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.

While most post-election commentary is focused on Trump and the political realignment in Washington, I think the bigger stories are the tectonic shifts in the neoliberal political economy and representative democracy itself.  Both are imploding.  Both are losing credibility as vehicles for human governance and betterment. And yet the lineaments of a new order – a robust realm of social innovation relatively unknown to mainstream politics – remains out of focus.

The election of a narcissistic, authoritarian bigot with no experience in politics and no serious ideas about how to solve the country’s problems, reveals the dysfunctions of the US constitutional system and its two major political parties. The rollicking, vituperative campaigns made for blockbuster TV ratings, but they were a farce in terms of democratic deliberation and governance.

And how could it be otherwise?  The venerable system devised by powdered-wig elites in the late 18th century has been eclipsed by the realities of the 21st century.  Politics is now a self-referential bubble of mass-media spectacle and social media.  As a branch of the entertainment world, it is a highly confected virtual space that caters more to emotional hot buttons and prejudices than rational deliberation or meaningful human dialogue.

Parties can’t help but regard this bizarre, modernist fun house as the real venue for getting and retaining power; solving real problems or fostering real democratic participation is a nostalgic fantasy.  In hindsight, it now seems utterly logical that an outrageous former reality-show star could prevail in this arena – much as Ronald Reagan’s long experience in Hollywood was essential to his success in politics. Let’s not pretend that this is “democracy.” It’s a Roman circus.

Besides her own limitations, Hillary Clinton had the misfortune of trying to be a successor to Barack Obama, who famously rode to office by promising change you can believe in.  Once elected, Obama quickly reverted to the same old neoliberal catechisms of his predecessor, George W. Bush, along with his vile military and anti-terrorism policies.

To be sure, Obama was stymied by obstructionist and racist Republicans who sought to delegitimize his very presidency and limited his leadership.  Still, Obama did not show much leadership in fighting income inequality, climate change, financial industry abuses and socially and environmentally harmful trade treaties.  Once he had accepted the neoliberal economic paradigm, the cake was mostly baked and he had few effective, practical solutions to offer.

Eight years later, Clinton in effect promised more of the same – incremental reforms.  She rejected the Bernie Sanders insurgency as too unrealistic and naïve.  Meanwhile the Democratic National Committee, working closely with Clinton, quietly sought to stymie Bernie’s amazing campaign through all sorts of offstage interventions.  Clinton refused to recognize the need for system-change that had lifted Sanders’ campaign from out of nowhere.  With Sanders gone, Trump skillfully exploited the populist void in the presidential campaign despite his singular lack of details for “making America great again.”

Even though Republicans now dominate Washington politics, both parties are now shattered. Trump is a party of one with no coherent political philosophy or reliable allegiances beyond himself. The Republicans still have many deep and unresolved divisions among its factions (business, evangelicals, working class).  And the Democratic Party is still in thrall to an Old Guard that still refuses to entertain more progressive or populist ideas, let alone explore post-neoliberal politics, post-growth possibilities.

Clinton’s defeat is more than a defeat for a battle-scarred political figure with too much baggage.  It is a rejection of the neoliberal vision of humane capitalism (sic) that a long line of Democrats has unsuccessfully peddled (Carter, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, Clinton).

To be sure, Trump offers no serious ideas for ameliorating the problems of laid-off workers and Midwestern towns abandoned by industry.  But even his simplistic blather sounds more committed than the glittering empty promises that Obama and Clinton made for economic growth, trade treaties, high technology, education and job retraining as ways to restore prosperity.

They won’t and they haven’t.  That’s because the structural demands of capital have overwhelmed the capacity of economic and social policy to give people decent, stable lives.  We’ve already experienced the failures of trickle-down economics. Yet this has remained the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s economic vision.

And how credible can these tired traditional promises be in any case?  Both Trump and Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren on the sidelines) were borne aloft by their cries that the system is rigged.  Obama confirmed this fact by failing to prosecute Wall Street from its colossal crimes.  He secured only modest legislative reforms of the financial sector and resisted calls for a consumer financial watchdog.  Clinton, who made dozens of speeches to Wall Street firms for $250,000 apiece, was hardly a credible champion of change.

So now we enter uncharted territory. The two US parties are fractured and in disarray. The electoral process is incapable of speaking seriously to urgent needs, from inequality and race to climate change and the environment. The governance process is beset by ideological gridlock, distrust and scorched-earth partisanship. The news media loves ratings-boosting spectacle more than serious journalism or a defense of democratic institutions. And the neoliberal political agenda as a consensus framework for human betterment is no longer credible, not just in the US but in Europe and beyond.

I think we stand on the threshold of a much larger discussion about new socio-economic frameworks for meeting needs and new political systems for governing ourselves.  I see great promise in commons providing new modes of democratic governance and self-organization – at scales allowing for genuine participation, authority and responsibility.  Orchestrating a state/commons rapprochement may be the hard part, at least initially, but this is a fruitful line of innovation, especially at the city level.

This discussion is inescapable because 1) all sorts of self-organized commons are growing in scale and sophistication around the world, if only because they meet many needs more effectively than either markets or government; and 2) existing political structures – the major parties, the nation-state and its bureaucracies, many conventional markets, and the financial industry allied with the state – are incapable of meeting the structural challenges we face.  They are too invested in the old, dysfunctional ways of doing things.

The tension between the old and the new will only intensify as the Internet empowers people to self-organize themselves outside of conventional institutions.  When will traditional government start to partner with and support commons as vehicles for the common good, rather than blindly shoveling taxpayer money and legal privileges to support a broken economic/political system?  We need to discuss how to move beyond a political economy that is structurally predisposed to be extractive, predatory, ecologically destructive and inequitable in allocating benefits.

If Trump’s campaign rhetoric is any indication, we will likely have to endure four years of monstrous, divisive social upheaval.  We may also suffer from unprecedented attacks on cherished democratic institutions and traditions.  Already, two days after the election, white supremacist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic acts of intimidation that invoke Trump are surging.  Immigrants fearful of deportation and ethnic minorities are taking to the streets in protest.

I can only hope that the tumultuous times ahead may spur commoners to accelerate their many projects – one by one, region by region, and through a web of federated relationships.  We will need courage, ingenuity, resolve and mutual support to develop the structural transformations that we so desperately need.

Photo by mal3k

The post A Moment That Illuminates Our Structural Challenges appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For lots of us users, it’s a different story. Twitter is pretty great. We reporters rely on its instant access to the chatter of the world more than we like to admit. The running commentary of friends and celebrities has turned horrible presidential debates and State of the Unions into Mystery Science Theater 3000. And the platform nurtures communities fighting for justice; historian Anthea Butler has argued, for instance, that Black Twitter has come to inherit the mantle of the Black Church. It also delivers us frequent access to Donald Trump’s id, if we want.

The trouble is, Wall Street’s economy has become Twitter’s economy, even if Wall Street’s view of the platform’s usefulness isn’t necessarily our view. But what if we changed Twitter’s economy? What if users were to band together and buy Twitter for themselves?

This is the kind of thinking at work in the growing movement for platform cooperativism – a series of experiments in shared ownership and governance for online platforms. But it’s an old idea, too. When I mentioned a Twitter buyout to co-op and crowdfunding veteran Danny Spitzberg, he reminded me of the Green Bay Packers. Have you ever wondered why the small-ish city of Green Bay has held on to its really good football team? It’s because, rather than being traded around by billionaires, the team started selling shares to its fans, starting in 1923. That has resulted in sold-out games, affordable ticket prices, tasteful stadium advertising, and an all-around successful, sustainable business model for generations.

I’m sure many of us have ideas about how we could make Twitter meet our needs better. One suggestion that came my way: “actually moderating threats and hatespeech.” But what would it take to put Twitter in the hands of those who rely on it most?

Armin Steuernagel, founder and managing partner at the innovative new investment firm Purpose Fund, suggested to me that it could go down this way: assemble a company and invite investment for shares that grant dividend rights, but not voting; gather about 20% of the funds needed for the buyout, then borrow the rest, and buy. As for the voting rights, they’d be distributed according to a “ladder of engagement,” including investors and general users, but allocating more control to those who contribute the most value to the platform, such as employees and the most active users. Finally, there could be a few “golden shares” with veto rights, perhaps controlled by a foundation representing all users.

It’s a long-shot, Steuernagel admits, but he points out that this kind of thing recently worked with Prokon, a sizable wind-power company that escaped bankruptcy and buyout by converting to a cooperative.

Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar and author of Peers Inc, wonders whether Twitter’s current leaders could play a role. “Could existing employees (or founders) who believe in such a purchase,” she wrote in an email, “be willing to roll-over some of their stock into the new ownership structure?” We might also need to ask this Saudi prince.

Another suggestion comes from Tom McDonough, a blogger with a history in capital markets, who proposes that less than 1% of users – no small number, at three million – could each buy $2,300 worth of shares and vote as a bloc for a transition to cooperative ownership. They’d then be paid back through the transition process, partly through a membership fee that could average to $10 each year. Rather than giving the company a blank check to sell your data, would you pay a co-ownership fee?

There are other possibilities as well. Using the Jobs Act, which now allows equity crowdfunding, a buyout could be funded with small investments from millions of people. Even the US government could step in, recognizing Twitter as a public utility and helping to orchestrate the conversion – just as it has in financing rural electric co-ops since the 1930s, which have become vehicles for broadband expansion today.

Twitter’s impending transition need not be, for most of us, merely a time to wait and see. It can be a chance for us to discuss, scheme, and organize. What would be an appropriate ownership design for the Twitter we know and love, and how do we get it there? How can we make sure that the future of the company serves those who depend on it most, who most want see it succeed culturally, technologically, and financially? This could be a chance to make the company better reflect the commons and the community that we have built with its product.

Republished from The Guardian

Photo by eldh

The post Here’s my plan to save Twitter: let’s buy it appeared first on P2P Foundation.