by Jim Tarbell

It is going to be a busy spring for the Grassroots Institute in Mendocino County, California. We are working toward introducing our solidarity economy mapping project to the public. This interactive, online map, detailing the Economy for Our Common Good in Mendocino County, features the business, non-profit, government and citizens groups that are already at work supporting a local economy that works for both people and planet. We are also planning how we can best introduce this mapping tool into neighboring counties.  In order to accomplish our first goal we are finalizing the data on over five dozen organizations that will be on the initial map. That is only a small portion of the over 200 organizations that have been nominated to be on the map. Adding and updating the map will be an on-going, ever-changing process.

In order to share this process with citizens and groups across the country we are finishing up a study guide on the year-and-a-half experience of creating the map. We will put that up on our website at grassroots-institute.org along with a link to the map, a sample video of the interviewing process for map-worthy organizations, and information on two upcoming events where we will be introducing the Economy for our Common Good mapping project and discussing how to incorporate more geography and data.

The first event will be the conference on "Post Capitalism: Building the Solidarity Economy" at Humboldt State University in Arcata CA on April 26 and 27. Emily Kawano, the founder of the US Solidarity Economy Network and our adviser on our mapping project, will be a keynote speaker at that conference. The Grassroots Institute will also present a workshop to help communities map their local solidarity economy that is already in existence.

Then Emily Kawano is coming down to Mendocino County for the grand public presentation of our map and all the organizations on it that are building an economy for the common good.  We'll also be holding a roundtable community discussion on building co-ops and collectives in Mendocino County. We are excited to be able to bring the diversity and vitality of our local solidarity economy into clearer view for Mendocino residents, and we hope that what we've done will be an inspiration to activists in other parts of the country to do the same where they are.

Jim Tarbell is editor of the Alliance journal, "Justice Rising: Grassroots Solutions to Corporate Power," a former host of "Corporations and Democracy" and a facilitator and instructor at the Grassroots Institute.

Town meeting season in Maine got off to a great start for Local Food RULES! Four towns passed the ordinance in just one week--Starks, Jonesport, Westmanland, and Parkman. Montville soon followed, raising the number of towns voting to protect local food to 29, with great potential for many more.

These latest five towns are in five different counties, so this is not a case of near-by towns playing follow the leader. Campaign organizers are hoping to pass ordinances in clusters of towns, however, by adding a section to the model Local Food and Community Self-Governance ordinance language titled “Mutual Recognition and Inter-Municipal Government Collaboration,” allowing food producers in one ordinance town to operate in others as well. Supporters hope to see some creative ideas coming out of this.

These town-level victories are especially sweet after last year's fight to retain most provisions of the Maine Food Sovereignty Act, a state bill that was passed and signed into law but then came under criticism by the USDA. “Getting to this place took a great deal of work with our allies to write an amendment to the Maine Food Sovereignty Act that would satisfy the USDA’s objections and still give us most of what we wanted,” said Bonnie Preston, Local Food RULES! Organizer and Alliance co-Vice Chair. “We succeeded! The Dept. of Agriculture and their lobbyist friends were shocked when the legislature voted for our amendment and not theirs, which had managed to remove all food from the Food Sovereignty Act. Once that was done, we had to work even harder to revise the LFCSGO to incorporate the changes in the law, but we got that done, too.”

News about the ordinance is also spreading thanks to Richard King, who homesteads with his wife Maria and who introduced the ordinance to his town in 2016. He has updated the website with a map of all the towns that have passed the ordinance, color-coded for dates, and more helpful material is on the way.

The campaign also has an ally in Maine's Granges. “The first one we visited was in Madison, a town that passed the ordinance in 2016,” Bonnie noted. “We learned that they had a farmers’ market that does not require venders to be licensed, and they were happy with the fact that they therefore had 'poor people buying from poor farmers,' a local economy that works well in very rural areas. No $6.00 lattes at that market!

“One person who attended the meeting was a selectman from a near-by town who is a lawyer, and he came in very skeptical about the ordinance, and left eager to pass it in his town, and happy to have us refer towns with questions about legal issues to him. He is truly one of our most valuable supporters.”

The Local Food RULES! Campaign is making great progress in Maine, but to change the way we do agriculture in this country, more towns and states must be involved. They are beginning to reach out to inform more people about this work; the more places that pass the ordinance, the more successful we will all be. What is now being called regenerative agriculture must take over from the industrial model. It will have huge benefits for the health of people, animals, and the environment.

The Alliance's three sponsored campaigns for public banks—the DC Public Banking Center, the Portland Public Banking Alliance, and Hub Public Banking—made progress this winter on democratizing finance in their cities and state.

In Washington, the DC Public Banking Center is keeping an eye on the request for proposals process for the city's public bank feasibility study, as well as continuing to reach out to constituents through a recent forum on “Banking for the Public Good, Not Private Profit.” The forum participants, including Alliance co-Vice chair Ruth Caplan, looked at what a public bank could do for Washington, the ethical concerns around the business practices of large banks, especially Wells Fargo, and the potential impact of a proposed revolving loan fund for environmental projects.

In Portland, public banking advocates have met with city council candidates and expect to have a majority on the five-person council who are friendly to the idea of a public municipal bank.

In Massachusetts, a bill to create a state infrastructure bank has been moved from the legislature's joint committee on Small Businesses to the committee on Financial Services, and advocates are mustering support for it from mayors, town managers, advocacy groups and citizens. Since the Finance committee's deadline for either moving bills to Ways and Means or asking for an extension on a decision is this week, proponents should know soon whether their bill has a chance of passage this term. 

The Alliance's campaigns were also part of the discussion at a recent strategy meeting on public banking, organized by the Public Banking Institute, which brought advocates from across the country together in Colorado. The vitality of many of these new campaigns is inspiring, especially those that have drawn a connection between municipal divestment from Wall Street banks and fossil fuels, and reinvestment in local economies and environment via a public bank.

Check out our public banking campaign page for more resources and links to individuals projects online and on social media.

Alliance co-chair Nancy Price joined activists from across the world to call for an end to the US's foreign military presence at the inaugural conference of the Coalition against US Foreign Military Bases, held January 12 through 14 in Baltimore. The conference brought together peace, health, community and environmental activists from around the country, as well as from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Canada, Cuba, Congo, South Korea, the Philippines, Okinawa, and Germany.

The Alliance was a conference endorser, and Nancy organized the “Environment and Health” plenary specifically to highlight health impacts on military and civilian base personnel and surrounding communities, not just from the better-known threats of nuclear weapons, Agent Orange, depleted uranium and chemical/ biological agents, but from the “alphabet soup” of air, land and water pollution from all military base activities.

Plenary speaker Patricia Hynes makes clear in The Polluter Is Not Paying that it’s almost impossible to hold the U.S. military and government responsible and accountable in the US or anywhere else. Marie Cruz on the Navy Base in Vieques, Puerto Rico and Susan Schnall on Vietnam documented the many decades it took to negotiate some clean-up and compensation, noting that as extreme weather pummels U.S. installations, contamination and buried munitions are uncovered and spread.

The United States has as many as 1,000 military bases and tens of thousands of troops in more than 170 foreign countries, especially Germany, Japan and South Korea, as well as thirty-four Naval air carriers either operational or planned, each composed of roughly 7,500 personnel and 65 to 70 aircraft—literally floating military bases.

We pay more for “defense” at an annual cost of approximately $156 billion—money that could be used to support basic human needs (for instance, heat for the Baltimore public schools, where students endured classroom temperatures in the 30s at the start of January, while parents scrambled to fundraise for space heaters and childrens' coats).

The environmental costs include radioactive and chemical contamination of water, destruction of fisheries and farmland, and disruption of climate through massive output of greenhouse gasses. The social costs overseas include disruption of local communities and higher crime rates, including prostitution, rape and sexual abuse. Human rights abuse include using bases for extra-judicial imprisonment and torture.

Ultimately, our overseas bases are not bulwarks of national security, but intended to guarantee multinationals access to markets, resources and cheap labor. As the conference unity statement says, “We must all unite to actively oppose the existence of U.S. foreign military bases and call for their immediate closure. We invite all forces of peace, social and environmental justice to join us in our renewed effort to achieve this shared goal.”

You can learn more about the conference and watch videos of the conference sessions at http://noforeignbases.org/ or see shorter highlights here. The conference program book is online here, with biographies of the speakers. 

​Is President Trump’s new Election Integrity Commission a fix or a fraud? That was the topic on this week's edition of "Corporations and Democracy," a twice-monthly radio show hosted by Alliance secretary Steve Scalmanini and Annie Esposito. Their guest was election integrity and voting rights activist Jan Ben-Dor, a founding member of the Michigan Election Reform Alliance, and a member of the board of directors of the National Election Defense Coalition, as well as a former election official.  

You can listen or download a podcast of the show here.

​If July 4th left you hankering after some real democracy, come make the connections, hear the ideas, and share the skills that will invigorate your movement-building at the Democracy Convention III, August 2 – 6, at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. 

The Alliance for Democracy will be there, organizing the Earth Rights and Global Democracy Conference linking global work to defend Mother Earth and the rights of communities and ecosystems to thrive and survive to the issues important to us in the US, such as: fair trade, water, food and agriculture, climate.

Read the Earth Rights and Global Democracy statement here. AfD’s Co-chair, Nancy Price is organizing a series of panels. Here’s a partial list of Convention presenters; the full program will be posted soon. 

Here’s just a taste of the Earth Rights & Global Democracy panels: the Renegotiating NAFTA panel will add a gender and racial justice analysis; and panels on the false solutions to global warming of cap and trade and carbon tax, stopping GE Eucalyptus forests slated for our southeastern states responsible for the terrible fires in Chile and Portugal, on bottled water,  frac-sand mining and more. 

Ronnie Cummins, International Director of the Organic Consumers Association, will speak on “Connecting the Dots: Bringing the Food, Climate, Natural Health and Democracy Movements Together in a Powerful Force for Revolution.” The great line-up of Convention Plenary speakers will be posted soon. 

Earth Rights and Global Democracy is one of eight distinct, yet interrelated conferences at this third Democracy Convention. You can also connect with Representative Democracy, Racial Justice for Democracy, Peace and Democracy, Media Democracy, Education United for Democracy, Democracy and the Constitution, and Community and Economic Democracy. In addition, two tracks, on Overcoming Oppression, Building an Inclusive Movement, and Skills and Arts provide a toolkit for activists seeking to broaden their allies and impact. 

Register Now: The Democracy Convention website has all the information you need on registration, lodging and meals (including affordable options on campus), and getting to and from Minneapolis. You can also donate or sponsor the convention. 

As conference organizers at the 2013 and 2015 conventions, we are excited to be working again with so many sharp and committed people. Previous conventions were a tremendous coming-together of activists across the issues and the miles. 

We look forward to seeing you again – this time in Minneapolis, August 2 – 6. Look for our table! 

Alliance national council Ethan Scarl has been focusing on an issue in his town of Tewksbury, Massachusetts--preventing the establishment of a slot machine parlor within this town of 30,000 people. The anti-slot parlor group won a town meeting vote on the rezoning ordinance required to build the project, with record attendance of about 2,700 voters. "We only needed 34% to kill a zoning change, and we got 61%, thereby obviating a scheduled September election on the casino itself," writes Ethan. 

Ethan adds: "This was an almost allegorical tale of a small grassroots campaign with volunteered time and money, soundly defeating a $3B corporation--Penn National Gaming, with no native involvement--whose deep pockets bought ads, signs, paid canvassers, etc., with all selectmen and the town manager signed on." The public votes on the slots parlor also gave townspeople tools to defeat this measure. By local law, they had to approve the zoning change, and by state law, the gambling establishment itself. "More often, townships fighting invasive corporations don't have such built-in mechanisms to work with," Ethan notes.

The slots parlor proposal was defeated at an open town meeting, at which every registered voter is welcome to come give input and participate in the final vote. Earlier in the year, though, Tewksbury's selectmen had proposed switching to representative town meetings, where voters elect a small slate of "town meeting members" to vote on their behalf. Ethan writes, "The town population soundly over-rode their selectmen and voted that down. If that hadn't happened, the casino would have been decided by elected representatives who would have been easy targets for the corporate campaign (as were the selectmen in this one)."