffery in the preface to the Democracy Collaborative’s recently published report Cities Building Community Wealth, “operates on an implicit assumption that everyone benefits from a city’s prosperity and economic growth. But that’s a sad fallacy.” A recent study by the Brookings Institute shows that income inequality has actually worsened in the nation’s largest 50 cities since 2012 – indicating that the wealthiest have captured most of the economic gains since the financial collapse of 2007. And, of course, even that class inequality is not evenly distributed: by at least one study, the median net worth of a white household in America today is $116,000, compared to only $1,700 for a black household.

So what might be an alternative? Stories like the East 12th Street struggle begin to point the way by demonstrating an oppositional and visionary alternative. Their actions also imply some basic questions like: What if housing was treated primarily as, well, housing, rather than an investment? What if we recognized land as a living source of common wealth rather than an abstract commodity? What if community development was actually shaped by all members of the community, not just the most privileged and most likely to profit?

One way to potentially achieve this is to manage our cities as a commons. The commons is a socio-economic system that has been implemented for millennia in societies across the globe to steward a wide variety of resources and cultures. But a commons can arise anytime a group of people decide to collectively manage an essential resource, with special regard for equitable access and long-term stewardship (to paraphrase a definition by commons scholar and activist, David Bollier). How might seeing our cities as a commons lead to more equitable forms of community development? Here are some ideas:

Land as a commons: None of us created the land beneath your feet or beneath your home. So why should certain people profit off its existence while many more are excluded from even having a place to sleep? In a land commons, the community of residents would collectively determine priorities for land use, perhaps in a process similar to the E12th WishList People’s Planning Forum. Many communities across the country are rediscovering the community land trust (CLT) as a tool for community-ownership and control of land. By separating the value of the land from the structures and activities happening on the land, a community land trust allows a community to permanently preserve the affordability of and equitable access to land for housing, urban farming, local businesses, and other community-determined uses. Originally developed by civil rights organizers and farmers in the South who were systematically denied access to land, the CLT model is again being deployed in urban communities of color as a strategy for community wealth building and resisting economic displacement.

Housing as a commons: While the CLT is one mechanism for the commons-based management of land, housing cooperatives and intentional communities are similar models for collective management of housing and living spaces. Popularly associated with hippies and other crunchy white people, housing cooperatives and intentional communities actually have a long history as tools of survival in the African-American community and many other marginalized communities. From the extensive network of low-income housing cooperatives in New York City created in the 1970s to the “Panther Pads” created by the Black Panther Party as political safe houses in the 1970s to Cooperation Jackson’s current vision of urban ecovillages, cooperatively owned and managed housing can be economically efficient, ecologically sustainable, and socially regenerative. Such an approach can help ensure that many more people are housed using existing housing stock and, as importantly, begin to recreate our relationship to houses as spaces for social and economic production, rather than financial speculation and exclusion.

Photo by Imani Khayyam.

Livelihoods as a commons: Displacement and gentrification are not simply about housing affordability. Certain communities are vulnerable to displacement because of generations of disinvestment, job discrimination, mass incarceration, educational inequality, environmental injustice, and more. In a highly monetized society, people should have a right to dignified and productive livelihoods – it’s no coincidence that both Martin Luther King, Jr and the Black Panther Party called for full employment for all people. Allowing people to both own and control their own labor, for example through worker cooperatives and multi-stakeholder cooperatives, has been shown to create more stable, dignified, and higher-paying jobs over the long-term. Furthermore, reducing income inequality is actually better for everyone, not just the poor: numerous studies have shown that life expectancy and other indicators of personal and social health is lower in societies with higher income inequality.

These are all ideas we are actively working on or thinking about at SELC. We’re also developing new ideas for cooperatively financing and managing housing and land as a commons, and creating new legal structures for the commons-based management of, well, everything. Read more about our Housing Program, Cooperative Program, and local policy work and stay tuned for more.

The commons offers a framework and a process for effectively and equitably stewarding the resources communities need to live in dignity. If we have a collective right to a resource, we should be able to participate in decisions about that resource’s use. From this perspective, all sorts of things start to look like they should be managed as commons: healthcare commons, learning commons, restorative justice commons, renewable energy commons, financial service commons, investment commons, food commons, water commons. It also happens that all of these things are being horribly mismanaged at the moment, literally putting life on earth in peril. So what about this for a radical idea: let people participate in the decisions that most directly affect their everyday lives.

Photo by Mister-Mastro

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