National Defense: An Opportunity for Change

We’d like to thank all of the Illahee folks who attended last Wednesday’s lecture, “A Decade of War,” with Andrew Bacevich. The crowd nearly filled Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, as Bacevich discussed decades of American militarism that relegates our country to a permanent state of national security crisis. He argues that this condition will continue to worsen as long as the leaders of the national security establishment go largely unchecked.

With that said, there is no one political party to blame; democrats and republicans are equally at fault. Nor can the blame be placed solely on the federal government either. According to Bacevich, there are a host of others that gain money and power from our state of perpetual war: defense contractors, corporations, big banks, special interest groups, universities, and media outlets.

The American public should also shoulder some of the responsibility too, as we have become increasingly complacent and out of touch with national security issues — unless of course they are unavoidable, like the Vietnam war or Iraq. The American public routinely shows vocal support for the small guard of soldiers that do their fighting, but sacrifice very little, if anything, in return.

Bacevich concludes in his book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War:

Americans today must reckon with a contradiction of gaping proportions.  Promising prosperity and peace, the Washington rules are propelling the United States toward insolvency and perpetual war.  Over the horizon, a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits.  To acknowledge the danger we face is to make learning – and perhaps even a course change – possible.  To willfully ignore the danger is to become complicit in the destruction of what most Americans profess to hold dear.  We, too, must choose.

In other words, if there is going to be change, it will have to come from the American people.

So what exactly constitutes our national security? Where do we need to go from here to make a change? Join Illahee on Thursday, May 24th at 7pm as we continue Bacevich’s discussion with three regional experts on national security. For more information, visit our website: www.illahee.org.

Health Care: A Right or Just a Failed System?

The American health care system has been headlining in the media in recent weeks. With the pending Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law, much speculation is flying around what it would mean for the court to rule in favor or against. Our next speaker, Wendell Potter, has weighed in on the topic and provides an interesting and disturbing picture of the system.

On the one hand, the Obama health care law is the best thing going for us right now — even though it’s not perfect and maybe just a start for a better system down the road. However, Potter recently noted that one of the groups most interested in the Supreme Court upholding the health care law is private health insurance companies. After spending millions in lobbying funds to shape the law as it exists today, they also have a vested interest in keeping the free market system going to ensure that they can continue to rake in record profits.

It’s sad, really. The health care law has the potential to do a lot of good, but also perpetuates a broken system that still largely benefits corporate interests, not just the American public.

Wendell Potter will be in Portland on Wednesday, April 18th to speak to the Illahee crowd. We think you should hear what he has to say. Check out the Illahee website for event details and tickets.

DIY or DIT?

Guest blogger Santigie Fofana-Dura, MFA candidate in Collaborative Design at PNCA, was invited to share his thoughts on Juliet Schor’s February 24^th talk for the 2012 Illahee Lecture Series. 

I attended Juliet Schor’s February 24^th talk for the Illahee Lecture Series and was captivated by her research on the current state of our economic system. Schor talked through countless compelling examples of how our “business-as-usual” economic paradigms, and the perversion of America’s work ethic are hurting us in profound and disturbing ways. There were moments when I wanted to shout my emotion-laden responses out loud.

Many of the effects are not obvious and reflect the counterintuitive nature of our current economic framework. For example, Americans work so many hours that the return on energy and oil invested into the work hours is simply not worth the output, thus increasing our national debt. As she continued her talk to include alternatives to consumption, specifically the DIY (Do It Yourself) mentality, the question arose: “Why don’t more people DIY?”

It seems simple enough. If your clothes become torn, sew them. If your toaster loses a screw, replace it. If your plumbing breaks, repair it? As each question increased in difficulty, it dawned on me that a lot of people might not know how to “do it.” Even something as simple as sewing a couple of stitches into a torn pair of jeans is a skill that has been lost in the development of our consumer-based disposable culture. The reason why more people aren’t DIY’ers is because they don’t know how (DNH). Before the DIY mentality can become an all-out movement, the DNH’ers need to begin with DIT (Do It Together).

People who want to learn need to seek out the knowledge and those with the skills need to make themselves available. I believe DIT will ignite the fires and plant the seeds for what it really means to DIY.

Five Questions for Juliet Schor

We had a quick exchange with Juliet Schor earlier this week in preparation for her lecture at Illahee this Friday (February 24th).  Like her message? Join us at 7pm at the First Congregational Church in Portland for her full discussion of jobs and the meaning of true wealth during this economic crisis. 

Job creation is a great topic of political discussion during this election season, and largely focuses on creating new jobs in new industries to ease unemployment. Is growth the solution for our jobs crisis?

Schor: Not “indiscriminate growth.” We need a growth in green jobs—to increase energy efficiency, expand alternative energy, and transform agriculture (sustainable agriculture will require more labor than chemical agriculture). But  the standard trickle down model of jobs (try to rev up the economy and hope the jobs follow) is now bankrupt.

To re-balance the labor market we need to reduce hours of work in long-hours jobs, make part-time work more appealing, and over the next 15 years, use productivity growth to reduce hours of work. That will get us higher employment and a saner pace of life plus it will reduce CO2 emissions.

As you discuss in your book, the first principle of Plenitude is a new allocation of time.  This involves moderating work time and decreasing income and consumption in order to reclaim free time. Decreasing the use/consumption of anything (even when we know it is good for us or will be the right move in the long run) is a difficult thing for many people to do. How do we start? How do we get going now?

Schor: As noted above, we start not by taking away income that people have, but by altering the path of income. New hires come on at 80%, rather than 100% of salary and work time (i.e., 4 day workweeks). That’s a gradual transition to a shorter hours economy that involves a slows rate of growth of consumption. We need to start by slowing down the engine of expansion.

Many of the fundamentals of Plenitude involve change at a personal level.  How can policy makers support this transition (to what you call the  “80% Solution”) at a larger scale?

Schor: Some important policies include fixing health care, and esp expanding public options/single payer solutions. High health care costs are a big reason that companies set long hours,  which in turn lead to more unemployment. Tax credits for shorter hour jobs could help.  Another key change would be honest energy prices. That’ll enhance local business, small-scale enterprises, self-employment and community connection.

In Oregon, the private sector has not been robust enough to keep up with the unemployment numbers and the jobs lost at the state and local levels. A new approach to creating jobs, called Economic Gardening, has been floating around in the Oregon. It focuses job-growth practices that target homegrown companies rather than using “economic hunting” methods that recruit companies from out of state. The companies are largely based in software or technology and have the ability to scale-up quickly due to their less-capital-intensive products. Do you think this is a viable solution for our long-term unemployment rates?

It’s an interesting approach, and one that I think is worth exploring. Yes.

You also have addressed high-tech, innovative and entrepreneurial solutions, but they revolve around self-providing. Could you discuss this a little more?

The high-tech, innovative side of this is also connected to the spread of ecological knowledge, up-skilling of eco-knowledge and higher productivity in “natural capital.” But this will work better if it’s more collaborative and less privatized. Information because of its non-rival aspects (my consuming it does not impinge on your consumption of it) should be freely available. I see a shift to more open-source, accessible new eco-knowledge (spreading digitally, in part) as part of a paradigm shift to collaborative production, peer-to-peer economies and the like.

2012 Illahee Lecture Series: Sacred Cows

Juliet Schor: Jobs, Markets & True Wealth

February 24, 2012 | 7pm | First Congregational Church, Portland

Tickets: $20 (individual lecture)/$64 (remaining series)

Jobs or the Environment?

The Oregon legislative session has reached the half-way mark and as expected, the big topics of debate: jobs, health care, and education. This morning’s headlines detail how legislators are going head to head on the issue of the jobs vs. the environment.

On the table are state forests and water resources pitted against about 3,500 potential jobs. As a stop-gap measure for our seemingly endless job stagnation, encouraging unsustainable growth (or in the case of House Bills 4098 and 4101 potentially unsustainable depletion of natural resources) appears to some as an only resort. But what are the true costs of creating these jobs? What long-term tradeoffs are we making for short-term gain? By using up nature now, we run the risk of greatly impacting the ongoing services that these ecosystems provide.

This issue isn’t unique to Oregon. The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline continues to rear its ugly head, as its construction alone promises to create 20,000+ U.S. full-time jobs and billions of dollars in annual spending to the economy. However, over 800,000 protestors argue against the Keyston XL project, because the true costs of the pipeline are far too great — environmental costs that far outweigh the prospect of hundreds of thousands of jobs created once the pipeline project is completed.

So we’d like to ask: jobs or the environment? Does it have to be one or the other? Our upcoming speaker, Juliet Schor argues that the two can (and should) co-exist and even thrive. Join Illahee next Friday, February 24th to continue the discussion.

Do We Really Need Job Growth?

Source: Oregon Office of Economic Analysis (Dec 2011)

Oregon’s current unemployment rate hovers around 9%, still one of the highest in the nation. We all did a silent cheer at the end of 2011 when that rate fell .5%. It should have been exciting news, but the fall in unemployment turned out to be more about hopelessness rather than hope — a figure attributed to the fact that job-seekers have given up and stopped looking for employment.

When Juliet Schor published her latest book, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, in 2010 she quoted an astounding figure: ”By October 2009, 8 million jobs had…been destroyed…. To put these people back to work and accommodate a growing population, the economy would have to generate an astounding half million jobs every month for the next two years.” It painted a grave picture for the the un-or-under-employed.

Even without the economic downturn, the United States was already having to find new ways to reintegrate people in the workforce who lost jobs due to technological advances that increase productivity with fewer employees. How did the market absorb the labor demands?

With growth.

As we learned from our fall speakers, Richard Heinberg and Paul Gilding, continual economic growth is not possible within our physical boundaries. The earth simply cannot withstand growth at the rate required to put all of our country’s unemployed job seekers back to work (especially when job creation is so closely tied to increased consumption). And clearly, our markets can only absorb so many workers under present conditions.

So do we really need more job growth? Well, yes and no. The better question would be, “what kind of job growth do we need?”

Schor has extensively explored our consumerism’s effect on the earth and has concluded that in order to create more jobs, we need enact a major shift in the way we live and work. She proposes less time at our jobs, which means more work to go around and increased free time for self-provision (to make, grow, and do things for oneself). A pretty simple idea, but one that faces almost insurmountable obstacles while our local, state, and national governing bodies rely heavily on increased production, consumption, and commercialization as a way out of our employment crisis.

How does Oregon measure up? We hope to explore that more in the weeks leading up to Juliet Schor’s Illahee talk on February 24th. Details and information below:

Juliet Schor: Jobs, Markets & True Wealth

Friday, February 24th | 7pm

First Congregational Church, 1126 SW Park Ave, Portland

More info: www.illahee.org or (503) 222-2719

Christopher Phillips: PNCA Constitution Cafe

Guest blogger Dustin Freemont, MFA candidate in Collaborative Design at PNCA, was invited to share his experience with our first speaker, Christopher Phillips, in the 2012 Illahee Lecture Series. 

The PNCA MFA Collaborative Design program was honored to host Christopher Phillips for a Constitution Café on February 1^st. Members of the program were joined by community residents, members of OccupyPDX, and Illahee board members. Phillips’ notion of a Constitution Café is to provoke discussion around the language of the constitution, something most of us probably regard as sacrosanct. In a time when our politics is so polarized, the Café was an enjoyable, non-partisan discussion. We discussed an extract from the 1^st amendment:

“Congress shall make no law… abridging… the right of the people to peaceably assemble.”

Phillips guided the group through several key questions surrounding the seemingly simple wording. Why just Congress and not any other part of the government (federal or local?)? Should where they assemble be specified (on public land? What constitutes public?)? Who decides what is peaceable? Would the term non-violent be more clear? Shouldn’t Congress actively protect my right to assemble, instead of merely just not making prohibitive laws?

We constructed a couple of alternate versions: “Congress shall protect/facilitate the right of the people to peaceably assemble” and “No arm of the government should obstruct the ability of the people to peaceably assemble.” Some clarifying statements such as “on public property,” in the end, we felt were better left alone to keep rights and privilege more open to interpretation.

These questions were discussed against the backdrop of recent Occupy oustings around the country. They were done at the city-level; technically Congress did not interfere. Does this failure call for an amending of the Constitution? Phillips sees no harm in considering it, and as a political scientist I agree. Yet while I will not foist my opinion on this audience, I’ll only say that the longer I contemplated the original wording, the more convinced I was of its wisdom.

Because of the complexities of language, it may seem impossible to have a perfect constitutional amendment. However, I don’t think the complexity of language is to blame, but human cleverness

This is Our Democracy?

2012 has the potential to be an exciting year for democracy. Presidential elections can inspire hope and change, but mostly they bring out the worst in candidates, scraping bottom for sound bites that might give them a few points in the polls. To date, the Republican party has hosted a staggering 19 debates, which has left moderators grasping to find fresh questions and forcing candidates to repeat the same tired messages over and over again.

Last week, Newt Gingrich went old-school (harking back to cold-war era plans to use space to defeat the Russians) and promised a permanent moon colony by the end of his second term as president. A permanent moon colony! That’s just what we need to pull us out of this economic crisis! Interestingly enough, Gingrich vowed to do this without increasing NASA’s budget, but simply by “transforming the agency’s culture, relying heavily on private industry, and leveraging American ingenuity.” (And pandering to each state in which he stumps.) Not to denigrate the the importance of space exploration, but putting humans on the moon is a highly specialized and expensive endeavor.

In a crucial election year, as many are underemployed, facing rising living costs, and struggling to navigate the so-called economic recovery that we’ve all been promised, the presidential race has become a farce. People now tune in not to hear learn anything new, but to check out the latest train wreck. This theater is our democracy, folks. Sit back and enjoy the show.

Or don’t. 

Join Illahee on February 1st at 7pm, to hear Christopher Phillips discuss a much more pertinent topic than space exploration:

Does the Constitution work for the 21st century?

Should we reframe our democracy?

If so, how? You decide.

For information on Christopher Phillips and Illahee’s 2012 Lecture Series: Sacred Cows, visit our website: www.illahee.org.

Rethinking Democracy

A recent Salon article delved into the political madness leading up to the 2012 presidential election; concluding the high-stakes campaigning and posturing brings out silliness in us all and, “like sex, politics makes almost everybody stupid.” Is this the type of democracy that our founding fathers envisioned when they penned the Constitution of the United States? Well, sort of.

In 1787, the Delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the governing framework in which, “all legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Simply put, laws are constructed and determined by an elected body, not directly by “We the People.”

On February 1st, we kick off the 2012 Illahee Lecture Series with Christopher Phillips, author of Constitution Cafe: Jefferson’s Brew for a True Revolution (2011). In his unique project, Phillips asks average Americans how they would rewrite the constitution, if given the opportunity. As Phillips details in his book, the best democracy (according to Thomas Jefferson) is one where every citizen is an acting member of government. Jefferson, often mistakenly included as a Founding Father of the Constitution, believed that the type of democracy outlined by the Delegates to the Constitutional Convention sidelines citizens via elected representation, making them “inattentive to public affairs” and leaving the “professional politicians [to] all become wolves — doing as they will because of an apathetic citizenry.”

This type of apathy brings out the worst in politics and politicians, leaving our public discourse mired in pseudo-facts and deliberately distorted points of view. How would the upcoming presidential campaign look if Americans were more active participants in our democracy — not just bodies to make phone calls and run internet “hope” campaigns? What if we were able actively rewrite our constitution to better suit the needs of today’s citizens, rather than live by a blueprint for democracy that is over 200 years old?

We encourage you to dust off that copy of the Constitution sitting on your bookshelf and read it from start to finish (presumably for the first time since grade school). Then, join us for our exciting 2012 lecture season as we tackle a few sacred cows — democracy, jobs, education, health care, and national defense.

Visit the Illahee website to find out more on our speaker and topics, as well as to purchase your Illahee 2012 Lecture Series Passes today!

Local Resilience: An Alternative to Growth

Richard Heinberg, author and Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, spoke to a substantial crowd on Friday, October 21st, 2011 at PNCA. Heinberg is no stranger to the Illahee crowd, and his message was as clear: the end of this recession is not in sight and even if it were, we will never go back to “normal”. To date, our economy has been based on cheap oil, cheap minerals, and cheap food. We are seeing the limits of growth today, and there are a set of converging factors that will make recovery very difficult:

Debt: Debt has out-shadowed our GDP and as a result, financial institutions have grown — both in size and in relative power. Heinberg maintains that there is an enormous amount of hidden debt that continue to fuel toxic assets. We may never know the true amount as long as our government continues to allow banks to lie about the exact amount that was lost.

Depletion: U.S. has reached peak oil production, even with new discoveries, and a shortage in precious metals and minerals is on the horizon. This is problematic with our “faith-based” energy policies, relying on undiscovered sources for a lot of our future supply. Our food systems overwhelmingly rely on oil for production, which drive up food prices that cut further into our already dwindling bank accounts.

Disaster: China is an example of a country headed for disaster with its growth at 10% a year (doubling every seven years). They consume over one half of the world’s coal every year. Like China, our economic future is “heading for a brick  wall” with declining tax revenues, persistent high unemployment, declining household income, and financial instability.

Deep breath. Here comes some optimism.

The end of growth doesn’t necessarily mean the end of happiness, but we are going to have to work for it. We need to replace GDP as a measure of success with social measures and goals. We’re also going to have to build up our local resilience by consuming less, planting gardens, and investing locally.

As it turns out, there’s a great opportunity this weekend to start building a stronger local economy: November 5th is Bank Transfer Day. Do the research, then choose where you want your money to reside — on Main Street or Wall Street?