Category: People Helping People

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, National Conference on Media Reform, People Helping People, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , , , ,

By Shel Horowitz, GreenAndProfitable.com

Michael Copps: There’s no larger question in the US right now than how do we get the media back?

We started out in 2002, 03, opposing Michael Powell’s plan to loosen media ownership rules. I said the people have a real interest in this, and thanks to FreePress and other groups, three million people contacted the FCC. We’ve conducted some good holding actions, but it’s time to win the battle.

The real question is, shouldn’t consumers be deciding where they want to go and what they want to do online, and that’s what Net Neutrality is about.

We’ve lost a lot of public interest territory over the years, and you don’t get that back an inch at a time.

How do we ensure that everyone has access to broadband? It’s the future of democracy. The facts are gone; the investigative journalism is gone. Thousands of journalists no longer walk the beat. How many facts are buried so deep that the few journalists left can’t find them? Let’s have the data. I have watched the evisceration of the public interest all of these years. I think it’s the most important issue facing the country. The resolution of all of those other issues rides on how they are depicted by the media—and if the facts are told to the American people so they can make a decision. You can’t get that from the starvation diet, the journalism lite that we get from the traditional newsrooms now.

We should bring back a licensing regimen where the public interest is actually included. Where the public interest controls. Where the localism, the news of our various communities, is actually covered. Where minorities are not caricatured but their real issues are covered. Where we can say, “if you’re not serving your community, we’ll take that license back and give it to someone who will.”

Citizen action can still work. Very few people hold outrageous amounts of power, and control what goes on in this country. But citizen action can still make a difference. Look at women’s rights, labor, minority rights, they all had uphill fight, but they all persevered. It never happens easily. We should rededicate and recommit ourselves, and we can make some real down payments on media democracy in the months ahead. And then we can get real progress in getting media that is of and by and for the people.

 

Mignon Clyburn (former South Carolina State Commissioner and activist)

You reaffirm to me how important it is to fight for parity when I put my head on the chopping block. Remember what people were doing 10 years ago while waiting for flights? Reading a book or staring at the ceiling? Now they’re playing a game with a friend in New Zealand, tweeting, texting, IMing. Count the number of wireless activities next time. I hear about the fast approaching mobile TV and mobile broadband. Wireless availability and ease of use is no longer a fun novelty. It’s an essential part of everyday routines. An overwhelming majority would say they couldn’t live without their cell phones. This is especially true in lower income communities. It may be far more economical to communicate in short text messages than taking up too many voice minutes. Wireless is becoming the choice for students, under 30, families with small discretionary incomes. They are relying on them to find bus arrival times and weather forecasts, and to mange  smoother ways of living. But this ease that many of us take for granted is at risk, for others.

1 in 4 households rely solely on wireless. They’re cutting costs and cutting the cord. Data apps on wireless are far more common in Afro-American and Latino communities, and they take advantage of a much wider array of the data than their white counterparts.

And we must be mindful of the effects of this on the ecosystem. If the costs become prohibitive, we have failed.

Small businesses pay significantly more per user (than big) for wireless.

I am an unlikely candidate for this job.  A non-lawyer from a small, poor, “interesting” state. But I am a person who saw the disconnects, the inequities from the day she was born that minimize the potential in her communities. I know that these technologies, the potential for unlocking the spirit and the hope and desires and the excellence in all of us—we have that potential as commissioners, and you have the potential to not let us get away with anything less than our best.

Response to government shutdown:
Copps: we’re wasting all this time on the high noon shootout when there are all these bigger issues.

Clyburn: A lessons we learned in our household that we can disagree without being disagreeable. We don’t see that in our public spaces and places, and because of that, we’re unable and unwilling to compromise.

Oversight of broadband

Clyburn: We are to ensure a robust telecommunications industry. People expect that when they sign up for a service, that they can access information. We established high-level rules to do just that. They’re not onerous rules. I am comfortable with that direction. At the end of the day, we talk about this consolidation. The majority of Americans have two or fewer Internet providers, and that does not stimulate competition. I’m a substitute for competition.

Copps: Internet users should be very worried, because the Net Neutrality we passed is a partial measure. It does not include wireless telecom and there’s the potential for companies to do mischief. Long-term, we should be more worried. Every new telecom technology starts out as the dawn of an era of openness and freedom, but control gets tighter and tighter. That’s the danger to the future of the Internet, probably the most liberating technology since the printing press, and it’s going down the same road as the rest. We’re talking about keeping this technology free, and not letting a few telecoms put up a toll booth. Of course we have authority to do this. The telecoms convinced previous FCCs to call it information services (not regulatable).

State regulators vs. municipal

Clyburn: There are significant donut holes in this nation. 95% has high-speed access, but that means 14-24 MILLION have no broadband access available. The companies say the economic case can’t be made. So cities and towns should have the flexibility to wire those communities.

Copps: We have a spectrum shortage, we need more for wireless. But that should not translate into taking it from broadcast. We have a democracy crisis in large pat due to the state of our media. Let’s look at how broadcasters are using the people’s spectrum. There’s room for both wireless and broadcast.

What would it take for ATT/TMobile merger to be in the public interest?

Copps: A hell of a lot more than I’ve seen before. We have to say, what about competition? What they’re looking for is deregulated monopoly and I hope that’s not the course of American history.

Clyburn: I look at broadband access as a human rights issue. This is the last opportunity—the TV airwaves are unaffordable and almost unreachable. Those traditional platforms are too expensive. If we let this go, what do we have left? It is the pathway forward.

Copps: I think you can justify access to broadband as a civil right very easily. You’re not going to be a young person who can’t get a job because you can’t apply online. You can’t monitor your kids’ learning, your health. We’re 15th or 20th in the world, and that means all these kids are growing up without that opportunity. You think we’ve got outsourcing now…

License renewals:

We used to have 14 guidelines. I don’t think we need to have that many, but you need an honest-to-god licensing system. I’d have the renewals every three years, and you make a judgment about whether the station is serving the public. And if not, you put them on probation for a year or two, and if not, plenty of other people would like to have access to bandwidth.

Diversity:

Copps: Diversity is one of our mandates, but station ownership doesn’t reflect that diversity. We’ve had a committee that has proposed 70-75 measures we could take. I’ve proposed that we take one of them up each month.

Free Expression:

Clyburn: We have to make space for viewpoints we disagree with. But if we diversify, people have more venues to get their voices across. They get drowned out and we cannot be satisfied with that. We have to push this agency and our lawmakers to be creative thinkers. And the advertisers will follow, and the voices we have problems with become less popular. Speak with your clickers and those voices will be gone.

Copps: I’d like to see the FCC require full disclosure on political advertisements. You hear, “brought to you by Citizens for Spacious Skies and Amber Waves of Grain,” and you don’t know it’s a chemical company.

The FCC is one of many agencies with a revolving door. We should say, for x number of years [former regulators can’t work as industry lobbyists]. It’s the crushing influence of money in Washington.

Clyburn: Reaffirmations that public-private partnerships are the way to go. I am not satisfied about our diversity initiatives. I don’t hear enough southern accents. [race, gender]. The revolving door works both ways. I’m the beneficiary of the expertise of my staffer on mergers, from the outside.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, media-general, People Helping People Tagged with , ,

Re-examining the “Media Ecosystem”: Reflections on the National Conference on Media Reform #NCMR11

By Shel Horowitz, GreenAndProfitable.com

 

At the fifth National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR) since 2003, the media landscape was repeatedly described as a rapidly evolving ecosystem—a metaphor I don’t remember at the two previous conferences I attended, in 2005 and 2008.

Looking at the mainstream media, the ecosystem is in tough shape. Massive cutbacks to news resources, a crippling of expensive investigative reporting at the expense of infotainment, rapid dropoffs in newspaper subscribership and ad revenues, and a lot of journalists working for free or almost free are some of the outcomes of massive consolidation and deregulation over the past 30 years or so—combined by a major rightward shift in the politics of media owners that is reflected in the way stories are covered, or if they’re covered at all.

Yes, the Internet is partly responsible. Many people seek out alternative news channels from their local bloggers on up to international outlets like the UK Guardian and Al Jazeera. And people under 30, growing up with computers in the home, never got into the habit of curling up with the morning paper over breakfast. And yes, Craigslist has hurt newspaper classified sections, hard.

But the Internet also made possible the incredible renaissance of alternate media. Anyone can be a publisher or a journalist now, and hundreds of thousands have done so. Many have built strong communities across geographical or interest-group commonalities.

And the collapse of mainstream news was predicted decades ago by George Orwell and Ray Bradbury, among others. The infotainment focus of broadcasters bringing technology to bear in order to dumb down popular culture was clearly laid out in their books, 1984 (published in the 1940s) and Fahrenheit 451 (1950s). The Internet was not even a dream yet.

Although I didn’t go with a press pass this time, I did take extensive notes. Over the next few weeks, I’ll try to pull out some highlights and share them

Shel Horowitz’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. He writes the Green And Profitable and Green And Practical monthly columns, https://greenandprofitable.com. Permission granted to reprint this post as long as this bio is included and any edits are approved by the author.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I have lived in a housing project of 55,000 people in New York City—so insignificant in the city’s eyes that we didn’t even have a subway stop; we had to bus or walk a mile to one of two different trains, one of which could have easily been extended a mile over Interstate 95. In all, I lived in New York City for about 20 years, including birth to 16. In my early 20s, I lived in four of the five boroughs: Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.

At the other extreme, for the past 12+ years, I’ve lived on a working farm in a village of about 200 within Hadley, Massachusetts—a town of 4753 people—part of Hampshire County, whose 20 “cities” and towns within 545 square miles increased over the past decade to 152,251. (City, as Massachusetts defines it, refers to a municipality administered by a mayor and council rather than Selectboard and Town Meeting, and has nothing to do with population.) And I actually serve on an official town land-use committee, where we wrestle constantly with shaping the future of our town.

New York City’s five densely populated boroughs comprise just under 305 square miles, and hold 8,391,881 residents. You could move NYC to my county and still have almost half the land area left —maybe to grow enough food for all those residents. My county has 1/55 as many people as NYC, spread out over 1.78 times as much land.

Between the time I first lived outside of New York, in 1973, and settled in Hampshire County, in 1981, I lived in various cities and towns ranging from under 5000 to 1,688,210. All of these communities can offer sustainability wisdom from which other places can learn—either by doing it right, or by doing it wrong (so much so that I could write a book on this—maybe I will, some day). Here are a few of the insights:

  • Vibrant neighborhoods require mixed use. In every city I’ve ever lived in, the exciting neighborhoods are those where people live, work, play, and shop in close proximity. The best US examples I know are Northampton and Amherst, MA, New York’s Upper West Side and Park Slope, and the Fox Point area of Providence. Much of Europe uses this model, and European cities are highly livable.
  • Car-centered cultures adversely affect quality of life. Strong mass transit usually enhances it. In New York City (where a car is a liability), commuting time on public transit is productive. People read, write, get through their e-mail, walk a few blocks to their destination, and don’t feel like they’ve wasted the time. Sometimes they even build friendships with the people they see every day on their commute. In Hadley, the shopping district is suburban-style, with big malls and strip malls along a state highway. Almost no one lives on that road, and it’s not a place for cultural events, other than movies. While the largest food stores actually do provide chances to hang out a bit with neighbors (all arriving in separate cars), having a brief chat with an acquaintance you run into in the produce aisle is not the same kind of community building as you can get in a cafe or a bookstore.
  • A corollary: planning must take into account the existing transportation patterns. Mass-transit thinking can’t just be grafted onto a car-oriented culture, and car-oriented thinking won’t work in crowded urban areas. Those patterns can change over time, but it’s a slow process.
  • A real community transcends ethnic and cultural differences. My current neighborhood of Hockanum  Village has a number of families that have been on the same land for 200 years or more. Some of them trace their lineage to the Mayflower. The whole neighborhood gets together every year for a Christmas party that attracts former residents from as far as Florida, and sometimes a summer picnic along the river. A few neighbors gather at the local coffee shop for breakfast once a week. I could knock on any door in the neighborhood with a request, and people would try to help me.
  • Cities lend themselves well to centralized renewable energy collection—but this potential to make a big difference in climate change and oil dependency has barely been tapped. Instead, many centrally heated buildings in New York are overheated to the point where tenants need to open windows on cold winter days, and that’s crazy.
  • Cities could supply a significant portion of their own food, but again, this potential is not tapped much.
  • Farmers and gardeners understand the food cycle. They know what it’s like to grow food for themselves, their families, and their livestock. They’ve seen crop failure. They pay close attention to weather patterns. Localism is not a theoretical construct; it’s an everyday reality.
  • Homeowners and farmers notice details and patterns, so, for instance, they anticipate and address maintenance issues before they become failures. They don’t expect anyone else to do things for them, though they might ask for help on a big project. Tenants (especially in urban areas) are much less likely to have this attitude.
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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with

I received a notice today about a photo exhibit of Albanian Muslim rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust—taken by a Jewish photographer, Norman H. Gershman. This rescue took place while the country was under Nazi occupation:

When Hitler’s troops began invading the Balkan States in the early 1940s, Muslims across Albania took an estimated 2,000 Jewish refugees into their homes en masse and welcomed them not as refugees, but as guests.  They disguised these Jews as Muslims, took them to mosque, called them Muslim names, gave them Muslim passports, hid them when they needed to, and then ferried them to inaccessible mountain hamlets.  “In fact, Albania is the only Nazi-occupied country that sheltered Jews,” says Gershman.  The Jewish population in Albania grew by ten-fold during World War II, and it became the only country in occupied Europe to have more Jews at the end of the war than at the beginning.  Records from the International School for Holocaust Studies show that not one Albanian Jew or any of the other thousands of refugees were given up to the Nazis by Albanian Muslims.  “They did this in the name of their religion,” Gershman said.  “They absolutely had no prejudice what so ever.”

If I can manage to get to NYC before January 29, I am so there! I see two key takeaways in this story:

1. Even in the face of unspeakable evil, there will be people who do the right thing, even at great personal risk.

2. This is one of many pieces of historical evidence that Jews and Muslims can coexist, yet another reason to disbelieve the racists on both sides who say such a thing is impossible.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

Nuclear Information and Resource Service reports in a recent newsletter that Congress received 15,000 letters and countless phone calls opposing the inclusion of $8 billion in bailouts (a/k/a “loan guarantees”) for new nuclear plant construction—and that the final interim funding bill to keep the government running did NOT include this boondoggle. The item is not on the NIRS website but you can find the entire newsletter reprinted here.

In other words, the power of an organized populace resulted in a victory, something that’s getting less frequent all the time but is still very much possible. Let’s hope for many more in the coming year.

Do not let anyone try to tell you that nuclear fission is in any way green. It’s an environmental disaster under the best of circumstances, and at its worst, it could make the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico look like a spilled cup of coffee. Here’s a post I wrote some time back that gives some among many reasons to oppose nuclear power (scroll past the feed from this blog).

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Demographics/Psychographics, Frugality/Frugal Fun, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media

flashmob:“a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual act for a brief time, then disperse.” (Wikipedia)

For the year or so that I’ve been watching the occasional video of flashmobs gathering in public places to perform, I’ve wished I could be part of one. But I didn’t wish strongly enough to organize one.

All the videos I’ve been sent took places in major cities like Amsterdam and Philadelphia. I live in a very rural area whose biggest city (Springfield, MA) has a population of only 155,629. And yet, to make a flashmob, you only need a dozen or so people.

I think a lot of the allure of flashmobs is that for the most part, we live in a society where entertainment is provided, prepackaged. Until 1877 when Edison invented the phonograph, if you wanted to hear music, you gathered some friends with instruments and songbooks and made some. If you wanted a theater experience, you played charades. Public concerts outside of major cities were few and far between. Now, every tiny town has live music 20 or 30 nights a year, and many have music every weekend night all year long. We are, for the most part, deprived of the opportunity to not only make our own entertainment but perform it for others. The flashmob at the Holyoke Mall had one day’s notice, no rehearsal. Singers were to wear a solid color indicating their part (my alto wife wore green, other parts wore red or white)—and of course, many people who just happened to be there joined in the singing.

Thursday, I received an e-mail from the organizer of a local folk music sing-along: a flashmob would gather the following day to sing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus at the food court of the largest shopping mall near us, the Holyoke Mall (halfway between our house and Springfield, in a town of 40,005). On a Friday night just before Christmas, it would certainly have an audience. Better still, it was organized by the local opera company; the singing would be worth hearing.

The next morning, my wife, D. Dina Friedman, who sings in a community chorus, got an e-mail about the event that went out to all the chorus members. This was looking better and better. And the timing was perfect; we could drop our son off for the final rehearsal of his school’s winter show, go sing, and be back at school in plenty of time to watch him perform.

The singing was magical. Sound coming from every corner of the large and crowded food court, and a few stunningly stellar voices rising above the crowd. It reminded me of the time more than 30 years ago that I happened to be out on a lawn at my college while the chorus was rehearsing for their upcoming tour, and they invited me to stand within their circle and be surrounded by beautiful sound.

What amazed me the most, though, was not the event, but the aftermath. By the time we returned home after Rafael’s show, when I went to post something on Twitter, I found links to at least two different videos, including this very high quality one posted on the Springfield newspaper’s site.

I sent the link around, and got a couple of “wish I was there” or “how did you find out?” responses. And then last night, I went to a different performance, more than 40 miles away from the shopping mall at a retreat center in a really remote area (it happens to be the most beautiful house I know, one I love to visit for this annual storytelling concert)—and at intermission, I heard people talking about the flashmob and wishing they had known ahead.

In other words, even without a big-city backdrop, this flashmob had an impact well beyond the borders of the food court. E-mail made the event possible; social media gave it permanent life. “And I say to myself/What a wonderful world.”

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice

Today is another Blog Action Day for social justice, and today’s topic is water. My slant on this, as someone who writes about environmental issues, is that access to clean, safe water is both an environmental and a justice issue. And that the easiest way to promote safe, clean water around the world is for us resource hogs in the developed countries to be much more careful not to squander the good water we are privileged to have.

Here are some facts provided by Blog Action Day (emphasis added):

1.      Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Unclean drinking water can incubate some pretty scary diseases, like E. coli, salmonella, cholera and hepatitis A. Given that bouquet of bacteria, it’s no surprise that water, or rather lack thereof, causes 42,000 deaths each week.

2.      More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet. Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to toilets. This means that sewage spills into rivers and streams, contaminating drinking water and causing disease.

3.      Every day, women and children in Africa walk a combined total of 109 million hours to get water. They do this while carrying cisterns weighing around 40 pounds when filled in order to gather water that, in many cases, is still polluted. Aside from putting a great deal of strain on their bodies, walking such long distances keeps children out of school and women away from other endeavors that can help improve the quality of life in their communities.

4.      It takes 6.3 gallons of water to produce just one hamburger. That 6.3 gallons covers everything from watering the wheat for the bun and providing water for the cow to cooking the patty and baking the bun. And that’s just one meal! It would take over 184 billion gallons of water to make just one hamburger for every person in the United States.

5.      The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world. From showering and washing our hands to watering our lawns and washing our cars, Americans use a lot of water. To put things into perspective, the average five-minute shower will use about 10 gallons of water. Now imagine using that same amount to bathe, wash your clothes, cook your meals and quench your thirst.

So…not to leave you sunk, here are a few easy and cheap/free ways to use less water:

Don’t run the water unnecessarily! Whether washing dishes or brushing your teeth, think about low-water methods. For those dishes,  clean the insides with a
soapy sponge and then only turn on the water (at modest force) to
rinse. For tooth brushing, wet the toothbrush, turn off the faucet, brush, wet again to rinse–you’ll use teaspoons instead of gallons.

Unbottle yourself. Save bottled water for places where tap water is not safe to drink. Bottling water consumes vast amounts of water (several times what’s actually in the bottle), energy, and plastic (much of which ends up in landfills). And lots of bottled water is nothing more than expensive public water supply water anyway. In much of the developed world, filtered tap water tastes as good as many bottled brands and has a far lower environmental and financial footprint.

Eat less (or no) meat–see #4, above. As a 37-year vegetarian, I can tell you that the wonderful cuisines of the world opened up to me when I stopped eating meat. I eat healthy, tasty, nutritious food, and I don’t miss the stuff I used to eat.

Sign the Blog Action Day UN Water Rights Petition:

 

(For more water saving tips, please see my e-book Painless Green: 110 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle.)

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People Tagged with , , ,

Last night, the local organizer for the Transition Towns movement finally got around to doing one in my town. We were a small group including several of the “usual suspects” (old friends from previous organizing campaigns) as well as a handful of others I didn’t know–with a lot of good ideas.

Transition towns organizing involves taking steps to get society off fossil and nuclear fuels, and building community in the process. It’s very much directed by the people who participate, so if a few people want to form a sewing circle to make cloth totes residents can bring to the market, or plant trees, or insulate houses, or work with local government to install traffic calming, or whatever—they do it. And it’s nice and small and manageable, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The movement started as an outgrowth of the permaculture movement in Kinsale, Ireland and Totnes, UK, and has spread widely.

Now, with a few years under its belt, it may be one of our best hopes for avoiding catastrophic climate change (on which the window is getting smaller) and the great hardship of massive price shocks on all the things based in fossil fuels—which is pretty much everything.

Resources:
Transition Towns organizing site for the US
The “get moving” page on the international website (which I found after getting distracted by some wonderful storytelling about live in past generations in a British village
The simple little WordPress site for Transition in my own community of Hadley, Massachusetts

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

There is definitely something to all this Law of Attraction stuff. Consider this: For the past few months, I’ve been putting out a lot of energy around four things:
1. Expanding the public speaking portion of my business
2. Pitching myself as a syndicated columnist writing on Green business (working a long-term plan)
3. Founding the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers
4. Working with unpublished writers to help them become well-published and well-marketed authors

Here’s some of what happened today:

  • While listening to a teleseminar with a syndicated columnist, I asked a question–and he offered to give me contacts at his syndicate
  • Got interviewed for a radio show and book about public speaking—and the interviewer may become a book publishing consulting client…and spent a half-hour getting acquainted with another marketing consultant, and he too is thinking of doing a book and letting me help
  • I did a little Green business of my own today, selling five pounds of surplus organic hot peppers from our garden to our neighbors’ farmstand (I had more to sell, but that was what I could easily carry on my bike)—it’s such a hoot for me as a New York City native to sell farm vegetables to my neighbors, whose family has been farming this land since 1806
  • Responded to a HARO query from a reporter, and the reporter wrote back that instead of just using my short quote, would I be interested in writing a regular column?
  • Received an invitation to speak at a high-level international conference in January, and a contract from a different organization for a talk I’m doing in December
  • Had a brief teleconference with a subset of the IAECM Steering Committee. I continue to be so impressed with the creative thinking of this talented group.
  • And still managed to get out and vote early (I was #16, so I could get the car back in time for my son to drive to school)…get several hours of billable work done…get in a lovely hike.

    It’s feeling like a pretty abundant day :-). I’ll even forgive the mice for chewing up the spout to our can of Chinese sesame oil, forcing me to change my dinner plans. (I went for Italian instead, and it was delicious. Guess the mice don’t like or haven’t discovered the olive oil.) I like it that I’m putting energy out on these four things, and permutations of those four are coming back to me.

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