Building Local Power

By Institute for Local Self-RelianceSociety & Culture News News Commentary

Building Local Power episodes

December 10, 2020A Vision for Landfills that Challenges the Status Quo
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Neil Seldman, Director of ILSR’s Waste to Wealth initiative, and Captain Charles Moore, author of Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans. Their conversation focuses on Moore’s latest article, Mine Landfills Now!, which describes his vision for turning landfills into “resource recovery parks.”
They also discuss:
The benefits communities can gain from recognizing all waste is, according to Moore, “a resource waiting for recovery.”
How Moore’s scientific and political background informed his reaction to discovering the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the late 90s.
Why a global grassroots political movement is needed to address climate change and plastic pollution and save the oceans.
Moore’s upcoming projects, including determining a methodology for measuring plastic in drinking water.

“The goal is to use technology to liberate mankind. It has that potential. There’s no question that liberating technology is already in place and has helped millions of people. The question is ‘What about the billions that haven’t been helped by it?’ We can’t ever lose sight of that.”

Contact Captain Charles Moore:
captain-charles-moore.org
[email protected]
Algalita Marine Research and Education

Related Resources
Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans.
Mine Landfills Now!
Save the Albatross Coalition
Urban Ore
St. Vincent de Paul of Eugene, Oregon
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
Transcript
Jess Del Fiacco:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought-provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Today I’m here with Neil Seldman, who’s the director of ILSR’s Waste to Wealth initiative, as well as Captain Charles Moore, who’s the author of Plastic Ocean and a long-time zero-waste advocate. So welcome to the show, guys.
Neil Seldman:
Thank you.
Charles Moore:
Thank you.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah. Neil, if you want to get us started?
Neil Seldman:
Yes. I will, and it’s a pleasure to have Charles here. Known Charles for many years, and we both coordinate the Save the Albatross Coalition, which is a grassroots organization, and I’ll just let people know that Charles has been a pioneer researcher. He’s continuing his research through several research organizations, which we’ll hear about, and he is an international leader, but he’s also a national leader involved in all aspects of retaining plastic, protecting the oceans, and helping the country as well as the world get to zero waste.
Neil Seldman:
Having said that, I’d like to ask Charles to start us off by just indicating what led you to inquire about the garbage patches that you discovered now some 25 years ago.
Charles Moore:
Well, it was an accidental kind of discovery, although I hesitate to call it a discovery, because it was just a feeling of unease about seeing so much anthropogenic debris as far from human civilization as you can get. This Eastern North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is huge. It’s probably the largest climatic feature on the planet, and I crossed it in 1997 during the largest El Niño on record, and it was very calm, and that allowed whatever trash was there to float to the surface, and I couldn’t come on deck without seeing some form of human-made debris pass by the vessel, and that happened for a whole week. So as a self-described marine mammal, growing up here on the ocean in Long Beach, California, it just rubbed me the wrong way to have trash be there out in the middle of the ocean.
Charles Moore:
So I was involved in researching bacteria in our ocean for the fact that our beaches were beginning to be closed for coliform bacterial levels getting so high that it was a danger to recreate in our local waters, and so I have connections with the research community, and I presented them with this conundrum of “How do I determine how much stuff of any sort is in the middle of the ocean?” because it’s not a fixed place. It’s always on the move, and it’s not like sampling near shore where you can set up a geographical location and go back there and expect to have the same sorts of conditions. These are constantly changing.
Charles Moore:
So this high-pressure system, this great North Pacific Subtropical Gyre was a problem for us to determine how to sample it. I got the help of some statisticians at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and some scientists there, and we designed a sampling strategy. I wanted to understand it and sample it carefully to get some kind of a feeling for how much is out there, because when I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and this was … Still, I was interested in waste at the time. I calculated that if there was a half a pound in a hundred square feet of ocean, it would be equal in the system, this subtropical gyre system, to a year’s deposition in Puente Hills Landfill, which is the largest landfill in California, probably the largest in the United States. If this much trash was floating in the ocean, I wanted to quantify it. I wanted to get some science onto it, because that’s what people listen to.
Charles Moore:
I did go back two years later with sampling equipment, and that’s when the discovery was really made, the fact that we had a garbage patch, because what we found was six times as much plastic as zooplankton in the surface waters out there. That means there was more trash than life in the area as far from human civilization as you can get anywhere on Earth.
Neil Seldman:
Let me interrupt right there and ask you, because I know that was your originals findings back in the ’90s. What have your most recent findings shown about that ratio, six to one?
Charles Moore:
Well, we’re a small research lab, and we don’t have a big staff, and I’m not part of an academic institution, so I can’t tap some undergraduates on the shoulder and say “Go into the lab and look at my samples and tell me how much is there.” So we’re still analyzing our 2019 sample set, and that was a 20-year time series. We’ve seen it going up, but to really establish trends over the 20-year timeframe, we need to finish our 2019 expedition samples, and we haven’t done that yet. But everyone knows that looks around them that trash in their neighborhood wherever they are is going up, and it doesn’t take a scientist to point that out. So the question is “How much?” and “What is it doing?” and we have this new invader of the biosphere. It’s synthetic polymer, which defeats natural decay organisms. That is the real issue to me.
Neil Seldman:
Well, I just want to point out two things that Charles has written describing his early years in this area, Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans. It’s Penguin USA, 2011.
Jess Del Fiacco:
We’ll have that linked in the post for this episode, so-
Neil Seldman:
Oh. [crosstalk 00:06:23].
Charles Moore:
That’s the hardback, Neil, and-
Neil Seldman:
Yes, and-
Charles Moore:
… the paperback as an extra chapter on the health effect.
Neil Seldman:
Yes, which I haven’t seen, but I look forward to it. I also want to point out that just yesterday the Institute published a new important article by Charles called Landfill Mining, which we’ll be talking about in a moment. I just want Charles to let us know before you … What was your education and training that prepared you so that when you saw this garbage patch back in ’97 you were alerted and you knew what to do? If you could just give us a couple of sentences of how you were trained to do this.
Charles Moore:
Well, I was trained by my father, who was an industrial chemist. We don’t hear too much about chemistry sets these days as a recreational toy for children, but our family had a laboratory in a used washroom. My childhood was taken up with chemical experiments, and I was a chemistry major at UC San Diego. But I was also aware of our situation, as a political animal, and being part of the world, I realized in the 1960s, the late ’60s, that this war in Vietnam was evil and untenable, and rather than pursue a continued degree and get a PhD and become a chemist on some corporate chemistry staff, I decided to break away from academia and go out on my own with a political agenda, which was to stop the war in Vietnam and exercise some vocal control over what happens in our community.
Charles Moore:
I was equipped with science, but I was also equipped with a political consciousness that allowed me to put two and two together and say “This is a political problem that we have trash in the middle of the ocean, not just a scientific study problem.” That’s kind of where I came from, and then I just … The ability to see the need for a new field of science, and that’s what we’ve developed over the years truly. When I started out I could not find one paper a year on the subject of plastic pollution in the ocean. Now we have a thousand papers per year, plastic in the ocean, so we really did develop a new field of science.
Neil Seldman:
Well, this is a great statement for young people to hear, combining scientific inquiry with political values, normative values, so thanks for summing that up for us. I want to get back now to what I mentioned earlier, that Charles recently did a piece, a long piece, which we published on landfill mining, and I love the theme. I’m restating it, but it basically is garbage dumps into resource-recovery parks is the goal, and this is an international goal, not just for the United States, and Charles, I was just wondering if you could give us a few minutes of what you observed as you went around the world looking at these dumps and came up with your ideas for how to deal with them.
Charles Moore:
I’ve been on a speaking tour, what I call the Plastic Pollution Conversation, because we are in the age of plastics, and we live behind a plastic curtain of ignorance, and I was drawing back that plastic and informing people about the product that defines our age. The stone age is defined by stones, the bronze age by bronze, and people in the stone age I think knew more about what to do with a stone than people in the plastic age know what to do with their plastic. It’s so unique, so variable, so different from anything we’ve been accustomed to, and to have it in such huge quantities and have it in such huge varieties, people just don’t know where it comes from. They don’t know how it’s made. They don’t know what its effects are, and largely because they’re so intimately in touch with it, they consider it to be a kind of inert material, innocent in a way, and that’s not the case in any sense.
Charles Moore:
That was my goal in touring was to draw back that plastic curtain of ignorance, and of course a lot of the folks that wanted to hear about it are folks that are involved in the zero-waste movement and involved in recycling, and I was able to see some very unique efforts in countries I visited, especially in my sailing trip to study the South Pacific Garbage Patch, and we sampled that in 2017. Then I came up the coast of Chile, and that’s where I saw the Atacama Desert in Antofagasta being reclaimed by a fantastic couple who turned a desert wasteland into a resource-recovery park. Parque Reciclado Ecorayen is an amazing effort where they’ve built an oasis in the middle of the desert all with reclaimed materials. Seeing something out of nothing made me realize that there’s no excuse for throwing everything away.
Charles Moore:
There’s a lot of areas that need to have reclaimed materials as their infrastructure, and this park is powered by reject solar panels. A lot of times things are rejected. We know this in the ugly fruit movement and the ugly vegetable movement. Things are discarded for looks, not for any significant, real problem with them, and they’re still functional. Many products that are headed for landfill really only need a little help to become those useful products that they were designed to be, and that’s what captured my attention at Parque Reciclado Ecorayen. That’s a very important example of what can and should be done with our discards.
Neil Seldman:
Charles, does that project have government support? Or is it completely private sector community based?
Charles Moore:
No. It’s completely private sector community based. It’s very rare to have government in the forefront of materials recovery or anything else, because it’s attached to the status quo. The government survives on the status quo, and it wants to see 10, a hundred, or a thousand examples of anything new already having been successful in order to risk their precious government resources on doing anything new.
Neil Seldman:
What you say is an exact description of what I found. I did a project for the World Bank in the 1980s. They sent me down to Medellín, Colombia where there’s a big landfill in the middle of the city with a lot of waste pickers, and we laid out a strategy to make them more efficient, get them conveyor belts, tables, coverings during the rain. The goal was to make them more efficient to get their children out of the dumps and into the schools, and the World Bank accepted the project, but the local politicians wouldn’t, because they figured if the waste pickers got organized, they’d be a political force, and the project was discarded exactly in the dynamics that you pointed out. So my next question is … Well, it’s a point you may want to comment on is that these technical solutions need political support, and it’s both a technical and political problem, as you were laying out earlier.
Charles Moore:
Well, I say in my disclaimer to the article that it’s an effort to reclaim utopian possibility, and people will point to zero waste as a utopian goal. As a matter of fact, zero-waste advocates constantly have to defend the concept of zero, because everyone knows nothing is perfect. So when we say zero waste, we have a slogan, “If you’re not for zero waste, how much waste are you for?” and the answer would be, well, people are for whatever amount of waste allows the status quo to continue to exist.
Neil Seldman:
Exactly.
Charles Moore:
The status quo is moribund. It is unable to cope with the realities of the 21st century. The forces that have created this immense wealth and this fantastic technology have been unable to organize it for the benefit of humankind in such a way that it doesn’t leave, and I’m going to use the term billions, billions of people out of the equation. This is not sustainable to have a world in which billions of people are expected to scrap on discards and claw their way out of poverty with no help. My utopian vision is coupled with the reality of political intransigence, political reaction, and to be quite frank, political stupidity.
Charles Moore:
The goal is to use technology to liberate mankind. It has that potential. There’s no question that liberating technology is already in place and has helped millions of people. The question is “What about the billions that haven’t been helped by it?” We can’t ever lose sight of that. The stock market rallying in this time of immense suffering is an example of how as an economy lose sight of the poorest among us, and we can’t do that if we’re going to have a sustainable society going into the future. Why? Because we’ve already created a determinant negation of that society with climate change and plastic pollution.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Could you talk a little bit more about what that utopian vision looks like, either for the recovery parks in particular or zero waste generally? I mean, what are some of the direct, indirect benefits to communities if they were to move away from landfills towards recovery parks, for example?
Charles Moore:
Well, first of all it’s space. If we continue down the road we’re on now, we will be living between landfills. Landfills are happening even without being organized as landfills. Things are just filling up with our trash. The beaches are becoming landfills. The ocean … I call the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a seafill in the middle of the ocean. It’s filling up with our garbage. So we’re going to have a lot more space if we stop wasting. We’re going to have room for the people on the planet to live a more fulfilling life, and the way we do that is to always remember that everything is a resource waiting for recovery. All products can be reincarnated. We reincarnate agriculture biologically. We have no problem with that. We know that our compost grows new plants.
Charles Moore:
So my vision is two-fold. One, to mimic the natural world’s biological zero-waste system, which a forest is a zero-waste economy. No one goes into the forest to fertilize the trees so we can have 200-, 500-year-old trees. They take care of themselves. It’s a zero-waste economy. It’s an economic model. Now, with technology there’s problems because many technological products are difficult to handle in a circular, steady-state type of economy, but that’s where my vision for the resource-recovery park has the resource-recovery university. We don’t give nearly enough time at academic institutions towards the science of recovery of resources.
Charles Moore:
We need a Nobel Prize for resource recovery. We need a faculty of recycling and resource recovery. We don’t have that. That’s why I think, as part of making the recycling of materials sexy, we need to have a university at the landfill, which is no longer a landfill. It’s a resource-recovery park, but we build it with the materials from the landfill. We’re going to mine these landfills, build these universities that are going to focus on recycling and resource recovery, and we’re going to do it with the materials that are there, because truly we’re going to go backwards from building a city and then building a landfill … We’re going to go from having a landfill to building a city.
Neil Seldman:
I love that image. I also want to point out you mentioned zero. The actual term zero waste is what we use is we say is zero waste or darn close to it. So we realize that we can’t get to zero, but in the United States now we’re at one third recycling. If we would double that or get it to 80 or 90 percent, the impact would be tremendous, even if we don’t get to actual zero.
Neil Seldman:
Charles, I wanted to add to your response to Jess’s question by saying that not only the space benefits and the other benefits you mentioned, but a zero-waste society would give more time for people to do whatever they wanted, do more work, do more recreation, and money. A zero-waste economy is less expensive. But the most important thing that a zero-waste economy does is to focus people not on material possessions, but on their relationships with their family, with their neighbors, and of course with the political system.
Neil Seldman:
So if I could ask another question … Thank you for that, Jess. I want you to let people know. What organizations do you network with? What organizations should people be paying attention to that you help them and they inform your work and we have a better synthesis after everyone is putting in their input?
Charles Moore:
Well, in my travels I did get an honorary PhD from a university in British Columbia, Canada, and there I noticed that there was some very progressive thinking about refill stations instead of having … They were fighting the contract that they had with the vending machine operator, and the vending machine operators of course want to stock with all kind of disposables, but the students wanted to put in washing machines and places where you could leave your cup, pick up another cup as an alternative to the vending machine culture, and I think universities are a good place to start. I think the Post-Landfill Action Network that seeks to make zero-waste universities is a good group to network with.
Charles Moore:
As a matter of fact, the organization I started, Algalita Marine Research and Education, has a director of partnerships. We don’t really focus on getting ourselves in a prominent position. We focus on maximizing our partnerships’ ability to work, because truly when we’re dealing with climate change or with plastic pollution, we’re dealing with a global problem in which everyone is part of the problem and everyone is part of the solution.
Charles Moore:
There’s a new politics. When the German philosophers talked about the Weltgeist, the world spirit, it was mostly about the spirit of Western civilization. Now we have a new world spirit connected by the internet that is going to make a political reality come true, which is a world political movement, and that’s what will be required to deal with climate change and what will be required to deal with plastic pollution will be a world consciousness, and that is obviously subject to manipulation. Unfortunately the algorithms that the corporate social media folks use associate like with like and give people more of the bad stuff if they’re already in a bad way.
Charles Moore:
So we’re not at the point where it’s a kind of panacea, but there will be efforts to make world political movements more rational and to attack world problems in a way that will actually make a difference, because you know and I know that all the conferences on climate change that have taken place have not produced a reduction even in the production of carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide production continues to go up. So we haven’t turned it around.
Charles Moore:
The traditional political organizing that is taking place is not producing results that can deal with this, like all the determinant negation of our capitalist system, which is that as it continues to profit by this wonderful technology, it creates conditions that make it unsurvivable in the future. It’s creating a climate situation that is incredibly sporadic and dangerous, and plastic pollution is creating a situation in which we now know that zooplankton in the ocean cannot pass the polyester fibers from our clothing, and that’s going to clog up the basic food source in the ocean.
Charles Moore:
So this is what I mean by determinant negation, and like I say it in the article, like bacteria consuming agar-agar on a Petri dish, they eventually get to the point where there’s more excrement than there is food, and their civilization collapses. That’s what we’re facing. That is a future that can only be avoided by world political action.
Neil Seldman:
Thank you for that, Charles. I was remembering as you were speaking about the climate crisis, plastic crisis, and actually the food crisis. I was thinking, back in the late ’60s when we had the first emergence of environmental consciousness in the country, the Cleveland River was on fire, the Santa Barbara oil spill, and the inversions around Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1969 alerted people, and the question is … Right now we’re facing even greater threats. Will the political systems respond? I think that is the question of our age.
Charles Moore:
No politician, no matter how progressive, can get us out of this mess. This is going to require grassroots political organizing on a global scale.
Neil Seldman:
Absolutely. I meant to say that we need the grassroots effort to continuously press whosever in power, and with Biden we have an opportunity, but it’s up to us to keep that pressure on. I do understand that.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Are you involved in any, I don’t know, projects or organizing right now, or anything you’re starting or excited about?
Charles Moore:
Yeah. Neil mentioned a food crisis. I might add to that a water crisis. It turns out that these plastic fibers are in our water, and we’re drinking it, and we’re getting it in our food. We’re getting it through the air. So my latest initiative was to start an organization that could drill down into the nano scale, which these particles of plastic don’t go away. They just break down until they’re nano scale, millionths of a meter size plastic.
Charles Moore:
We’re going to have to regulate plastic pollution in our tap water, and I’ve started a laboratory, and in conjunction with international labs from China and Europe, from around the globe, we’re developing methods now to determine how much plastic is in our drinking water so that governments can begin to regulate the sources and causes of this type of contamination.
Charles Moore:
So the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research just held a GivingTuesday fundraiser. We did pretty well, and we go to the lab every day. We sit on that microscope, sit on a chair in front of the microscope, and look at samples of water and pull out little bits of plastic, and these are standardized amongst the 40 labs that are participating in the study. They’ve all received a standardized hundreds of particles of plastic in clear water, and the idea is to find out how well they coordinate in order to have a standardized methodology that we can rely on to then create regulations when we determine how much plastic is in our drinking water.
Charles Moore:
So I started the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research, and I’m working closely with my former institution, Algalita Marine Research and Education, and that’s the latest initiative I have. I should mention however too that in times of COVID, I always had a hand in the biological regenerative side, and I started Long Beach Organic to turn vacant lots into organic community gardens, and we’ve now started a program with Long Beach Organic to dedicate a certain part of all our community gardens to growing food for people in need during COVID, and I just got them a $10,000 grant so that they could expand that project and get food out to the community that’s organic and fresh and can be combined with all the canned goods and other stuff they’re getting.
Charles Moore:
So I have a two-pronged approach. My first handle at the dawn of the internet was Land and Sea, and I believe that we can’t really fix what’s in the ocean without fixing what we do on land, and that requires organic land management, requires regenerative agriculture, and requires that we start giving space to cities to produce their own food. The city of Paris was self sustaining early in its history in terms of agriculture, and we need to have self-sustaining cities now. Now folks are doing it in high rises. They’re doing it under glass. They’re doing it in open space and vacant lots.
Charles Moore:
I want to combine both our land approach to zero waste and the study of the sea to create this kind of knowledge base that we need. Incremental change is now our friend in a time of crisis, and that’s why I believe, and I know you agree with me, Neil, that radical political change is a must for human longevity.
Neil Seldman:
Yes. We have to get to the root causes of things. I just wanted to add what Jess asked about your itinerary for this coming year, 2021. Will you still be going out on oceans during 2021-
Charles Moore:
Yeah.
Neil Seldman:
… making your expeditions? Okay.
Charles Moore:
There’s a new initiative by a local resource organization I mentioned before. The Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, a joint powers authority, works with the waste dischargers and the various government entities that deal with water, the water boards. They’re wanting to study and get baseline data on how much plastic is in our local water area that we call San Pedro Bay. There’s two major urban rivers, the San Gabriel and the Los Angeles River, discharging there. They want samples off of those rivers, and I think it’s a three-year project, where they’ve asked my vessel to be the support vessel for this effort, because I’ve designed the epibenthic sleds they’re going to be using to sample plastic near the sea floor. I’m building a new one right now, and we’re going out today after this interview to begin practicing with some of our new research equipment.
Charles Moore:
I will be active on the water. I’ll be active in the lab, and I’ll be active in my garden. Every Sunday I have a local farmers market that can’t be more local than being in my front yard, and I make a little bit of money every weekend with passersby. I put out my surplus food I grow for the community. I find out what their interests are, what they like, and I grow it. I have 46 years of agricultural experience in organic urban farming, and Captain Charlie’s Urban Farm is inspected by the county agricultural commissioner. I have a seller’s permit, and every Sunday from 10:00 to 4:00 I put out a table with my goods on it, and I also let people harvest their own if they want, and I harvest as they come. So you can be any fresher than that.
Neil Seldman:
A true Renaissance man, a national and international treasure. The picture on the book … It’s a wonderful graphic showing a fish contaminated by everything we’re throwing out, and there have been many other pictures of Albatrosses have been dissected and showing why they died with all this, and I’m reminded of the great poster that Greenpeace produced in the ’80s when the Mobro garbage barge was moving around the ocean, “Next time, recycle,” which became an iconic poster at university dorm rooms, et cetera. So I wanted to compliment you on the graphic on the book.
Neil Seldman:
Getting back, if you don’t mind, to the Mining the Landfill, your most recent publication, have you … Besides describing the project you did, are you familiar with any similar projects in the United States that have been trying to build these resource-recovery parks out of recycled materials?
Charles Moore:
I do know of one in Hawaii that has made a fairly decent park at the Waimea Transfer Station and has a store where they sell reusable materials, mostly clothing and electronics, anything that’s in good enough condition, because a lot of things that come to the landfill, as I said before, are in pretty good condition and with minor repairs can be made usable again. So this transfer station is a nice model because when people come there, it’s not just one receptacle to dump stuff in. It’s a series of receptacles that have cardboard, mixed paper, glass, metal.
Charles Moore:
You have all this separation going on by the community. It’s especially useful in communities that don’t have curbside, because curbside tends to want to have just one single recyclable bin, but if you have communities that take their waste to the transfer station, you can have them separate it at the transfer station. So you get several different kinds of materials without anybody but the producer of that waste having separated it.
Neil Seldman:
Yeah. Let me point out that a good friend of both of ours, Dan Knapp and Mary Lou Vandeventer at Urban Ore … They just negotiated … It’s a reuse company on three acres in Berkeley. They just won a contract with a service fee. Every ton they pull out of the materials going through the transfer station, they get $46 a ton, which is what the city would have had to pay to landfill it. So there are excellent examples.
Neil Seldman:
I just want to mention two more. St. Vincent de Paul in Eugene, Oregon has a whole network of repair operations, appliances, mattresses, furniture, textiles, and then a new phenomenon in Appalachia called the ReUse Corridor. It serves Southern Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and parts of Pennsylvania where communities are getting together to aggregate mattresses, electronic scrap, and then they’re contracting with end users and processors. So the reuse is happening in the United States. We would love to see the full resource-recovery parks the way Charles has described them, and as Charles said, we’re all in a work in progress making progress with lots of barriers.
Neil Seldman:
Before we leave, we usually ask our guest “What two books or two articles do you think are important for people to read at this point?” Charles, in your opinion.
Charles Moore:
Well, do people still read?
Neil Seldman:
Yes. I think some of us still do, Charles.
Charles Moore:
I thought it was all emojis now.
Jess Del Fiacco:
We’ll take an emoji suggestion too if you’ve got one.
Charles Moore:
You know, I like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, an Appalachian farmer that moved from Tucson, Arizona, decided to live on everything that they could produce. She has a very good perspective on zero waste. It’s the agricultural side, very good. Then there’s another one called Utopia for Realists that talks about utopian ideas not being any more utopian. That was my professor at UC San Diego, Herbert Marcuse, has written several books. I recommend you to read any of those. M-A-R-C-U-S-E. His take on technology was that it’s wasted if it’s not used for the utopian possibilities that it presents, and that’s what we’re doing. We’re wasting technology, not only goods. We’re wasting our ability to liberate humanity.
Charles Moore:
Now, these miracles of technology can be shared, and that was my purpose in writing this article. I talked about waste pickers on one side of the landfill and then modern technology on the other side, and when they meet in the middle, the landfill would be completely mined, would have all the resources taken out. Now, and I think that’s the kind of utopian vision that we need, that we can unite the technical with the artisan and create a world in which artisan possibilities are liberated by technology. So you don’t have to be a salve to your trade. Your trade can liberate you through the technology. That’s my vision, and that’s what I tried to communicate in this article.
Neil Seldman:
Well, Charles, I can say, being a long-retired professor of political theory, that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s first discourse in the 1750s made the same point, that all the science and technology that we’re advancing does not do anything if it doesn’t help the common person. So we’re both abiding a long tradition in Western political thought, and Charles, you’ve animated it. You’ve given us examples and inspiration. I really appreciate your time. So thanks again, Charles. Have a great weekend.
Charles Moore:
Neil, I want to thank you for sticking with the Save the Albatross Coalition. A lot of people don’t realize that the Albatross is in so much danger from eating plastic waste. Thanks for continuing to work on that, and we hope for big things for the Save the Albatross Coalition in the future.
Neil Seldman:
Yeah. I’ll just give a quick update. The Albatross Coalition is working with lawyers to develop municipal lawsuits against the big polluters for suing for funds to clean up the beach, and that’s one of among a number of projects from Save the Albatross Coalition. I want to give a shout out to Laura Anthony, who’s the staff coordinator for the Save the Albatross Coalition as well. She’s based in San Diego.
Charles Moore:
Thanks again for the interview.
Neil Seldman:
Thanks.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you.
Charles Moore:
All our best to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
Neil Seldman:
Thank you again.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you.

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43 min
November 25, 2020 A Cornucopia of Policy Opportunities in the New Year — Episode 115 of Building Local Power
In this episode, we look forward to upcoming policy opportunities. We discuss the status of small businesses across the country and the creative solutions some communities have implemented to keep them going, ILSR's 30 Million Solar Homes proposal, and why nonprofit approaches are the most reliable solution we have for closing the digital divide.
49 min
November 09, 2020Voters Turn Out to Support Climate, Broadband, Other Local Initiatives in 2020 Election
In this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by ILSR staff members John Farrell, Christopher Mitchell, and Ron Knox to discuss the 2020 election and what the results may mean for ILSR’s work. Their conversation touches on a number of topics, including:
Interesting ballot initiatives that passed in communities around the country, such as:
Support for municipal action on broadband issues in Denver and Chicago.
Establishment of a climate sales tax in Denver, a climate fund in Albany, Calif., and community choice aggregation in East Brunswick, N.J. and Columbus, Ohio.
Support for restrictions on payday lending in Nebraska, a tax on the wealthy in Arizona, and a $15 minimum wage in Florida.
How we can reckon with the huge ideological gap between political parties, especially regarding specific policies that receive broad public support.
What a new administration could mean for federal broadband, climate, and antitrust policy.

“When voters are faced with these really clear policy choices, it turns out that these policies are actually popular and they’re often wildly popular and then they win. I think that’s just such a clear lesson for our work… and the work of organizers everywhere, it’s no mystery that issue campaigns can be really successful and can lead to really immediate and important policy changes.”

Related Resources
Is it Finally Time to Break Up Big Tech?
The Post-Election Potential for a 30 Million Solar Home Stimulus
Transcript
Jess Del Fiacco:
Hello and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought-provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities or power, wealth and accountability remain in local hands.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Good morning. I’m here with my colleagues, John Farrell, Chris Mitchell and Ron Knox, and this is ILSRs special post-election episode of Building Local Power. Before we get started, I just want to specify that we are recording this on Friday morning. We do not have a call in the presidential election and states are still counting. FYI, if you’re listening to this in the next few days, next week, that’s where we’re at, still held in suspense in many ways.
Chris Mitchell:
If you’re much farther into the future, let’s hope it’s a much, much brighter future than our year of 2020.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah, 2021 listeners, I hope you’re having a great time. To get to our actual conversation, if hypothetically, purely hypothetically, if I was a person who had only spent the last 48 hours refreshing results, refreshing the stats on Pennsylvania and Georgia and not paying a whole lot of attention to other local elections throughout the country, what have I missed specifically? I know you guys have had your eyes on some interesting ballot initiatives in different cities. I’m curious how those line up with how people came out to support any particular candidate or the different parties. Maybe we could start with Chris. I know some interesting stuff happened in Chicago and Denver.
Chris Mitchell:
Yes. I’m going to start big and we’ll see if anyone can top me, but we had referenda to do more on broadband, would probably be a way to characterize it. In particular, Denver had to overcome a state law which says that a city has to pass a referendum in order to basically build a network or to partner with a network, even if they just want to provide access to public housing or something like that. This is a law that’s one of 19 states that have this sort of a thing passed by in the big monopolies through a pliant legislature. In Denver, they voted 83.5% to restore that authority to be able to make those decisions locally but that, that was a tight election compared to Chicago, where they voted by 90% to 10%, that the city should make it a priority to make sure that all neighborhoods have decent internet access, which I defy anyone to have better numbers than that this morning. It’s very exciting.
John Farrell:
Chris, I have the best numbers. Just wait until I get to my stuff.
Chris Mitchell:
Okay.
John Farrell:
I’ve got the best numbers. You’ve never seen numbers like these before. They’re the most beautiful numbers.
Chris Mitchell:
That’s remarkable. I’m sorry that you’ve perfected that accent just when it will no longer be that useful. God, I hope so. What I think is exciting about that is that these are major cities. These are areas in which if you ask the federal government, they would say, “There is no problem here. There is lots of competition. There is lots of investment. These are vibrant places where you have lots of broadband,” and people are rejecting the big monopolies. They are saying, “We want service that’s better. We want customer service that’s at the human scale. We want reasonable prices.”
Chris Mitchell:
The bad part is, I’ll just say briefly, is that there was a couple of referenda in smaller towns. There was one in Lucas, Texas, there was one in Kaysville, Utah, in which they rejected plans to build specific municipal local controlled networks. One of the things that we do see is that when there’s a referendum, for a specific project that has $1 figure on it, it is much easier for the big cable monopolies to put a lot of money in to scare people off. I would not consider this the end of the road for those places. Often we see that there will be some kind of resurgence where people will spend the next few weeks thinking about that and deciding, “You know what? Why did I vote for Comcast? I don’t know, why did I do that?” Then, they may have another vote in a few years in which we’ll see a significant win. It’s a pattern we’ve seen.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Is that a communications issue? I mean, why consider it after you’ve already voted?
Chris Mitchell:
Yeah, I think it is partially communications. I feel like and who among us doesn’t do this, right? You’re like, you know who you’re going to vote on the key races and then you’re about to go into the polling place, you’re like, “Oh, wait, there’s other things I have to answer.” Then, you’re just at the last second trying to remember it and maybe your perceptions were swayed by a bunch of dramatic advertising you saw. After that, you’re talking to your neighbors and they’re disappointed about this and you learn more about it and then you think, “You know what? Why did I vote that way?” I mean, Longmont, Colorado went through this. We studied it very closely and it was fascinating.
Chris Mitchell:
Two years after they rejected the referendum, they passed it very soundly. Honestly, they probably could have done it weeks later just because of how people more educated themselves after they’d cast their vote. It’s just a dynamic that we see from time to time.
John Farrell:
I wonder if we could have this sort of alternate reality conversation about three weeks after 2016 election, if people might have changed their vote, Chris, then we wouldn’t all be sitting here refreshing results pages with such a level of anxiety.
Chris Mitchell:
Well, I guess I would say I feel like we do have that ultimate reality. Donald Trump has received millions more votes. One of the things that I’ll say that I mean, I don’t think there’s any way we’re going to avoid coming back to the national issues on this, but we live in a polarized country and people have very strong feelings about the parties at the national level. Maybe, but I think my analysis is more relevant to some specific local issues than those sort of national ones.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah, we’ll get back to the national… Oh, sorry, Ron, go ahead.
Ron Knox:
No, it’s okay. I was going to say, look, I’m curious if maybe part of the issue on the broadband initiatives has to do with the amount of and the potential for funding, like in big cities versus small towns, like a pro, I mean, municipal broadband initiative in larger cities would have more funding for more mailers or TV ads, radio ads, all those kinds of things wherein small towns, all the funding would come from the corporations of folks who are pushing back against municipal broadband and there’s not a lot of funding on the other side, I wonder if that can kind of have an effect.
Chris Mitchell:
I think that can have an effect but I think the overwhelming effect is that it is easy to pass a general referendum. It is hard for a cable monopoly to say, “No, you don’t want better internet access.” Like the sort of Obi Wan Kenobi you’re like, you’re happy with your Comcast. It doesn’t work if the question is, “Do you want something better?” People say, “Yes.” The question is, should we, and I’m just going to be really hyperbolic in a way that I don’t think this is the way to talk about it. I don’t think this is an accurate claim but if I was running against it in Denver or Chicago, I would say, “Should we close down these city parks to have better broadband,” and then you’re going to see a totally different vote when they actually have to put it together.
Chris Mitchell:
We have to be honest about the level of support. How I read these elections is that the cities are not taking this seriously enough. It doesn’t mean that they should spend a billion dollars to build broadband fiber optics out to everyone but it means they really need to take positive steps to encourage competition and new investment, remove barriers and part of that I think does mean modest amounts of investment in shared infrastructure, so that smaller ISPs can actually build their networks without having to pay $1,500 per customer and if you can get that down to a few hundred dollars per customer with smart city investments that are shared, I think we have a marketplace that looks a lot different, that’s what I think people want.
Jess Del Fiacco:
All right, let’s move on to John. What are your big numbers, John? Please share.
John Farrell:
A 100%, I’ve got 100%, Chris, for you.
Chris Mitchell:
Well, Ron’s going to end up with 105%.
John Farrell:
Yeah, actually, we’re talking about 100% is that the ballot measure in Columbus, Ohio, it’s a state that allows Community Choice Energy. They allow cities to go out and be the buyer of the electricity source for their residents and small businesses. The voters there passed a ballot measure that would get the city to 100% renewable electricity by 2023. That’s 100% part about measure did not pass with 100% of the vote but it’s indicative of what we’re seeing a lot around the country. There’s over 150 cities that have already made pledges for 100% renewable energy at some date certain. Usually, not quite as ambitious as Columbus just passed by 2030, 2040 and what have you, and those cities represent over 100 million Americans. You did see climate change as a discussion in the national elections, but it’s actually at the local and the state level where we’re seeing a lot of movement.
John Farrell:
Here’s just a few other examples. Columbus passed this ballot measure. East Brunswick, New Jersey is also going to create a Community Choice Agency, thanks to a ballot measure that passed handily on Tuesday. There’s a couple of ones out in California. Oddly enough, Albany, California passed a measure to increase the utility tax to fund climate and other local initiatives but Berkeley, California didn’t pass. Theirs failed by just a few percentage points to raise electric bills just vary slightly to create a fund to do more climate funding, clean energy development at the local level.
John Farrell:
There was, however, success in Denver. Denver also succeeded on the climate front as well as broadband with a sales tax increase that will be used to create a $40 million a year fund to invest in clean energy and climate initiatives at the local level, which is pretty substantial and is part of a trend now that we’re seeing. Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland have all also in the past few years passed either through the ballot measure or through the city council these different taxes or fees to focus investment on reducing the impacts of climate change and facilitating clean energy.
John Farrell:
What I find really interesting about that is not only are we seeing cities do a lot, they’re also committing to very ambitious schedules for doing things compared to at the state level. There was also a win in Nevada, where question six requires utilities to get to 50% renewable electricity by 2030. Yet, you’re seeing a lot of cities saying we’re going to get to 100% by 2030, not 50%. They’re putting their money where their mouth is in passing these local ballot initiatives to do more. It was very successful of the things that were on the ballot around climate and clean energy, almost universally they passed and they’re going to be adding a lot more resources into the fight to reduce our carbon footprint and to especially increase the economic rewards for these communities from doing more clean energy.
Chris Mitchell:
Let me ask you, do you have a sense that that was correlated with other people’s votes? I mean, do you have a sense that there was a lot of people who voted for Republicans who would maybe not support those policies, but then voted directly for those policies and this is foreshadowing a future part of our discussion, I guess.
John Farrell:
I think, yes. I mean, I think, you look at Nevada where we’re all waiting and waiting and waiting to see how that state is going to vote in the presidential election but question six passed handily, both in 2018 and again, this year. It’s a sort of a curiosity of Nevada where some of their initiatives have to be passed twice to be on referendum. I do think that there is much broader support for action on clean energy and you could see this, frankly, in the polls. The Yale Climate Initiative does some really good public polling regularly. Things like solar energy and clean energy generally, poll like 70, 80% of the population wants to spend more money on these things. It’s really no surprise that we find these things easily outpolling, for example, Democratic politicians who are more often associated with action on climate change.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Any other questions for John or should we move on to Ron’s numbers?
Ron Knox:
I’ve got good numbers too, not the best, but pretty good numbers.
Jess Del Fiacco:
All right. Go ahead.
Ron Knox:
Yeah, I mean, I just, I think that’s really interesting framing and just to kind of frame some of my numbers in the kind of national political landscape, right? I mean, we started the show here. It looks very much like Joe Biden is going to be the 46th President of the United States but the Democrats lost, on their way to losing double digit house seats. The balance in the Senate is going to end up hinging on to run off elections in Georgia State where Democrats haven’t won a runoff election in decades. It’s not lost on anyone here on the show or anyone listening that the race nationally has been extremely close, painstakingly close in some places despite the persistent unpopularity of President Trump, Democrats struggled in a lot of places around the country.
Ron Knox:
That’s the big picture. That’s the framing but then you look at these smaller ballot initiatives, these really issue-specific initiatives and you see a much different picture. Arizona, which is a state that is on some networks, still too close to call it and a very close race. Proposition 208 last night officially passed and that would raise taxes on the wealthy to help fund public schools, very progressive measure and obviously a progressive tax. Arizona also legalized recreational cannabis as did South Dakota, Montana, New Jersey and Nebraska, a state where Trump won handily when going away. Voters there approved caps on payday lending interest rates and they approved it by 83%. It’s massive statewide margin, right?
Chris Mitchell:
It doesn’t beat 90%, just to be clear.
Ron Knox:
Yeah.
John Farrell:
100%.
Ron Knox:
Yeah, 100% of people. 83% is wild, but I mean, this is business regulations. It’s the kind of thing that you think a very red state would not be into but yet it passes by a massive margin.
Chris Mitchell:
I assume that it was opposed. I mean, that industry has a lot of money to put into these races. It’s not like it’s something that was evenly spent. I would guess that that the forces that would like to have not have passed that probably put a lot more money into that effort.
Ron Knox:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s the same, I mean, in Florida. Look at Florida, right? It’s a state that Biden lost by a significant margin, yet the state approved a 15-hour minimum wage, a thing that a lot of business groups would oppose. They approved a 15-hour minimum wage by 30 points. That’s like super majority of voters in that state approved a massive margin.
Ron Knox:
What we’re seeing all across the country is this kind of divide between the way that people vote for these candidates and the way that people vote for these very specific localized issues and policies that I think there’s a better connection to people’s daily lives and the way people actually live and the business and the political and economic environment around them. I just think we’ve seen this huge split and it’s very, very interesting to me. I think it means a lot for the direction of the country.
John Farrell:
I do, I find this really fascinating as well. I think one of the things I keep thinking about is a lot of these issues that you talk about, obviously Ron, if you get 80% in Nebraska, you’re pulling Democrats, you’re pulling Republicans, and it highlights… We talk about being a really divided country and I think what we really need to say is we are really divided, our political parties are really divided, like the ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans has grown really wide, so that they can’t, even though you have these payday lending restrictions being enormously politically popular, for some reason can’t pass a bill in the legislature that would get bipartisan support.
John Farrell:
I think that really, I see that as not only an issue that affects how our government works and the faith that people have in their government to come up with solutions to our common pressing problems. I see that as a problem that directly affects the work that we do that tends to cut across in a really interesting way some of these partisan divides like corporate concentration in the economy, like our work on Amazon and its threat to market competitiveness. These are issues that have progressive implications around opportunities for labor, to organize, to get fair wages, but also opportunities for small businesses to survive and compete. It’s really frustrating to feel like the political parties are so far apart or so locked into their ideological combat that they can’t address these things that are wildly popular.
Ron Knox:
I think what comes down to and yes, and that’s all correct. I think what this comes down to, I think it’s increasingly easy to project whatever qualities you want onto politicians, right? They’re heroes. They’re Boogeyman. It’s very easy for people to believe the most dire predictions about what a political party or a specific politician is going to do. It’s going to cost you your job. They’re going to raise your taxes. They’re going to take your guns, right? All-
Chris Mitchell:
They don’t like you.
Ron Knox:
They don’t like you. All the things exactly, they don’t like you. They don’t represent you, all the things. What’s much harder to argue about in those ways are these very simple propositions, right? Do you think low wage workers deserve to make more money? Do you think payday lenders should be able to charge whatever interest rates they want? Do you want to tax the rich to pay for schools? When voters are faced with these really clear policy choices, it turns out that these policies are actually popular and they’re often wildly popular and then they win. I think that’s just such a clear lesson for our work, John, as you said, for our work and the work of organizers everywhere, it’s no mystery that issue campaigns can be really successful and can lead to really immediate and important policy changes.
Ron Knox:
Does it mean that people can just ignore candidates and candidate politics completely? No, you can’t because the people we elect to control policy at every level of government but this difference between the way the voters view people versus the way they view the issues in front of them suggests to me that the country is ready for a change in our kind of larger political and ideological worldview.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Before I move on to my next question, I think now is a good time to take a short break. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power. If nothing else, this election has shown the importance of working for change on the local level and coincidentally, that’s what we do here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. If you want to help support our work, I hope you’ll consider heading over to archive.ilsr.org/donatetoday. We need your help to produce the resources necessary to push back against concentrated, corporate and political power and build stronger communities. Plus, you can make sure we get to keep this podcast going. Go to archive.ilsr.org/donate. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. Now, let’s return to my conversation with my colleagues John Farrell, Ron Knox and Christopher Mitchell.
Chris Mitchell:
We’ve each had a chance to throw out some numbers. I’m curious, Jess, do you have any numbers you want to throw out or do you want to react to our excitement, enthusiasm, overtopping each other?
Jess Del Fiacco:
I’ve got no numbers to share with you. Sorry about that but I think the big question about where this conversation is going is there anything that could possibly fill that gap? I mean, it would seem that we could have someone a party that’s like these are our issues. People like them. We’re going to run on these issues. Is that going to happen? Are we going to get a new worldview that can tie these things together? That’s a big question and you probably don’t have an answer. I guess what would you like to see? What would be useful for our work?
John Farrell:
Just a weathervane party. Any issue that’s got 60% for support among the population is part of their party platform.
Chris Mitchell:
Well, I think it is worth hitting the brakes for a second to remind ourselves that we celebrate a lot of the referenda that we liked but in California, where it’s considered a very progressive state, the corporations passed several referenda that were good or they defeated referenda that would have harmed them in some ways, not intentionally harmed them, but would have benefited the people that work for them.
Chris Mitchell:
The Uber one in particular, which I think was 22 and I think it’s worth remembering past conversations we’ve had with David Morris, one of our cofounders, about how we’ve seen referenda be weaponized by corporations because the ability of mass media to really drive people in a certain way to say we’re going to legalize cannabis in Ohio by creating monopolies for corporations to control it, which was fortunately shot down in a previous election cycle. Some of this is also just, it’s a little bit more complicated than we’ve led on, I think.
Ron Knox:
Well, I’ll say this about, yes, I agree but I’ll also say that it’s very easy for… Well, it’s not easy but corporations, lobbyists, the folks that can often have their hands all over ballot initiatives and referenda can make them very confusing and can make referenda sound like a really good thing for voters when in fact, they’re not.
Ron Knox:
There was an initiative here in Missouri that, in fact, would have essentially ended gerrymandering and gerrymandered districts but the way that it was written, made it sound like it was a really good deal, like it was going to cut the amount of gifts that lobbyists could give to politicians and it was going to create this bipartisan commission to look at legislative districts. Yeah, well, in reality, what it did was it reduced the amount of gifts by $5 and it did not say that on the language of initiatives and they created a commission that was entirely controlled by the people already in power. I just think these things can be confusing, I’ll say that.
John Farrell:
Yeah. That’s not the only example. There is one in Florida a couple of years ago where the utilities managed to get on the ballot a competing initiative to one that was meant to open the solar market to more competition. Utilities in Florida, already monopolies, had been very successful limiting any way for consumers or particular for other small companies to get into the solar business. Florida residents, Republican wanted more competition, I think, probably even more support on the conservative end than on the progressive end for that kind of policy, in particular. The utilities ran their own very confusing ballot initiative that would have essentially cemented their monopoly, but was made to sound like it was going to allow for competition.
John Farrell:
There is, I think, a challenge with that. It really frustrates me though, I want to kind of pose this back as a question, if ballot initiatives can be successful and we’re seeing that they are successful, but they’re not a panacea, what else can we do? What are the other strategies we have for advancing these kinds of policies? In climate and clean energy, it’s been go local. It’s been focused on cities, focused on states that’s where you can still have policy conversations that are and potentially politicians that are not so, like ideologically cemented in their ways and that you can make some progress on these issues but of course, cities don’t have the power to affect some of these areas because they are limited in their powers.
Chris Mitchell:
I like just to react to this because I feel like it’s a communications issue and Jess is very smart on these things. I feel one of the issues is that the people who are crafting messages on behalf of the sort of folks who I said are focused on policy, I don’t think they really appreciate how many voters don’t think of themselves as being a Democrat or Republican. You got all these people who are like, yeah, they’re mostly going to end up voting for Democrats perhaps because of where they live and what their options are but they have different views on guns or they have different views on minimum wage. You have a lot of Republicans that support the minimum wage and you’ve got democrats that don’t, you know because some of those democrats are small business owners or large business owners that have a view that may be out of line with their peers.
Chris Mitchell:
I just feel like, I don’t know if he was doing it for retorque reasons but Paul Krugman had this thing where he was just shocked at Florida, raising the minimum wage while voting for elected officials that oppose the minimum wage and I don’t find that surprising at all. People average your political views and then they act as though that average means something and it doesn’t. It’s statistical malpractice. I guess what I will come back to is the question for Jess is, is this mostly communications or am I just oversimplifying it because I’m focused on that in this minute?
Jess Del Fiacco:
No, I think communications is a significant part of it. I mean, I think part of it is treating any voting bloc like it’s actually a monolith. Not everyone in cities is going to vote for a Democrat, even if that’s a trend. Small business owners, they’re not a monolith. It’s going to go either way on policies. Organizing at community levels is significant if you want to connect those policies or those referenda whatever it is to a candidate or to a party and if that doesn’t happen, then no, you’re not going to have people make that connection because most people aren’t thinking that deeply about candidates’ platforms.
Jess Del Fiacco:
It just doesn’t happen. They don’t have a sense of… You were talking about reading seven books about monopolies earlier, most people aren’t going to read seven books about monopolies. They don’t know the history. They don’t know a voting record. They have a vague sense of what that person is and they’re going to read specific questions on the ballot as like, “Oh, yeah, yes or no, as I’m feeling in the voting booth.” You’re right, they’re not as connected as they are and if candidates want them to be, they need to do a lot more of that community level organizing, I think.
Chris Mitchell:
Ron, your eyes got really big during a part of that.
Ron Knox:
I was going to say, most people aren’t going to read a pamphlet about monopolies let alone seven books unfortunately.
Chris Mitchell:
There’s some good ones that are about 250 years old, though. I highly recommend it.
Ron Knox:
That’s very, very true. That’s very true. No, I mean, look, you know I think that’s right. I mean, unfortunately, I think a lot of people vote for the name on the front of the jersey, the logo on the front of the jersey instead of the name on the back or the policies on the back, so to speak. I think it’s a shame, but I think, like what we’re seeing on the local level both from these state wide referenda that we’re seeing where a lot of more progressive policies are being put in place and are being approved by voters by big margins and so on, is that I think that there is this desire now, at this moment, and maybe this desire has been around for a while.
Ron Knox:
But there’s this desire at this moment to shift away from the broad-governing philosophy that’s kind of controlled our politics and our economy for the last 40, 50 years or so, right? I call it neoliberalism. What does that mean? It just means this political philosophy that shifted power away from our democratic institutions, to the market and to powerful corporations and experts that support these corporations and their interests and it’s all happened through these policies of deregulation, privatization, austerity, pro-monopoly and you know, all these kinds of things.
Chris Mitchell:
As an example Ron, let me just say, as an example of that, I think, this was laid out really well in the recent book by Barry Lynn, the Liberty from All Masters, in which for most of the history, for instance, prices had to be clear and non-discriminatory and more recently now with Amazon, and we think of it commonly with airplanes, but it’s arguable about that, but now, it’s not clear what the price of a thing is that I’m buying and I’m paying a different amount than my neighbor. That’s an issue in which previously the government said for the market to work well, you have to be clear and transparent prices. We’ve said, no. We’re going to let the market set that and keep it secret, if it wants to. That’s what you’re talking about in terms of like neoliberalism in terms of an action, right?
Ron Knox:
Absolutely. I mean, that’s exactly right. What it leads to, I mean, it leads to people getting ripped off. It leads to you and me, consumers getting ripped off. It leads to really big powerful sellers being able to rip off suppliers, all these kinds of things. The sum total of this is our modern economy, right? The most unequal economy in a century, wage stagnation for decades, monopolies across industries, all these kinds of things, I think some of these ballot initiatives that we’ve seen in the local organizing initiatives to get these ballot initiatives on the ballot and to get him past, it shows us the path that we’ve taken to get here to this economy is wrong and we need to find a different one. This organizing this really on the ground, hands on grassroots organizing that’s led to these successes is really important and it gives me a lot of hope.
Ron Knox:
The other thing that gives me hope and confidence that we’ve moved beyond this kind of unequal, monopolized economy is the House Judiciary committee’s investigation of monopoly power in tech and the findings, that not only does it exist, but it’s damage to the economy and these companies should be broken up and regulated. This report was embraced by a democratic majority, the members of which have a wide variety of viewpoints on business regulation. Some of the proposals in the committee’s report were embraced by Republicans as well such as Ken Buck and others. This is important, right? I think the election just reinforced to me that Americans across the country, even if they’re still just voting for the logo on the front of the jersey, as I said, they’re actually ready to push back against corporate control of their lives and their democracy and push back against this hands off pro-monopoly approach to governance.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Right, yeah. I think, to bring it back to communications, people do feel the effects of that significantly unequal economy. They just don’t always get these things spoken. They’re not being described in ways that they can connect to like, “Oh, yeah, I have no savings and look at what Amazon’s doing in my neighborhood.” If we can connect on those things, then people do get it, like there is hunger for that change. I think.
Chris Mitchell:
I agree. I think a lot of this comes back to mass media and I still blame television news, more than anything else.
Jess Del Fiacco:
I think you have blamed television news in every podcast we’ve put out lately.
Chris Mitchell:
I guess the question is whether I’m being convincing, because at least I’m consistent.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah.
Chris Mitchell:
I just find it frustrating because people want to blame Facebook and Facebook sucks and people should blame Facebook for lots of things but Facebook is manufacturing the content. Fox News, CNN and others are, that’s the content that is kind of warping people’s brains. It just so happens that Facebook is the carrier of that currently but what it comes down to is I feel like people are more positive and hopeful about their local situation than they are about things that they learn about through the media. Most of our media today is designed to stimulate us and to get us scared or emotional in some way that will lead us to watch more of it. I don’t feel like we’ve yet reckoned with how television has hacked our brains, which were designed on the savanna for hundreds of thousands of years in certain ways that we trust our eyes. It’s different for radio.
Chris Mitchell:
Actually, I think the way we interact with podcasts is different and is much better for informing ourselves. That’s why I always harp on TV news. I think the visual medium screws it up but fundamentally, I would just bring it back to, it’s easy to fool people with television news and I feel like that’s where a lot of this comes from because people feel that their lives are getting worse. They have little less control. Their dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to. Then, the TV tells them this is why because those bad people there are trying to screw you in this way. That’s a message which has been designed by very smart people with lots of science to try and figure out how to distract you and get you to react in a certain way.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yep. No argument here.
Chris Mitchell:
Anyway, I would just say that Deb Fallows and James Fallows have a great book. I think it’s called Our Towns. I forget, their latest book, whatever it is, it covers some of this and I think it’s helpful to get a sense of the dynamic. As we’re sort of, I assume, running out of time here at some point, there’s a lot of things to be hopeful for. I mean, I think there’s reasons to hope, laugh as hard as you will, maybe we won’t see the country torn so much apart by immigration in the near future as we see, at least current extrapolations suggests that Republicans are pulling more votes from communities of color than they expected.
Chris Mitchell:
Maybe white supremacists will have less of a role, white nationalist as Donald Trump exits the party and we’ll see more of these issues being less, the sort of flashpoint that I think has been really ugly for a lot of us when we look at how some of the racial issues have been demagogued. I think there’s some reasons to be hopeful as we move forward to break past some of that and I’m going to come out of this hopeful one way or another, because that’s what I am, I guess.
Ron Knox:
I’ll just say really, really quickly that, as far as like hope and I mean, I think there is a lot of reason for hope in particularly in those ways and those kind of ideological ways, but once this election is over, we are in the worst part of this yearlong, possibly multiple year pandemic. It is bad. It looks like it’s not going to get any better this winter. We are in the middle of a small business extinction event that’s really tied to this pandemic.
Ron Knox:
I’ll just say that I will be more hopeful and my level of confidence in this incoming government to really govern and to really help people will increase when I see real concrete proposals put in place to help small businesses and to rebuild the small business economy, both to rescue those that are still alive right now and floundering and struggling and to create the infrastructure and the incentives for folks to be entrepreneurial, start new businesses and kind of regrow that economy from the ground.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Speaking of being hopeful and maybe a little bit of magical thinking here, with the Georgia races going to run offs, do we… There’s a chance, at least, that we could end up with Democrats in control the Senate? Do you all have thoughts on what that would mean for your work?
John Farrell:
Yeah, I guess I just really quickly, though, I want to piggyback off what Ron was saying, as an element that I’m hopeful to see in whatever administration we end up with, so he has highlighted the antitrust findings of the House Judiciary Committee. I think one of the things that people don’t often realize and also benefit from Chris’s reference to TV news is that the connections aren’t being made for folks, generally speaking, at least those that don’t read seven books on monopoly.
John Farrell:
Between the way that these structural market problems that are highlighted in that report, also spill over into our politics whether it’s ballot initiatives or anything else and just a quick illustration of that as in Ohio. They passed a bill last year called House Bill Six to essentially bail out coal and nuclear plants owned by FirstEnergy. And other companies that had previously been monopolies, had been forced into and actually volunteered to go into a competitive market, realized they couldn’t compete, so therefore used their monopoly power and political influence to buy the votes, literally buy the votes, the FBI is investigating, of legislators to protect them from competition.
John Farrell:
I think we have to just keep in mind that whatever big picture we want to see from the incoming administration, it needs to start to break those chains of corporate power in the marketplace and the way that it spills into our politics. Biden administration with a democratic House and Senate, I mean, David Roberts from Vox has said this pretty well, that basically all the good climate policies we’ve seen have resulted from unified democratic control of governments because the republican party has decided to vacate on climate and energy policy, with the exception maybe of helping to renew some federal tax credits for clean energy that are great for people who are wealthier and don’t really help a lot of Americans, unfortunately, benefit from clean energy.
John Farrell:
I’m hopeful that what we’ll see is, I mean, if nothing else, a willingness to even talk about climate change. One of the things we’ve seen from Republican administrations at state and federal levels is to expunge the language of climate change from any conversation in the state as though ignoring it will help us deal with it. I am hopeful that this like horrendous hurricane season, the wildfires in California et cetera, are helping us turn the corner to realize that actually this is a problem we have to deal with. I’m hopeful that a Biden administration with a Democratic Congress could actually pass meaningful climate legislation that could frankly, just pour lots of money into our cities and towns and communities and states to just invest in clean energy things that will boost the economy. We have a great opportunity here.
John Farrell:
We’re actually talking about this, we have a rare look at federal policy in a program called 30 million solar rooftops, a project that ILSR is leading that is looking at how do we combine our clean energy policy with economic stimulus and in a way that tries to address some of these issues of monopoly power and racial inequality, all at the same time. I think, unfortunately, it would take probably a democratic administration, and a democratic congress to pass those things but I’m also hopeful that lots of those are things many people care about.
John Farrell:
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Property Brothers and their show about fixing up homes for folks or whatever. Jonathan Scott, one of the Property Brothers, was helping folks go solar as part of the home remodel projects. He’s actually coming out with a documentary, not like home remodel show, but a documentary did with PBS about how we could overcome some of these issues of monopoly power in the energy system to address climate and clean energy. He’s got all these conservatives who are talking in the trailer for this thing who are saying, “We really need to do solar and clean energy. It’s really important to have more energy independence.” I think we have an opportunity potentially and I’m hopeful that it would be successful, regardless of the outcomes in the senate run offs in Georgia but the evidence so far has been if we want to make progress on climate and clean energy, then unfortunately, you’ve had to elect Democrats to do it.
Chris Mitchell:
I’m quite worried in ways that I was very hopeful prior to and now I’m quite worried about broadband opportunities in the new senate. Many of us expected that Comcast will be very powerful in a Biden administration, but the democrats have put down strong markers that they really wanted to put money into broadband and not only that, but getting beyond the focus on rural and back to urban, where we started the show, recognizing the need, particularly for communities of color that have been left behind.
Chris Mitchell:
While I am very optimistic about hopefully leaving some of this divisive racial language behind that I think we’ve seen from a white nationalist presidency, I think we’re going to see more of a return to the big corporate friendly policies of less populism from the Republican Party. I kind of feel like we’re not going to see very much broadband investment from the federal government. I would expect that to the extent that we do, it will probably be wasteful subsidies to Comcast and charter spectrum and that sort of a thing rather than programs that would structurally solve the problem, create a real market, which would make future subsidies less costly because subsidizing a broken market is just a really, really bad policy. I’m kind of afraid that’s where we’ll end up.
Chris Mitchell:
It’s one of those things that like, it’s just a different set of problems and a little bit disappointed that in some ways I feel like 49-51 senate one way or the other actually doesn’t make that big of a difference on this issue when you look at the power of these monopolies. I thought that giving democrats a decisive majority would have led to them being bold for recovery package, which would have involved broadband spending in the way that we saw energy spending so well snuck into the stimulus. The opportunity to make these bold policy movements doesn’t come along often. I thought the democrats are ready to take it. Now, I just don’t see a path for getting there, although we will work very hard to build that path nonetheless.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah, it was supposed to be a hopeful note to end the show on, Chris.
Chris Mitchell:
I don’t want to sit here and keep ragging. I don’t want to pretend that all Republicans have racial animus. I don’t believe that but I can’t overstate enough how glad I am that I think many Republicans will really tone that down. I don’t know what’s in their hearts. I don’t really care what’s in their hearts. What I care about is people having the opportunity no matter what their skin color or background is, to live a good life in the United States. I feel like getting rid of the Trump administration will move us closer to that goal. For me, that’s enough to take away on this, I think.
Ron Knox:
I’ll say real quickly, maybe on a more hopeful note to end here. From the independent business perspective, I think there’s a lot of low hanging fruit that an incoming Biden administration and a new Congress can get done that will really help small business. I think things as simple as enacting the paycheck guarantee proposals by Senator Sander and Warner and Representative Jayapal that would be a huge step towards sustaining small businesses throughout the COVID crisis. That would be huge. I think any initiatives to overhaul the Small Business Administration would be extremely important, reorienting its lending programs to deliver more funding to small and BIPOC-owned businesses, and to integrate its analysis and its advocacy functions, I think that would be really, really important.
Ron Knox:
There’s a bill by Senator Rubio called the Freedom to Compete Act that would ban employers from using non-compete agreements for entry level and low wage workers. That should be immediately passed by both chambers and signed into law. That would do a lot of good to workers across the country. There’s all the stuff that’s out there. Bills that have been introduced and have languished, all these things that can be done through executive order and executive function that can really help people help workers, help small businesses, help communities, it just has to happen. Hopefully, this incoming administration and incoming Congress are motivated to do these things.
Chris Mitchell:
Yes. I just want to say that I think it’s really important that we not fall into this blue team, red team where we feel like, if Biden administration is getting unfair criticism from a right leaning press that we feel like we have to defend their inadequacies, we really need to hold democrats’ feet to the fire on these issues, push them hard, and knock it into the sense that we can’t criticize Democrats because we feel that that some of the Republican folks are making over the top accusations that are out of line with four years of the policies they’ve just been pushing.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah, as tired as we might be after this week and the last four years and a pandemic that we’re still in the middle of, now is not the time to relax on any front, really. On that note, thanks, everyone. Is there any final thoughts, comments?
Chris Mitchell:
You know what? This has been, I think, less organized than I wanted it to be. I know I wandered more than I wanted to. One of the things I hope people will take away is don’t take too many firm conclusions until we see what more of the data says. The exit polls are all wrong that we’re seeing on the news. There’s a lot of things in which we’re junkies and we’re trying to get information but there’s bad information out there. Many of us poisoned our brains with months of polls that were wrong and we’re having trouble adjusting to the reality because we’re trying to fit it to what we thought reality was. That reality never existed. We were told-
Jess Del Fiacco:
Some of us have been saying the polls are wrong for the last few months, Chris.
Chris Mitchell:
Thank you, Jess. I will listen to you more in the future. You have definitely proven to be more wise than many others but I think it’s important just to remember that there are a significant ways in which we take numbers seriously, more seriously than we should when they are not definitive. I think this is a reminder. The referenda that we’re seeing are real, right? I mean, people they support these policies and they recognize that their lives are getting worse. It’s up to us to, I think, do a better job of connecting that to how they have less control over their lives because government has given more control to the, I don’t want to say the market, I want to say the monopolies because I will firmly defend the market. I know that we’re all on the same page there, but I just try to be more consistent with the language. We want functioning markets where we can have them. There I go, rambling as I’m trying to apologize for rambling.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you all. This was a great discussion.
John Farrell:
Thanks, Jess.
Chris Mitchell:
Thank you, Jess.
Ron Knox:
Thanks, Jess.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode, archive.ilsr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with the gift that helped us produced this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show was produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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51 min
October 29, 2020In Seattle, Corporations Must Pay Their Fair Share to Support Climate Justice
In this episode of Building Local Power, ILSR Co-director John Farrell interviews Jill Mangaliman, Executive Director of Got Green, and Abigail Juaner of Puget Sound Sage. They discuss Seattle’s JumpStart tax, which city council passed this summer, and how it will be used to fund local projects centered around affordable housing and the city’s Green New Deal. Their conversation touches on:
How their organizations were involved in pushing for the JumpStart legislation.
Opportunities for similar action to take place in other cities and why collaboration between different local entities is key.
The overlaps between investing in affordable housing and the Green New Deal and why climate justice must be prioritized in the transition to a clean energy future.
How the community is involved with decisions around how to spend JumpStart tax revenue.

“How do we move away from fossil fuels? Not just new infrastructure, but also existing infrastructure needs to make that transition. And again, how do we support the communities and the workers in that transition? There has to be some real investments. … We really want to make sure that if we are going to make those goals by 2030, to move away from climate pollution, that we actually do so in an intentional way that doesn’t leave any of our community behind.”

Related Resources
Decriminalize Seattle
King County Equity Now
Got Green
Puget Sound Sage
Transcript
Jessica Del Fiacco:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jessica Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and Communications Manager here at the Institute for Local Self-reliance. For 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands.
Jessica Del Fiacco:
In this episode, ILSR co-director John Farrell interviews Jill Mangaliman, Executive Director of Got Green, and Abigail Juaner from Puget Sound Sage about Seattle’s Jumpstart Tax. This tax applies to businesses with annual payrolls over $7 million, and the revenue is used to fund local projects centered around affordable housing and the city’s Green New Deal. With that, let’s head to the show.
John Farrell:
We could just start with, at the basic level, I’m interested in hearing about the Jumpstart Tax. What was the idea behind it? How much money is it going to collect? And who’s paying for it?
Abigail Juaner:
Jumpstart is the progressive revenue legislation that the Seattle City Council passed this summer, in July. It’s estimated to bring around 214 million a year. And who’s paying for it? It’s businesses with payroll expenses for employees with at least $150,000 in annual compensation. It’s structured in three tiers, if you want me to go over it really quickly?
John Farrell:
Yeah, I think that’s useful. I think it’s really intriguing for folks in other cities to even just understand a little bit about this kind of structure of local taxation.
Abigail Juaner:
Yeah. It is structured in three tiers. Businesses with payroll expenses up to a hundred million? Their rates are 0.7% of employees with annual compensation between $150,000 and $400,000. Then it will be 1.7% of those with annual compensation above $400,000. The next year is for businesses with payroll expenses between a hundred million and 1 billion. The tax rate for that is 0.7% for employees at annual compensation between $150,000 and $400,000, and then 1.9% for those with annual compensation about $400,000. Then the third tier is for businesses with payroll expenses over 1 billion. The rate for that is 1.4% for annual compensation between $150,000 and $400,000, and then 2.4% for those annual compensation above $400,000. Businesses with parallel expenses under 7 million are exempted from this.
John Farrell:
So it’s really progressive, I guess, on almost three different facets. You’re only taxing high paid employees. So, folks who make a lot of money. You’re only taxing businesses above a certain payroll level, but also in an amount that goes up. So you’re really focused on big corporations and people at big corporations who make a lot of money, are sort of the targets for raising this revenue.
John Farrell:
I did a little ballpark, did a little Googling about the size of the city budget, and it looks like this is going to raise something like about 3% of what the annual city budget was. So it’s also not insignificant. It’s going to actually be able to do some significant work for that amount of money.
Abigail Juaner:
Yes, absolutely.
John Farrell:
One of the questions I had was that this tax, the Jumpstart Tax, wasn’t the first attempt to tax large businesses to support local priorities in Seattle. I’m just curious what helped it pass this time around after the failure of a similar proposal back in 2018?
Jill Mangaliman:
I guess one major thing that was noticeable was… Well, after last year when the whole tax Amazon had taxed was, it was actually passed unanimously in the city council, and then it was revoked. It just kind of exposed how powerful Amazon is in our city. And actually, I feel like it created a bad taste in people’s mouth. Like, people were just like enraged, too. Like, what the heck? I think, given the political conditions also right now in Seattle, there’s just some really strong organizing, especially with the Black Lives Matter movement and just a lot of more energy.
Jill Mangaliman:
I think that this time around the political will was there. And the city council members also were working hand in hand with folks. But I do think the conditions were better than compared to the first time it came through, and some of the issues were also discussed and addressed in this is iteration. That’s my take, but I don’t know if you have other thoughts on it, Abigail?
Abigail Juaner:
It’s similar to what you’ve you’ve said. I was not even around in 2018, but we are in a middle of an unprecedented moment. This pandemic and the resulting economic downturn is really threatening our communities that have already been vulnerable even before this pandemic. So with the city’s forecasts of a budget shortfall, I think between 200 to 300 million, there just needed to be a more proactive approach to how we’re going to raise these revenues without cutting the most essential services that are badly needed by our communities. So, yeah. The city needed to find new sources of funding, and continuing to increase sales tax, especially for the ones who are already suffering was just not the right way to go about it. So setting up a new source of revenue that is progressive is the right way to go.
John Farrell:
I was curious, with the tax, one of the things that we are very interested in is when cities exercise authority in this way, whether it’s with new taxation or maybe it’s a new regulation, is trying to understand how much other communities could replicate that. Do you know, for example, could other cities in Washington do a similar thing? Other cities in other states? Would they have the authority to do this kind of similar tax?
Jill Mangaliman:
I think it’s possible. Or if it’s not, I think the approach of city by city is a very good approach. We saw that with 15 minimal wage. Right? It started in SeaTac and then it happened in Seattle and like carried into other cities and then all over the nation until it got some grounding to actually become statewide. I think that could be an approach.
Jill Mangaliman:
It would also help with the concerns around leakage. People talk about like, “Oh, well you do this tax. Then Amazon will leave or they’ll go to Bellevue or Tacoma” and so forth. So I think if more and more cities do it, then it becomes the norm and they can’t just escape taxation, and actually be held accountable and actually pay their fair share.
John Farrell:
I’d like to ask both of you to talk a little bit about how your organizations were involved in the effort to adopt the tax, and also maybe it a little bit more about how it aligns with the work that your organizations do. Jill, do you want to talk about what Got Green had invested in this and how it aligns with the work that you do?
Jill Mangaliman:
Yeah. We were doing a lot of talking with community during the time we were push for the Green New Deal, and that kept coming up, the question, “How are we going to pay for this?” This is very ambitious to transition the entire economy to one that’s sustainable. It became very clear from all our conversations and surveys that people wanted something that wasn’t going to fall on the backs of working people. Abigail said, sales tax is really regressive. There were some initiatives on the table around property tax levies. We can’t keep continuing to squeeze every day people who are not responsible for these climate disasters. That we really should be going to the top 1% or the corporations. So it was very clear alignment with what we were hearing from the community.
Jill Mangaliman:
Even when we were doing work around the 1631, the carbon tax in Washington state, that was something that we couldn’t ignore. People were really concerned about paying taxes, and everyday people having it passed on to them. So this is something that the Jumpstart, like the Amazon tax, or these progressive taxes is something that we, as an organization, we have to support in terms of our beliefs around just transition in ways that… Of course, having all these conversations around revenue, I think the way we were involved, we were definitely not taking lead there in city hall the time, but we were consulted around, where would we want some of the revenue to go? Obviously we pushed for the basic needs and environmental justice and the Green New Deal. But also, yeah, we mobilized folks to make phone calls and send letters to our city council to take that bold step.
John Farrell:
Abigail, do you want to talk about what Puget Sound Sage did as part of this and how it aligns with the broader work that your organization is involved in?
Abigail Juaner:
Puget Sound Sage has always advocated for policies that support the resilience of Black, Indigenous, people of color, immigrant and low income workers and families. Even before the pandemic, our community partners have been experiencing threats of displacement. What this pandemic has done is exacerbate these conditions. We already know that they suffer the most from the economic cost of this crisis because of the lack of resources and infrastructure to protect BIPOC and low-income communities from disaster, be it a climate induced one or in a form of a social economic shock, which we’re both experiencing right now. Sage, like Got Green, we’re not the leading organization for this, but have also been consulted around where we want to see the revenues go.
Abigail Juaner:
We saw an opportunity to advocate for dedicated funding, not just for Green New Deal, but also for the Equitable Development Initiative, which is a city program that we have long advocated for, with our coalition partners and SouthCORE and the Race and Social Equity Task Force. So, advocating for 20 million for a equitable development initiative, which we see as an anti-displacement strategy that our coalition had fought for in previous years. Before jumpstart revenues, its main source of funding was the short-term rental tax, which became unstable due to the COVID crisis. And with the vision for EDI to be funded at 20 million a year, we saw it as an opportunity to use this revenue, to direct resources, that will help our communities become resilient through community led development and land stewardship, which Sage has been advocating for because we see community stewardship of land as a way to address the displacement crisis that our communities have been facing.
Abigail Juaner:
So in many forums, we see community stewardship as an antidote to the worst of the historic harms done to our BIPOC communities, and they continue to be the ones who suffer the most and are the last ones to recover, especially with the crisis that we have right now.
John Farrell:
Could you talk a bit more about that idea of community land stewardship? Are you talking about… I’m familiar with community land trusts, where you’ve got a nonprofit that’s owning the land under the properties, and so you’re sort of preventing displacement due to rising property values. Is that what you’re getting at? I just want to make sure I understand.
Abigail Juaner:
Yeah. Community land trust is just one model of community stewardship. But at Sage we have come up with our definition of community stewardship of land which, for us, it means that communities, whether they’re neighborhood based or cultural based or identity or issue focused, they’re the ones who control the land with the intention to keep it out of the speculative market, where the intention to use it for permanent affordable housing, affordable business spaces, and other social services and other community developments. They use this land as a resource.
Abigail Juaner:
One thing that is unique about our values around community stewardship of land is the group that owns the land is driven by strong values, and they are accountable to the people they serve, and they value democratic decision making, and they agree that the purpose of this land is to maintain it in perpetuity to make it affordable, permanently or long-term. So community stewardship of land essentially transform the purpose of land to not just be a commodity designed for creating personal wealth, individual wealth, but treating land as a shared resource intended to benefit all communities and keep them resilient.
John Farrell:
That’s great. Thank you. More broadly with the Jumpstart Tax, it looks like, as you have alluded to, a lot of the funds are really focused on housing affordability and avoiding displacement. There’s also a carve out for so-called Green New Deal initiatives, it looks like, starting in 2022. Do you see overlaps between the investments in affordable housing and the Green New Deal? And are there key elements of a Seattle Green New Deal that you hope will be supported with these funds?
Jill Mangaliman:
Yes. Totally, there’s overlap. Considering that we view displacement as something that also creates pollution and increases climate impacts. Right? The more that we can keep people rooted in place with stable housing, the more resilient there’ll be. Also we can reduce carbon emissions as well at the same time. So it’s a complimentary planning. But also by building housing, that’s also the potential for creation of jobs, as well as potential for creating green infrastructure, making it more accessible to the local communities here, the working-class and BIPOC communities.
Jill Mangaliman:
Something that came up while we were advocating for Green New Deal is around the transition. Right? How do we move away from fossil fuels? Not just new infrastructure, but also existing infrastructure needs to make that transition. And again, how do we support the communities and the workers in that transition? There has to be some real investments. And right now, yeah, there aren’t a whole lot of programs out there that help support the costs to go from natural gas and oil to electric or healthier types, or solar. There’s very little support and programming for that. So we really want to make sure that if we are going to make those goals by 2030, to move away from climate pollution, that we actually do so in an intentional way that doesn’t leave any of our community behind.
Jill Mangaliman:
I think that, yeah, the more that we can continue to have really strong place-based solutions, and support the local communities in building up their resilience plans, whether it’s like increasing their food security or emergency plans, or creating centers and where folks can access health services in times of crisis, or even shelter during wildfire, all of these will help not only create jobs locally, but also will help kind of meet many of our goals at the same time. And yeah, they should be around these areas of affordable housing. So they should go hand in hand together. See a lot of potential for partnership and also a lot of alignment in goals. But yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot. The Green New Deal, it’s a big deal, and much needed.
John Farrell:
Abigail, were there specific things that your organization was looking for in terms of the initiatives or particular programs or ideas that Jumpstart would fund in Seattle?
Abigail Juaner:
I think that Jill has already talked about it. Our Climate Justice Program is actively involved with the Green New Deal conversation.
John Farrell:
Things that I saw in terms of an ask of the city, as part of this Green New Deal initiative program, was that there would be funding for a Community Advisory Board that would help oversee how the money was spent. I guess I’m curious to hear what’s important about having that community advisory role, and then is that actually happening as far as you know?
Jill Mangaliman:
Yeah. Earlier this year, we were also like, “What the heck? What’s going on?” Because that was the next step after the Green New Deal passed. We ensured that there was going to be a creation of a Green New Deal Oversight Board to implement that vision. And so earlier this year we heard that there wasn’t going to be staffing or funding. That all changed with the Jumpstart. Some of the Green New Deal coalition, we were able to get in there and state our needs. I think the reason why we pushed for it is that we know that implementation is key. We can have this really great vision, we can pass policies, but unless community is engaged in leading and driving, we can’t guarantee it’s going to reach the people on the ground.
Jill Mangaliman:
So this is also a very necessary piece for accountability that it would actually happen, that would be involving people who are impacted. So the advisory board had folks, very specifically, from environmental justice communities, representing youth, Native tribes, as well as labor workers so that we can have a say in where these resources go. The importance of having it staffed and resourced by the city is also for them to also be accountable and put their money where their mouth was. Right? To actually dedicate resources to ensure that this body can convene and be supported for community members.
Jill Mangaliman:
It’s very difficult to sit on these governance boards without any support. People take time from their working day where they have childcare or transportation needs, and on top of that needing to organize a meeting and gather notes and gather research. It was a way for the city to actually invest and dedicate to their commitment, to these Green New Deal goals. We also seen when there isn’t staffing or resources that the burden falls, again, on the community members. We really want to see the city step up and actually commit to making those goals and the Green New Deal.
John Farrell:
I have some first hand experience with that in Minneapolis, where I sit on an advisory committee to some of the city’s clean energy work. The meetings are a couple of hours long every quarter and in the late afternoon, and there’s no support for the folks who participate. There’s no stipend. There’s no meal. There’s no childcare. In fact, they used to have snacks, just like trail mix or something like that, for people to have. Then they took that away. So it’s really just striking how difficult it makes it. Because I’m a professional. I can bill my work time to participate in that, and it’s lovely. But it really precludes ordinary folks from participating.
Abigail Juaner:
I just want to add that it’s actually exciting to put together the Green New Deal Advisory Board. Especially because, I think, just last month, actually not too long ago, the city had just voted to pass the legislation to stand up a permanent equitable development initiative advisory board. We’ve had the interim advisory board for a few years now, and we’ve always wanted to have a permanent board for it. It’s exciting to really see the city commit to being accountable to the communities who are closest to the problems and also know the solutions that are needed.
Jessica Del Fiacco:
Sorry to interrupt the conversation, but I wanted to thank you for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power. If you enjoy learning about innovative local policy solutions, I hope you’ll consider heading over to ILSR.org/donate to help support our work. Beyond making this podcast possible, your donations support all of our work at ILSR. You can help us produce the research and resources necessary to push back against concentrated corporate power and build strong local communities. Go to ILSR.org/donate. Any amount is sincerely appreciated.
Jessica Del Fiacco:
And now back to John Farrell’s conversation with Jill Mangaliman and Abigail Juaner about Seattle’s Jumpstart Tax.
John Farrell:
One question I had about the funding, and both of you have alluded to this really important advisory role that the community plays in determining how funds are spent. I was also curious, one of the things that I have heard a lot from folks is that you’ll set out these broad goals about how resources should be spent, and the game of the legislation is that we want to help communities that have struggled, whether that’s energy burdened, or communities of color that have been red lined. Is there a part of the work, a way that the city is identifying geography or demographics or something like that so there’s a way to be accountable? Like, “Hey, we spent $10 million. We know that it went to the right place.” How do you track that, I guess, is what I’m curious about?
Jill Mangaliman:
Yeah. I think part of it is also how do we… The people on the advisory committee should have roots or connection in the community that they are experts, and so they would know where is it going. But also how do we match that with data? There is the Washington Disparities Map, Health Disparities Map, that actually both our organizations advised on. It was worked on in partnership with the University of Washington and Front and Centered, which is a statewide climate coalition that we’re both part of, and looking to how do we utilize data and mapping, and where are the most vulnerable communities, risk of climate and displacement, and then utilizing our community relationships and understanding of the neighborhoods and identifying, “Okay, these are the priority places and communities.”
Jill Mangaliman:
There exists a environmental justice steering committee at the city that’s carrying out the equity and environment agenda that a few years ago created. So there already exists like tons of information and community expertise on where are the most environmental hotspots in our city and the communities who are leading that work. So I think it’s just a matter of how do we break down those barriers so those folks can actually be resourced to do that work. I feel like there’s so much, already, much research has already been done of where are the communities most at risk of displacement? And so the goal of this advisory committee is to break down those barriers and make it less challenging to access resources so that the community can continue to do the good work that they’re doing. That’s my take.
John Farrell:
Like a lot of cities in doing this local climate and energy work, over 150 cities have made, for example, a hundred percent renewable energy commitments by some date. Buildings and transportation obviously are a really big piece of this renewable energy goal. Obviously we’ve already talked a little bit about the linkages between housing affordability and displacement and the Green New Deal. Will this fund, the Jumpstart Tax fund, the 200 and some million a year, be enough to help address these issues and to help make that transition? Which as you mentioned, is only a decade away, really, in terms of that clean energy switch?
Jill Mangaliman:
I don’t think it’s enough, but it’s a big start. Yes. You’re going to need much more action, more resources, more creativity.
Abigail Juaner:
Yeah, absolutely. I think even… Is the a question have we done enough? Or, yeah. I think that’s the more important question. Have we done enough? Because I don’t think we have, so the answer is “no” and there’s always more we can do, and we can be more intentional in getting creative in where we get these funding sources.
John Farrell:
Do you see, just out of curiosity… In Minneapolis we raised the franchise fee, which is basically like a sales tax, if you will, on electric and gas bills as a small source of funding. It’s orders of magnitude less money than Seattle has through the Jumpstart Tax. But there have been some conversations about, we should go back to this and actually raise it a significant amount that would really fund a significant amount of work. It’s very early to ask this kind of question when you just passed it this year, but do you anticipate that this is a place you could go back and say, “Well, maybe we should raise more money from the same thing”, whether it’s changed the rates or apply it to different companies or something like that?
Jill Mangaliman:
I definitely think should assess like every few years, anyways, and see, is it working? Is it doing the thing, or feel like options should be put on the table and see how effective has this worked, also? I feel like that that’s a really important thing to figure out, but I, at this time, I don’t know.
John Farrell:
I think that this model of taxing high salaried employees of big businesses is something that other cities should consider? If you got to start over again, you’re helping to organize in Tacoma or you’re helping to organize in Phoenix or something like that, is there anything that you do differently when you’re thinking about the design of that tax or the way that you talk to the community about it?
Jill Mangaliman:
I don’t know if you know about Washington. Seattle’s sometimes viewed as an outlier. Like, “Well, they’re doing that stuff in Seattle.” So I do wish, if we were to go back in time, that there could have been more city collaboration so it wasn’t just this random event that happened in Seattle, but rather like… Because we know a lot of people have been pushed out of Seattle. And I think that other cities are also struggling right now with revenue and their own climate planning and housing issues. And so it’s not the problems we have in Seattle. Although they feel really heavy right now. I don’t even live in Seattle anymore, but I think that they actually would resonate with people across the state.
Jill Mangaliman:
So if there was more collaboration with other cities or other states, could be a powerful movement. And just in context, Washington State, we don’t have an income tax. We’re like one of them… We are the most regressive state in the country with our tax structure. So it’s an ongoing issue around revenue with the entirety of our state. And so one city stepping up and saying, “Okay, we’re going to tax these higher income earners.” It’s bold. Especially if this is a state that has had challenges doing that. So what would it look like if we all work together to change that?
Abigail Juaner:
I wish we didn’t have to wait for a pandemic to be proactive about moving away from a regressive tax system that continues to hurt already vulnerable communities, increasing sales tax. A dollar lost to the sales tax is a higher cost to someone who is already poor, compared to someone who earns $150,000 in annual compensation. If we’re being honest here, big corporations like Amazon don’t pay the full cost of their negative externalities. And in the middle of this pandemic, they continue to have huge earnings from this crisis.
John Farrell:
I don’t know if you seen my colleagues Stacy’s work, but we’ve got a big spear aimed at Amazon pretty much all the time. She does a lot of research on their market power and the fact that they are too big. Pretty much par for the course on this podcast, to have that frank conversation about how big corporations have a lot of influence.
John Farrell:
I appreciate what you were saying, Jill, as well about this idea of… Seattle has this reputation as sort of an outlier. And yet I feel like one of the things I’ve found really interesting just about, for example, the presidential campaign and the democratic primary is that some of the things that Bernie Sanders talked about, that you really don’t get from Joe Biden or some of the other candidates, was this idea that corporations have too much power and there is some shared belief of that across the political spectrum. There even a lot of conservatives who say, “Yeah, we don’t want these private institutions to be able to control our lives, to limit our choices and our freedoms.”
John Farrell:
So it’s one of the things I find so intriguing about this approach is that something like an income tax is, I think, fairly partisan in terms of how things fall down. But something like this that really targets high earners at big corporations, or really, I think maybe even more than anything, focuses on big corporations, focuses on a problem that I think, broadly, a lot of Americans see as a threat to their way of life and to fairness.
Jill Mangaliman:
Yes, I agree. I feel like whenever we have community dialogues, people are thinking it. But then when they get in a room together with other people also thinking, and they’re like, “Oh, man. Other people think this, too?” I think that’s also the role that Sage and Got Green plays. It’s like we kind of bring people together and just talk about what’s going on in our community, and people get fired up and want to do stuff. That’s where the people power, the importance of bringing our communities to these spaces, to that point where they’re like, “Okay, things can change. It doesn’t have to always be like this.”
Jill Mangaliman:
I am very inspired right now, even though things are really hard with COVID and the police killings, and just life is hard right now. But I’m really inspired by the youth organizing, by the energy in the streets, and I think that’s really what’s been creating all of these gains, these organizing games recently.
John Farrell:
That a really nice way to wrap up. I’m wondering, Abigail, if you have anything that, whether it’s in the work that you’re doing or something that you’ve been reading, that sort of helps keep you going through 2020, which I think is a high bar for a lot of folks? Is there anything that you’d like to share that sort of helps you keep energy for this work in a trying time?
Abigail Juaner:
Yeah. I just wrote it down. The solidarity work that we’re seeing in our communities is really inspiring. We already know that a lot of our community partners are the first responders in their communities when the crisis hit. I think that Got Green and Sage, we’re a values driven organization, and we were to turn our values and ideas and to transformative action. And the city, it did the right thing for passing progressive revenue because it’s in the critical and worse moments when we reveal who we are as leaders, as community members, and what our true values look like in action.
Abigail Juaner:
So for the council to demonstrate what their values are by standing in solidarity with our BIPOC communities, that keeps me going. It makes the work a little easier, even though there’s a lot of challenges that continue to come up. Seeing the power that we’re building through our organizing work and being able to hold our elected leaders accountable, that keeps us going.
Jill Mangaliman:
God, you just inspire me. I really do want to give a shout out to the folks who’ve been leading this work, Decriminalize Seattle, King County Equity Now. That’s some powerful Black led organizing in our city. Also the COVID Mutual Aid. We’ve just been seeing this spread all over the county, all over the city. Folks are stepping up in leadership, and it’s really inspiring. There’s even new organizations popping up. I’m happy to be part of it.
John Farrell:
Well, Jill and Abigail, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me about your work and the really big success, I think not just for Seattle, but in terms of modeling what other cities can do to approach some of these thorny issues with the Jumpstart Tax. It is very exciting to be able to tell this story and to, I think, help seed some ideas like this for other cities about how they attack these very challenging issues and to do it in a time when your traditional sources of revenue are not as robust. So thanks again for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Jill Mangaliman:
No problem.
Abigail Juaner:
Thank you for having us.
Jessica Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to ILSR.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s ILSr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website. Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by me, Jessica Del Fiacco, and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco, and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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35 min
October 16, 2020Is It Finally Time to Break up Big Tech?
In this bonus episode of Building Local Power, ILSR Co-director Stacy Mitchell and Senior Researcher Ron Knox dig into the new report from the House Antitrust Subcommittee on monopoly power in digital markets. The report is the result of a more than a year-long investigation into the anticompetitive behavior of the four biggest tech companies: Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple.
Jess, Ron, and Stacy discuss:
Highlights from the report’s findings.
The most important recommendations from the report, including that these companies should be broken up along product lines.
How this report and its recommendations fits into the history of antitrust action in the United States.
What we can expect to happen next and how the impact of this report might go beyond these four companies.

“…we should recognize that the power that these companies have, and their ability to engage in those kinds of behaviors and to use those sort of predatory tactics, is a function of shifts in policy. I mean, had Amazon come along in an earlier era, things that it did to gain this incredible position would have invited criminal prosecution.”

Related Resources
Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets: Majority Staff Report and Recommendations
Don’t Let Amazon Get Any Bigger by Stacy Mitchell, New York Times
Why Antitrust History Is So Important by Ron Knox, Washington Post
Transcript
Jess Del Fiacco:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power. A podcast dedicated to thought-provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth and accountability remain in local hands. Today, I’m joined by ILSR co-director Stacy Mitchell and senior researcher, Ron Knox. And we’re going to talk about the house antitrust subcommittee’s new report, which focuses on competition in digital markets. What you’ve gotten a few updates from us along the way. It’s been a more than a year long investigation, I believe. They’ve produced 400 plus, 500 plus pages. So Stacy and Ron, what is in this report?
Ron Knox:
Thanks Jess. So yeah, 450 pages, like right on the dot I think was the final version of that. So well, that’s the report and you’re right. More than a year long investigation, 16 months, 15 months, 16 months, something like that. And the report is essentially the comprehensive findings of this more than a year long investigation into the monopoly power of the four big tech companies, as we think about them, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon. So I think the report was really successful in showing the ways in which these four tech companies came to dominate and came to monopolize their respective markets. The report correctly connected the threads between these companies to show that the problem, that is the reason for their monopolization, are common among the companies. And in that way, they’re more systemic in their problems of policy that can ultimately be corrected with some changes to the law.
Ron Knox:
So the prime example identified in the report and identified in the investigation were mergers, right? The investigation found that the poor companies had collectively closed hundreds of mergers over the last decade. And that at least some of those mergers happened because the tech monopolies wanted to extinguish competition from smaller companies that they thought could challenge its dominance in some way and at some point down the line. So the evidence showed that this was for example, Facebook’s broad strategy when acquiring Instagram, when acquiring WhatsApp and other rivals. Now Facebook’s monopoly position is so strong that it mainly competes with its own apps. Rather than any other social media company out there. For Amazon these kinds of acquisitions included rivals like Zappos, the shoe seller, that was its primary competition until Amazon forced it into a merger by undercutting its prices.
Ron Knox:
And also diapers.com is a good example of that. The strategy and the tactics for Amazon and for all of these companies were much the same throughout this report as the report identified. So that’s kind of one piece of it. Then you have the conduct. And I’ll just note that a lot of the monopoly conduct that the investigation identified, had to do with data and the way these companies acquired and exploited data. So this is data as market power or as a tool to enforce market power. So Amazon’s reach into many various industries and its role as essential infrastructure and as a gatekeeper to the marketplace, allow it to have access to data that no other company can access. And it’s online marketplace, it knows what’s selling, it knows who it’s selling to. It knows when and why. And it can leverage that data to preference its own products and services.
Ron Knox:
And it can, and indeed has spied on and used data from the small businesses that rely on Amazon to reach their customers. So that’s just kind of part and parcel to a lot of the kinds of abuses that this report found up Google, Facebook, Apple, all use their positions as really critical infrastructure in their various markets to collect troves of data. And that data enhances their power. So those are just two monopoly tactics that the report uncovered mergers, infrastructure leveraging. I’ll point out that these are very high tech companies. Obviously we know that, but these are not high tech tactics. These are not like high-tech actions. These are the same old school monopoly tactics that really powerful companies have used over the years to try to gain unfair advantages in the economy.
Jess Del Fiacco:
So they had all these findings and they found these various abuses of power. So what does the report say we should do about it? Do they want us to create new laws, do they focus on existing legislation? Was there anything in particular you were excited to see included in their recommendations?
Stacy Mitchell:
Yeah. The report’s recommendations are really terrific and very comprehensive. They fall into three main buckets. So the first set of recommendations has to do with, “Okay, now that we have this, this incredibly concentrated markets power in the hands of just a few companies, what do we do to actually restructure those industries and markets so that they’re open and fair and competitive once again?” So the report in this case is really calling for congressional actions. It’s essentially saying things have gotten so far off track with monopoly power, that it’s time for Congress to step in and put in place some new legislation to attack this head-on. So that’s one set of recommendations.
Stacy Mitchell:
The second has to do with strengthening our existing antitrust laws. Not because the laws themselves aren’t strong, but the courts have issued a number of rulings and the enforcement agencies have taken a number of positions that have really weakened how we enforce these laws.
Stacy Mitchell:
And so that set of recommendations is basically calling for Congress to clarify predatory pricing is illegal. To actually put in place and bring the law back to just sort of its original strength. And then the last set of recommendations has to do with strengthening the enforcement agencies, making them more transparent and accountable to the public. Making sure they have the resources they need to go after monopoly power and that kind of thing.
Jess Del Fiacco:
So what exactly is Congress’s role? What do they need to do to make these markets more competitive?
Stacy Mitchell:
Actually the very first recommendation in the report and the one that we think is most important and is really essential for the other recommendations to actually work, is that Congress needs to split these companies up. And particularly to split them up along business lines. So in the case of Amazon, what we see is that Amazon uses its power in one area essentially exploits that power in order to move into adjacent industries with like kind of a built-in advantage. So one example of this that we’ve documented here at ILSR in our work is Amazon has this controlling power over third party sellers on its marketplace. And it basically forces them to use its shipping and package delivery service. So Amazon has become this dominant player and logistics. It’s now delivering as many packages almost as UPS and FedEx. And it’s done that basically by strong arming the companies that depend on its website.
Stacy Mitchell:
And it does that over and over again. It leverages power in one area to gain the upper hand in another. And so the way we need to address that is actually just to pass legislation that would require Amazon to spin itself off into multiple companies. So that’s the most important recommendation.
Stacy Mitchell:
And then another recommendation that I would highlight is one that has to do with requiring that dominant digital platforms operate with a duty of fair dealing and fair terms. So essentially what that’s saying is that Amazon as a marketplace, that all these other companies rely on, can’t exploit that position to favor some companies over others, to charge exorbitant fees. All the ways we see now that Amazon takes advantage of sellers and abuses them. And indeed in some cases takes advantage of customers too. Applying standards of non-discrimination. Basically saying you’re a kind of common carrier, as Ron said, your infrastructure and therefore you have an obligation to treat all comers fairly. So that’s another really key recommendation on the report.
Jess Del Fiacco:
I think that breaking up Amazon seems like a big new idea, but Ron recently you wrote in the Washington post about how this fits within historical precedent in America for dealing with monopolies. Would you say that the recommendations in this report breaking up these companies, does that fall in line with things we’ve done in the past? Or does this go further in any way?
Ron Knox:
I mean I think it falls right in line with a lot of, you know, the actions that we as a country have taken over the last century or so to reign in corporate power. As anyone here at ILSR internally will tell you I love the history of this stuff. And I think it’s really, really fascinating. And I think it’s really interesting to see and follow all of the parallels between these kind of past issues of monopoly power and then the congressional reaction to that, the very democratic reaction to that power. And also I’ll mention just real quickly that yeah, I mean, breakups, a lot of pro monopoly folks, a lot of folks who take the sides of these kind of corporate titans say that this is a radical action to break up these companies.
Ron Knox:
It’s not and in fact, it’s like part and parcel to the antitrust laws themselves. And it’s a crucial kind of tool in the toolbox both of Congress and of the antitrust enforcers that’s been used repeatedly over the years to good effect. I mean so just a couple of examples of the way that Congress has responded to these kind of peaks and spikes in monopoly power over the years. I don’t know how common knowledge this is, but the first thing [inaudible 00:10:29] more than a century ago, 1890, and it’s commonly called the Sherman act. And it’s a good law. And it’s a strong law. And that law after it was passed was used really successfully to break up some of the headline monopolies of those days.
Ron Knox:
Which was like Standard Oil, American Tobacco and so on. A few other companies. But the law was quite narrow. So it didn’t capture all of the various kinds of conduct that can lead to monopoly power, including mergers and so on. So there is still this kind of monopoly problem coursing through the economy that was not addressed by the first law.
Ron Knox:
And a part of that was the power of Wall Street financers. So the public call this the money trust and what they meant by the money trust was these like four or five really powerful financers led by JP Morgan and some others who used both their wealth and their political kind of power to build and prop up these monopolies throughout the economy. So JP Morgan himself and his money helped create US Steel and then helped to create some of the companies that we’re really familiar with today, AT&T, General Electric and so on.
Ron Knox:
And there was really no way to address, using that first law, there was no way to address the way that he used his power and the way that he built these monopolies. So what happened? So Congress convened a group of lawmakers and that committee’s findings and report led to major legal reforms. It led to the passage of a law called the Clayton act, which really has become the bedrock of antitrust enforcement in America. That stopped mergers, stopped what are known as interlocking directorates, which a lot of these kinds of Wall Street financers use to control these companies and so on. And it also led to the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, which is now our primary anti-monopoly enforcement agency in America. So the democratic intervention there worked and by 1914, JP Morgan had essentially gotten his hand out of a lot of these companies, including AT&T and the railroads and so on.
Ron Knox:
So that’s just one example, but we can see this pattern throughout history. In the new deal, a lot of the congressional investigations led by the temporary national economic committee, which is more commonly called the monopoly committee. It revealed problematic corporate power throughout the economy. And, and a lot of those findings led to much more stringent and dedicated antitrust enforcement and led to some very important legal changes as well. So essentially we’re just… This isn’t new, this isn’t radical, these are things that have happened kind of over and over over the course of the last century or so. And this is Congress using it’s democratic kind of power to terrain in this very undemocratic kind of corporate power that now really dominates the economy.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah. So you’ve gotten close to touching on this, but I just want to dig in a little bit deeper. Another argument from the pro monopolist side is this is America where if a man’s on track to become the world’s first trillionaire, we should just give him a pat on the back. No matter how he did that. But really what you’re saying is that monopoly power is fundamentally a threat to democracy. Could you just expand on that a little bit more?
Ron Knox:
Sure, absolutely. So, the things we see with monopoly power have been… The problems of monopoly power, I should say, have been a concern in America since the very dawn of the country. I mean, Thomas Jefferson wanted to include an amendment to the constitution that would essentially ban monopolies or restrict monopolies. The Boston Tea Party was an anti-monopoly uprising basically. So these things are kind of ingrained in the fabric of America and for good reason. Because in a body like Congress, you have real democracy. The members of that body are elected by people and they’re elected to represent the will of the people. You don’t have that same kind of thing with corporate power. There’s no democratic checks and balances internally to a monopoly, it just wields power.
Ron Knox:
And it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about it, it wheels power for the sake of profit and its shareholders and so on. And it’s not just economic power that those monopoly companies wield. It’s real political power as well. You can see that in the way that monopoly has been policy to favor bigness and to favor themselves the amount of money and manpower at [inaudible 00:15:17], for example, to make sure that the laws favor them. So it has this very undemocratic kind of nature to it. And Congress has always been the counterbalance to that undemocratic power.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Before I go onto my next question, let’s take a short break.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of building local power. If you’ve appreciated our coverage of the investigation into the power of big tech, I hope you’ll consider heading over to archive.ilsr.org/donate to help support our work. Beyond making this podcast possible, your donation support all of our work at ILSR, help us produce the research and resources necessary to push back against concentrated corporate power and build strong local communities. Go to archive.ilsr.org/donate. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. And now back to my conversation with ILSR Stacy Mitchell and Ron Knox.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Stacy, do you know what should we expect to happen next? What steps might Congress take now that they have this report?
Stacy Mitchell:
Well, the Congressman who chairs this committee and really led this whole investigation, David Cicilline has said that we can expect legislation to be introduced maybe as soon as the end of this year, like before the year is out. And we’ll see what happens with the election. I do think one thing that’s interesting to note on that front is that the report is a report of the majority on the committee, which are Democrats. But there was a set of several Republicans on the committee who issued simultaneously their own report, which agrees with many of the conclusions of the majority. And in fact says that Amazon is its business model is quote inherently anti-competitive, which is a pretty strong conclusion to draw. So there is some level of bipartisan support for this, but I think what happens with the election, we’ll see where we land and how that sets the stage potentially for legislation next year.
Stacy Mitchell:
And I think it’s really interesting. I mean, part of what this committee has done, that’s been so heartening is that they have not only done this incredible investigation of the tech companies and really in great detail, kind of comprehensively laid out the problem. They’ve also done it in a way that’s been very accessible to people as we’ve talked about before. I mean, there’s a section on the report that has the subtitle Bullying, so they’re not using arcane antitrust. I mean it’s a very juicy report if you are an antitrust scholar, there’s a lot for you to really like about this report. But anybody can pick it up and read it, which I think is pretty remarkable.
Stacy Mitchell:
Well, what’s also been really critical about this whole process is that by doing this, the committee has illustrated the power of investigation and the importance of congressional investigation. And given us kind of a glimpse of what would it be like if Congress actually worked on problems. Like delved into the hard stuff and came to a shared set of facts and then tried to figure out what are the right solutions. And so within this, you can start to see not only how do we solve the problem of monopoly power and that kind of dominance of these tech companies, but also how do we solve the problem and what’s gone wrong with Congress.
Stacy Mitchell:
So I think we’re likely to see legislation. I think there’s growing consensus that something very substantial, including breakups, needs to be done. And I think what is really important is that this committee has said, “This is Congress’s job.” And it’s been a long time. I mean, as Ron kind of talked about, it’s been a long time since Congress has stepped up to the plate on antitrust, but historically Congress has always had a role. Congress has stepped in every so often looked at this problem, added new legislation, clarify the meaning of laws, gotten the courts back on track. And we’re at a moment where the courts have gone wildly off track. The enforcement agencies wildly off track and it’s time for Congress to step back up. And so it’s pretty exciting. And I think there’s some real momentum heading into the next session.
Ron Knox:
I think that folks can make this argument that there’s nothing wrong with being big in America. There’s nothing wrong with having a big powerful company and you have the right to be a monopoly in America. And I think it’s good to have the argument about whether or not that is true and whether or not that’s the intent of the law and the intent of Congress when they passed the law. But I think what this report really makes clear is that that’s not the issue here. Because it’s not just that these companies are big, it’s that these companies have used their size and their market power to crush competition, to exploit rivals. To really control the pathway to market for a lot of other companies in the economy. And that’s different.
Ron Knox:
We’re not just talking about bigness, we’re talking about what the report identifies as bad actors and bad actions and all of those things can and should be reached by our anti-monopoly laws. So just going back to your comment for a second, that I should have mentioned in the first place, but I think that’s an important distinction to make.
Stacy Mitchell:
Yeah, that’s totally right. And we should recognize that the power that these companies have and their ability to engage in those kinds of behaviors and to use those sort of predatory tactics, is a function of shifts in policy. I mean had Amazon come along in an earlier era, things that it did to gain this incredible position would have invited criminal prosecution. Like we used to prosecute these things. And we used to have more dynamic economy and economy that had more business startups where there was a fair distribution of income. Where working people had an easier time forming unions. I mean we used to have an economy that worked better in a lot of ways. Save of course for the fact that people of color were often excluded from those protections.
Stacy Mitchell:
But in a lot of ways, in the mid 20th century, we had more… We had a much better distribution of income, distribution of power. And we have really gone to these extreme levels of inequality. I was on a panel this morning and someone said that Jeff Bezos has now become worth $200 billion. And what that means is that he could write a check for a $100000 dollars to every single one of Amazon’s 800 and some thousand employees. He could write a check for a hundred thousand dollars, every one of them. And he would still have as much money as he had in February of this year. I mean if that’s not an illustration of monopoly power, I don’t know what it is. And it’s like we have to tackle that if we want to restore democracy and some sense of liberty and equality and what this country is supposed to be about.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Say we see new legislation, if not before the end of the year coming soon out of Congress, will that have affects throughout the economy or throughout society beyond just these four companies? Will that shape, the future of our economy in some way?
Stacy Mitchell:
That’s a great question, because I think you’re absolutely right that the kind of legislation that’s being contemplated will restore a lot of the anti-monopoly checks and balances to our policy. And that will affect lots of different industries. I think because of the nature of the tech companies power, because of the kinds of surveillance that Ron talked about, because their role is essential infrastructure because of the very evident threat to democracy that that poses, they have gotten lawmakers’ attention. In a different kind of way that the monopolistic companies that came before them haven’t.
Stacy Mitchell:
And so what’s great about that is that it then is now causing them to really look deeper at this whole problem and to propose legislation that would address monopoly power broadly. We’ll see what bills actually come out of the recommendations, but in terms of the recommendations in the report, there are things like easier standards around proving predatory pricing. Which is something that lots of big companies and predatory companies have engaged in across the economy. We’ve seen it with Walmart, for example.
Stacy Mitchell:
So there are provisions around merger guidelines and standards. There are provisions around how the antitrust agencies operate and being more accountable to the public. So all of these things will affect not just the tech companies, if they become law, but they’ll effect powerful corporations across the economy and really enable farmers and small business people and working people to actually get a fair share.
Ron Knox:
I think all of that is exactly right. And the thing I’ll highlight when I think about what the effect will be, if were all of the recommendations in this report to happen, obviously the structural separation is important and there are lots of important recommendations. But a part of the recommendations would restrict mergers of a certain size. And basically, a new law would say a merger that creates a company in the industry over excise, it just can’t happen. There’s a structural presumption against it. Imagine the effect that that kind of law would have on the economy, both from a small business perspective and from a you and me, regular person on the street perspective. For small businesses you would have all of these other options of places to sell your goods into.
Ron Knox:
So imagine you’re a small farmer, you’re a family farmer. And instead of having two or three massive meat packing plants to buy your goods, you have five, six, seven meat packing plants in your region to sell your goods into. You’re going to get better prices for your goods, for your livestock, for your products. And that’s going to have rippling effects throughout your community because you’re doing better. You’ll have the ability to hire, to grow, to do all these things that we should all, that a small business in America should be able to do. But now cannot do because of this kind of heightened monopoly power that really creates these bottlenecks.
Ron Knox:
And then from a consumer perspective, I mean imagine if you’re… I always go back to airlines and I know that airlines they’re for business travelers or whatever, but honestly, imagine instead of having three national airlines or four national airlines that we have now, you had seven, you had eight, your life is going to be better if you have to fly. Your tickets are going to be less expensive. You’re not going to have baggage fees. You’re going to have more room. You’re going to have all these other things, all these other ancillary benefits. And so I think the merger law recommendations in the report themselves can have these massive rippling effects throughout the economy. That will be better for all of the various actors that have to interact with monopoly power.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Wow! An economy that works for everybody. What a concept. Sounds pretty good. Okay. Well, thank you guys for joining me today. Just so everyone listening knows, keep an eye out on our website on the independent business section of our website in particular. We’ll have resources, explainers, a petition, so you can help make sure that your representatives are paying attention to this report and taking its recommendations to heart. That’ll be all up on archive.ilsr.org. Yeah, thank you Ron and Stacy for joining me.
Ron Knox:
Thank you, Jess.
Stacy Mitchell:
Thanks, Jess.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. The show is produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco, and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction Al. We’re the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I’m Jess Del Fiacco and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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29 min
October 15, 2020How the Baltimore Farm Alliance is Fighting Food Apartheid and Building Community Resilience – Episode 111 of Building Local Power
On this week’s episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Denzel Mitchell, Deputy Director of the Baltimore Farm Alliance, and Sophia Hosain, leader of ILSR’s composting work in Baltimore. The Baltimore Farm Alliance is a membership organization of urban farms, neighborhood growers, and friends that use connection, resource sharing, and collective advocacy with respect to food, land, and water to expand communities’ self-determination and power. Jess, Denzel, and Sophia discuss:
How the history of redlining and systematic disenfranchisement which destroyed Black wealth and land ownership is contributing to current day food insecurity.
The importance of Black agricultural land ownership and land sovereignty in building self-reliant communities, and how the Baltimore Farm Alliance is supporting this vision.
Food apartheid and why the term “food desert” is an inaccurate term that should be retired.
The importance of composting as an act of resistance, and the role that ILSR’s Community Composting Initiative is playing to expand composting in Baltimore.
How composting is bringing communities together, creating new ways to look at our relationship to the Earth, and why we should all be composting.
Educational and inspirational reading (and watching) recommendations. Don’t miss Denzel and Sophia’s suggestions in the resources section below!

“We are here. We are the children, we are the descendants of these folks that you moved out, that you did wrong, that you did dirty, and we are taking control of the food system and making ourselves a part of the conversation.”

Related Resources
Black Yield Institute
Baltimore’s Strange Fruit
Lovecraft Country
Karen Washington: It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid
Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City by Antero Pietila
Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights by Pete Daniel
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
The Warmth Of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White, Ladonna Redmond
Transcript
Jess Del Fiacco:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought-provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Today I am here with my ILSR colleague, Sophia Hosain, who leads ILSR’s composting work in Baltimore, as well as Denzel Mitchell, who is the deputy director of the Baltimore Farm Alliance. Welcome to the show guys.
Denzel Mitchell:
Thanks for having us.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Happy to have you here. Thanks for taking the time. Denzel, could you start us off by just giving us a brief overview of the work that you do with the Baltimore Farm Alliance? What’s your mission in the city?
Denzel Mitchell:
Our mission is to build a sustainable community of farmers, food workers, and land-based progressive activists through racial equity and land tenure and ownership lens. The organization was founded by Maya Kosok in 2008 through an OSI fellowship. I was one of the founding members, and we’ve been working towards technical services, education and support of urban agriculture, teaching, training, collective marketing, community building, and sustainable agriculture, specifically based around building soils in the city since then. And I’ve been their deputy director since February of this year.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Very cool stuff. Sophia, maybe you could talk about ILSR’s connections with the Baltimore Farm Alliance and a little bit more about our work in Baltimore.
Sophia Hosain:
Yeah. So ILSR established a few community composting sites in Baltimore this last year through funding with NRGC and the Rockefeller Foundation, and a couple of those sites are from Alliance members. So one of them is Strength to Love Farm, which actually Denzel used to be the farm manager there for many years. And they’re in West Baltimore. And we are also working with a couple other demonstration sites in Park Heights. We’ve got Plantation, which I believe is also a member of the Farm Alliance. And Denzel, is Hidden Harvest a member of Farm Alliance as well?
Denzel Mitchell:
Yes. Yup, absolutely. There’s 19 member organizations throughout the city, 16 farms, three community gardens. And yes, the three farms that you named are all members.
Sophia Hosain:
Awesome. Yeah, so we’ve been trying to help the farms build capacity to be able to process some of their own organic waste that they’re creating on farm. And so we’ve been working with the three bin system right now, and we’re exploring some other investible options to put in place later this year.
Jess Del Fiacco:
So now that I’ve grilled you, I’m going to hand it over to you, Sophia, to ask some questions too.
Sophia Hosain:
Okay, cool. Denzel, I want to get a feel for how you got to where you are. I know you have a strong identity as a farmer and as a land worker. And prior to your position with the Farm Alliance, you were the farm manager at Strength to Love Farm. And I know also that actually the Farm Alliance now is working a lot on land ownership and community empowerment through land trust. So I know that black agricultural land ownership has declined drastically from it’s peak in the 1920s, where it was about at 14% to now less than 1% as of 2002. Could you expand on the work that you’re doing with Baltimore Farm Alliance to build land sovereignty and community land trust?
Denzel Mitchell:
Wow, there’s a lot.
Sophia Hosain:
Real quick.
Denzel Mitchell:
All right. Yeah, real quick. So, yes, I do identify correctly as a farmer and a land worker. More specifically, I identify as a black farmer and land worker. Even more specifically, I identify as a black farmer that was born and raised in America’s heartland on land that was stolen from the indigenous folks and then quasi, given back to them in the Dawes Act. So I grew up in Oklahoma on land that, as you all well know, was given, essentially given away to homesteaders and folks that were expanding out West. My family ended up on the Dawes Rolls as black Creek Freedmen.
Denzel Mitchell:
And I didn’t realize at the time that that would inform… I didn’t realize throughout my childhood and adolescence and even well into my adulthood, that that would inform a lot of my work until I got to be in an actual grownup who was now thinking about buying land and buying a home and figuring out where to settle and were a place to call home.
Denzel Mitchell:
And so that’s been my work that’s been central to my thinking in my work since 2008, 2009, and being in the city and realizing that, A, there isn’t a whole lot of farmland around here, but let’s start farming, let’s start growing food for production. And then that growing and developing into this idea of now trying to own some land in this system of capitalism, the idea of buying, borrowing money from a bank, you guys know all this. And so it was really a achy and painful idea that we weren’t really able to realize in Baltimore and in Baltimore County, because land is so expensive.
Denzel Mitchell:
And so my involvement with the Farm Alliance now is really about getting folks access to the land that is here that is available, that is ours. As Zachary Curtis said so eloquently yesterday in the teaching, if it’s public land, it belongs to us because we’re citizens. We are part of the populace. We’re part of the public. So it’s our land. And so my role now, part of my role in the Farm Alliance is to help the folks in the organizations that have established stewardship and control of the land that they are using, that they’ve gotten the opportunity to use to produce food for folks, in their control for as long as we possibly can.
Denzel Mitchell:
And so, yes, we are looking at ways to own the land, we are looking at ways to get the land into a trust so that it is controlled and it cannot be taken away by a developer or by the city when now the city decides all of a sudden that this land is worth way more money as a parking lot or a store or a condo than it would be to produce food for folks and food makers in this community and in this economy. And under Mariya Strauss’s leadership in the last three years, the Farm Alliance has shifted its focus that way. And so I came in at a great time.
Denzel Mitchell:
So I think that was a roundabout way of answering your question. But yeah, that’s what we’re doing. Each of our farms is looking at their use of land a little differently. And so it’s really unique to what the farm itself, whether it’s privately owned or whether it’s a program as a part of another nonprofit, what they want to do with the land that they’re on. And we’ve got also got folks that are coming into the city or coming back into the city and wanting to create economy on a little piece of land. And so what are the ways that they can do that?
Denzel Mitchell:
I think that what Chris [Maddox 00:07:34] is doing is really interesting and intriguing and empowering in terms of working with the private land owners, but then also buying some land and buying a home to turn into a community center. There’s a couple of organizations that are looking at putting the land into trust. There’s also a couple of organizations that have longterm leases with the city. And so really the organization is really just looking to push the envelope and push the understanding of how a city in an urban center really looks at the uses of land.
Jess Del Fiacco:
So is a lot of the land right now owned by the city or is it a pretty wide mix of whether it’s city owned, privately owned in some kind of nonprofit ownership model?
Denzel Mitchell:
Right, so most of the land that is being utilized by the farms in our network is owned by the city, either one of three departments in the city. And so over the years, that has been the first gateway into getting into farming, finding a vacant piece of property, finding out who owns it. And then generally speaking, if it’s been the city, it’s been fairly easy to set up shop either through an Adopt-a-Lot Agreement, which is now being phased out. But for a lot of people, especially when I was coming up in 2008, 2009, 2010, just having the ability to use the inefficacies or the shortcomings of bureaucracy, we were able to get permission to use a piece of property via an Adopt-a-Lot Agreement and then just roll that out.
Denzel Mitchell:
And then I think around 2000, well, Department of Plan’s Office of Sustainability created the Homegrown Baltimore leasing program. And so that was a way to get a lease with the city for five years with a two year right or refusal, and then an opportunity to re-up that agreement. And so I was a part of that process as an individual in the early years. And then I know Real Food Farm/Civic Works got a Homegrown Baltimore lease. And then a now defunct for-profit B corporation farm model called Big City Farms got one of those leases, which then kind of morphed into Strength to Love, i.e, Intersection of Change, taking over that lease. Just so that’s where things are now. So it really just depends. It has not been often that folks with means and resources are being able to come into the city and buy land, but that has also happened a few times.
Sophia Hosain:
What role do you see urban farms and gardens playing in combating the racially charged history of redlining and food apartheid in the city?
Denzel Mitchell:
There’s so many things, but the first thing, the most impactful thing, probably the thing that I can bet that is most tangible for me is just really just like changing the narrative and changing the relationship to farming, number one, and to food production, to the importance of agriculture, for me personally. This doesn’t really answer your question, but I know for myself and for my family and the folks that are in my community and that have been a part of this process since 2008 have really, really been charged by the notion of being able to produce food for yourself, for your family, for your community, right here next to you, not this like far off, hard to reach dream that is only attainable through a massive amount of resources, a massive amount of mechanization, and then a family that’s owned some land. It’s attainable through creating this identity or accepting this identity for yourself and then using the land that is available to you.
Denzel Mitchell:
As we know, there’s thousands of vacant lots all over the city, going through that process and tapping into the knowledge of our elders, the knowledge of our ancestors, the folks that have been in our families that have these tools and resources to be able to do it. So that’s one thing. Just like this new idea that, oh, food grows in the ground. It looks like this. It’s not always pretty. That the land is quite abundant, right? That basic knowledge that we don’t teach the kids at home, we don’t teach it to kids in schools, we don’t talk about it when we sit down to the dinner table, we definitely don’t talk about it when we sit down to most restaurants. So, this is all brand new. So that’s one thing that’s kind of, for me, the biggest thing and that was why we got into it.
Denzel Mitchell:
The second piece though, I think is the connection of [inaudible 00:12:24] sovereignty to land control as it relates to the land that I can see, that I’m looking at right now. We talk to a lot of people all the time about black folks having land in the South or black folks having land out in the Midwest and losing it. All these number of ways. Or black folks living in Baltimore City in these beautiful, well-kept concentrated neighborhoods, and then certain things happening. That’s been well documented now in hindsight, and now black folks have left. They’ve moved to the county, they’ve moved over here, they’ve moved over there. And then as a result, the city knocks down four or five blocks of homes that folks’ grandmas and aunties and uncles and daddies and whatever lived in.
Denzel Mitchell:
We are now coming back in the arts and the 20 teens and reclaiming some of that land and reestablishing this idea that we are here, right? That we are the children, we’re the descendants of these folks that you’ve moved out, that you did wrong, that you did dirty, and we are taking control of the food system and making ourselves a part of the conversation. Because one of the things that we know that the machine of capital, the machine of government, continues to turn on and the inequities and the disparities and the discrimination that have been baked into these systems are still here, but now we’ve gotten some of the knowledge to address some of that. And we’ve got some of the courage to stand in front of city council members and mayors and planners and say, “This doesn’t work for us. This is not the way things are supposed to be.”
Denzel Mitchell:
So it’s been a long time coming and I’ve come to this portion of the party a little late because I’m not from here. So I’ve really relied on folks that are from Baltimore to inform me and relied on the literature to inform me because I’m from Oklahoma where the land was expansive and sweeping down the plain as the song says, and it just seemed like there was plenty. But then my family, we lost ours too. So it’s like even when I wanted to farm, when I got the bug and I got infected with this idea of being a farmer, it’s like I couldn’t go home because my family had lost a land. We had 600 acres in Oklahoma. So we decided to set roots here and do the work here and really understand like this is what’s happening to folks in the city.
Denzel Mitchell:
So the monster looks different, but it’s doing the same work. Now we know that the systems that were created are not sustainable, that they’re not working, that they’re not feeding people. So we have to feed ourselves and we have to feed the folks that we love and we have to feed the folks that we’re connected to.
Sophia Hosain:
Wow, so powerful. I love hearing you talk about it. And just to do a quick plug, I know that you said that you are not from here, but that you do love to learn from folks in Baltimore. And I recently watched Baltimore’s Strange Fruit, which for our listeners who are not familiar, was a documentary that was created by Eric Jackson of the Black Yield Institute in Baltimore. I believe he’s from Cherry Hill, from South Baltimore.
Denzel Mitchell:
Yeah.
Sophia Hosain:
And I wanted, maybe it turns out you can talk to me a little bit about your relationship with Eric and to creating Baltimore’s Strange Fruit.
Denzel Mitchell:
Right on, right on. Eric Jackson is the homie. He’s God body in the flesh. I was actually introduced to Eric prior to his work with Black Yield by my wife, actually. They were working together at the Health Department. They met as young ’90s hip hop kids who grew up listening to the words of everybody from Chuck D, to Kara Swan, to Minister Louis Farrakhan, to Sister Souljah, to Audre Lorde. My wife came home and is like, “Yo, you have got to meet this dude. You all would love each other.” And I’m like, “Yeah, all right, whatever.” But we started working together and I was like, “Yo, I think I love this thing.” And so fast forward, marriage and kids. We worked together with Mount Pleasant Baptist Church’s Freedom School, and our babies have worked together and played together. And it’s about family and liberation and all the ways that we, as people of African descent need and want to be free and all the ways that we have to free ourselves and all the ways that we need to break the systems that have caged us.
Denzel Mitchell:
And so, I’m learning a lot from Eric. Eric is an organizer and an activist. And I did some organizing and activism work in Oklahoma, but here in Baltimore it’s different. The politics are different and the stakes are different. And the stakes are much higher because we’ve grown now. We got bills and we got kids and just got to go to school and got to live in the city. I’m learning a lot from him. I’m not going to sit here and say the nominal organizer or activist in the same ilk. I grow food, I’m a teacher. I spend a lot of my time reading to folks and telling them what to read and then trying to lead by example. That’s really my work.
Denzel Mitchell:
But Eric came to me early in the days of Black Yield Institute and said he wants to do this film about his family and his heritage and Baltimore and Cherry Hill and center around food security and food sovereignty. And our stories are very, very similar in terms of being raised by powerful women who understood the importance of family and understood the importance of tradition and understood the importance of food and what you took from that and how that informed your growth and development into fatherhood and into adulthood and into being a community member.
Denzel Mitchell:
So my son, my oldest son, who was shameless plug, who is now a film student at NYU, he actually asked Jesse to help out with the filming because he was a gaucho student and Jesse was really just getting into film. And so Eric was like, “Yo, can Jesse help out with this? And by the way, can you say a few words?” So it’s all in the family. So I love Eric, I love his wife, [inaudible 00:19:04], I love the babies, love Black Yield Institute. And so now, I’ve come full circle in that the Farm Alliance and Black Yield Institute are working in concert together in so many ways.
Jess Del Fiacco:
We’ll link to the Black Yield Institute’s website and the video from the post for this podcast episode. So if you go to archive.ilsr.org, you can find the post there. And then all the links to what we talked about will be there for you. I think this is a good place to take a quick break.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power. In every episode of this show, we bring stories about action taking place in communities across the country. If you enjoy the insight shared by guests like Denzel, I hope you’ll consider heading over to archive.ilsr.org/donate to help support our work. You’re making this podcast possible. Your donation support all of our work at ILSR. You can help us produce the research and resources necessary to push back against concentrated corporate power and build resilient local communities like we’re seeing at Baltimore. Go to archive.ilsr.org/donate. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. And now back to my conversation with Sophia Hosain and Denzel Mitchell at the Baltimore Farm Alliance.
Sophia Hosain:
I love the way that farming in Baltimore really feels like a family or a deal. And people call it small tomorrow. Like it’s there’s very close connections and you can get from point A to point B in just a couple of minutes. And I like the idea of the way that you talk about farming as a movement of the people to create systems that serve them when there is like this overarching bureaucracy that really doesn’t serve them and that where people fall through the cracks and there is no such thing as food security. Could you talk to me about the term food desert versus food apartheid and why we choose food apartheid?
Denzel Mitchell:
Yes, absolutely. But I’m just parroting much greater minds and thinkers than myself. There is no such thing as a food desert. We don’t use that term. We rebuke that as my grandmother would say, because deserts are not manmade. And we know that folks not having enough food, folks being deprived of sound, nutrition, healthcare, clean water is an act of man, not God, not of nature. So this idea that somebody lives in a barren place in the middle of the city with no access to food to feed themselves and their children is not real. It doesn’t work that way, right?
Denzel Mitchell:
And so we know the history of Jim Crow and how that affected our folks. We know the history of redlining in these cities and cutting people off from access. We know the history of planning and its ability to restrict folks’ movements, and we know the history of development and its ability to take essential structures, brick and mortar businesses away from families. And we know the history of this extractive, predatory capitalism that removes working Taylorism from these communities.
Denzel Mitchell:
And so food apartheid is, there’s a system in which that’s been created to separate, right? That’s what the word apartheid means is separate folks from good sound nutrition, separate babies from good sound nutrition. And we see it seep into these neighborhoods that are largely populated by black and brown working poor folks. And the grocery stores that have been removed, the food that they’re feeding to folks in hospice and hospitals and nursing and in the schools is by design, right? And the design is cyclical to keep us sick and destitute and dependent upon a system that is not designed to help us thrive.
Denzel Mitchell:
And so I can’t take credit for that thinking at all because there was time that I was like, I was talking about food deserts too. So it was Karen Washington, a powerful sister mama actually, out of Brooklyn, New York, who used the term food apartheid and explained it incredibly well in a article from Gorilla Magazine that I can send to you guys later that you should put the link up to. It was paradigm shifting. And I was like, “You know what? She’s right. That’s absolutely right.” And the reason why we did what we did was because of it. When we moved to Baltimore, 2006, we moved to Belair-Edison neighborhood. I didn’t know nothing about Baltimore outside of The Wire and Orioles. And I never sold drugs and I never played any sports.
Denzel Mitchell:
So we moved to Baltimore because of what was happening in DC. We were living in DC, we wanted to buy a house and it was 2006. And so the housing prices in DC were astronomical. They were ridiculous. I was teaching, I had three young kids. So we’re like, “Oh, let’s move to Baltimore.” So we moved to Baltimore and we moved to a neighborhood that didn’t have a grocery store. The grocery store was a ways away. And at the time, I didn’t think nothing of it, but I was also thinking about the fact that like, oh, I want a garden again. I want my kids to learn how to ferment and make kimchi and hippie stuff like that. And make pickles. And we want to have bees and we want to have chickens.
Denzel Mitchell:
It was really kind of universal marriage of hymen space and connection that really brought us here, but I think about how challenging it was just for us to get to the grocery store back then. That’s what food apartheid is. It’s like it’s folks’ inability to have access to the things that they need. We all need to eat. That’s why we farm, right? This is why we are so concerned about soil. This is why we are so concerned about small businesses thriving, because we know that’s what families need in order to do well and get all the things that they want and the children to get what they need and what they want. Everybody, they just wanted to be happy. And if you open the fridge and ain’t nothing in there, then you’re not happy. That’s what it was for us, and didn’t fully understand that until we really started to travel around Baltimore and see how devastating it was.
Sophia Hosain:
The work that we’re doing, that you’re doing with urban farms now really does serve to be a movement of the people in revolt of this very intentional, systematic oppression of black people in a city that has been black for its entire history.
Denzel Mitchell:
Right.
Sophia Hosain:
Yeah, it’s so very intentional. And I love, there’s a Malcolm X quote that I love and it’s that land is the basis of all revolution. And I feel like there’s more to it than that, but that’s the part that rings in my head over and over again. And I love that by reclaiming this art that is ancestral and that has been in practice for decades and eons, we can create a sense of security for ourselves, even though the system is designed for us to not survive and to not thrive and be well.
Sophia Hosain:
So farming as revolution is such a powerful concept. And it’s so amazing to see that in a city like Baltimore, where food apartheid prevails, that there are these little pockets of green space where you see people growing and cultivating and creating community and creating these connections to their ancestral roots. I would almost prefer that to a grocery store. It creates so much more community.
Sophia Hosain:
So to tie it a little bit more closely to the work that we’ve done together in the past, as we’ve talked about, about a quarter of the population of Baltimore is food insecure. And as a farmer, I’m sure you know that the soil is key to growing nutritious food. What role do you see compost playing in seeding sovereignty in our food systems?
Denzel Mitchell:
Right. So soil is the foundation, right? If you talk to a farmer who’s really about their life, as I say, that’s where it starts is with the soil. And you talk to a black farmer that the basis of our understanding is the knowledge and wisdom of George Washington Carver, who told us that it starts with the soil because you can’t get anything that you need, unless if the soil isn’t right. And we know the contributions that George Washington Carver made to modern, sustainable agriculture across this nation. But those of us who identify and connect with the heritage of African Americans, understanding that George Washington Carver is the founder of that and the soil is where our work starts. That’s the first thing that I learned.
Denzel Mitchell:
And so it started very simply with keep making sure that you got worms and looking to make sure if you got worms, you got good soil. That’s what my grandparents used to say. But then as we get more intellectual and academic and we read a little bit more and we get more access to information, we understand that it’s about creating an ecosystem below the ground that we walk on that is going to give us life back. And so you have to give life to get life.
Denzel Mitchell:
At the same time, we also know that this society has been designed to have a ton of waste. And how much of that waste can we capture and turn it into something life-giving, right? That is the challenge amongst folks who have been inflicted with so much trauma. That’s the long work, right? We are challenged and stay challenged with that. To get back to your question, I think that that’s pivotal. We know that access to good soil, especially access to good soil here in the city, cities typically have very, very poorly managed soil because it gets walked on, it gets compacted, it has all types of things on it. The histories of cities and industry and industry being in cities has polluted much of our soil. And so there’s a ton of work to do to bring the soil back in one of those practices that’s so pivotal is capturing all the waste that we are creating here in the place that we are and turning that back into fertility, turning that back into life. And so composting is important.
Denzel Mitchell:
And we’ve been composting at home. I’ve taught my kids to compost since they were little itty bitty. This is just part of what we do. And I try to make sure that that’s a spouse in schools and other folks’ homes anytime I’m working with kids around food, that like we’re saving our food scraps. Why are we saving our food scraps? To build soil. We’re saving our food scraps to feed the worms. Yeah, I think it’s a long-term educational process. I think the advantage that we have is that there are farms in the city that are employing practices and have had the opportunity to get a composting system or a bin system to be able to recycle some of that waste and then turn it into black gold, to use the words of Marvin Hagler, or to use the words of sister [inaudible 00:31:18]. So that’s super important.
Denzel Mitchell:
So I think that even having a three bin compost system in a neighborhood like Sandtown-Winchester, and then opening up that three bin system to the residence, to Sandtown-Winchester, and reminding them that they could bring their potato fields, they could bring their banana fields, they can bring their carrot scraps and turn it into soil. And this is what it looks like at the end. You got this blackness here on the soil and it’s growing, this is growing food for folks in this neighborhood. And so I really feel like we’re at the very, very, very beginning of this work, the very beginning, right? This is all a brand new dissolve. All this is new conversation for us who are 45 and younger.
Sophia Hosain:
For our listeners who are maybe not as familiar with Baltimore’s waste stream, let’s go over the landscape of waste. Baltimore sends all of its waste to the BRESCO incinerator and then also to a landfill. Incinerators these days have been rebranded as clean energy sources, which they’re not, let’s be real. BRESCO is responsible for $50 million worth of health impact a year. And in 2016, I believe one of the ZIP codes in South Baltimore was the most polluted ZIP code in the country. South Baltimore is home to the incinerator, BRESCO incinerator, but also to a medical waste incinerator that accepts medical waste from all over the country. It gets mailed to this incinerator and is burned there.
Sophia Hosain:
And so that brings me to what are we sending to this incinerator? 50%, about 49%, technically, of the waste that’s going to our incinerators and to our landfill can absolutely be diverted as organic matter. About 25% is food scrap, 6% is yard waste, and 18% is other compostable matter. So when we talk about composting in West Baltimore and composting in South Baltimore, we really bring it back to this idea of like composting as an act of resistance, because the systems that are in place would have you send it to an incinerator that’ll kill you if you live close to it. And I think that, Denzel, you’re right, like we are at the very beginning of this journey and it takes so much education to unlearn what we consider to be trash is actually an incredibly valuable organic resource that we can give back to the earth that feeds us. And to quote Marvin Hayes, Marvin always says, “Feed the soil that feeds you.” Right?
Denzel Mitchell:
Yes.
Sophia Hosain:
We expect the earth to give us this fertility, to give us this sustenance, to give us the nutritious food that keeps us well and keeps us healthy without really giving back to it. And so I love the idea of feeding the soil and giving back to the earth. And as Leah Penniman would say, to treat the earth like a relative rather than a commodity.
Denzel Mitchell:
Yes, yes, yes.
Sophia Hosain:
So beyond just reducing food waste and beyond feeding the soil, and which is huge in and of itself, how does community composting and farming contribute to community resilience?
Denzel Mitchell:
I think it helps folks to unlearn some really bad practices that have been normalized in our societies and in our community. That’s the first thing is like, it means like composting should be second nature. How do we reduce the amount of waste instead of this idea of like digging a big hole and filling it up and then capping the hole off and walking away and acting like there’s nothing under there or burning it all and creating this massive suit that covers these cities. It’s like that should have never even been an idea, but that’s what’s been normalized. So now we’ve got to go back and relearn how to do things.
Denzel Mitchell:
But then I think it also brings communities together based on this like new set of ideas and like a new way to look at your relationship to the earth and a new way to look at your relationship to your environment and a new way to look at your relationship to atmosphere.
Sophia Hosain:
I do want to build on what you were just saying, Denzel, in that not only does compost create an alternate composting or building that into our food systems create a circular system where now all of the waste that we’re creating can go right back into creating new food for us. It also on the largest scale, works for a community. Composting can sustain two to four times as many jobs as landfilling. And not only that, but by applying compost to our city soils, which you mentioned are super nutrient deficient, or have lost all of their structure, we can give back that carbon sequestration ability and try to curb some of the global warming that happens in cities, and also return the nutrients… If the nutrients aren’t in our soil, they’re not in our food. So we’re creating stronger people, like physically stronger communities by feeding them out of soil that has been amended with compost. And not only that, by creating more jobs in the composting sector, we can also create dollars in our community and maintain dollars in our community and keep that system circular and sustainable and flowing.
Denzel Mitchell:
Yeah, the thing is like you were saying, community resilience is about utilizing what you have in your community. And we all know that each community is creating waste or what is seen as waste, right? Like I’m not going to eat the peel of this onion, but then what can that be turned into? Right? And then if you know that like three blocks down the road, there’s a community garden, there’s a farm, and you support that farm in whatever way you support that farm, even if you’re just glad about the fact that this is not a trash covered empty lot that folks are dumping in the back of just like they’ve turned it into something. So use the resources that we have to build the entire community. All of it. It’s like not everybody needs to be a farmer, but we all need to understand why farming is so important. We all need to understand why composting is so important. And we all should be composting and stop using stuff that we can’t get rid of.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Okay, so to wrap up this conversation, let’s do one last very quick question. So like one answer from each of you, do you have a reading or media in general recommendation for listeners? Could be related to this conversation, could not be. It’s up to you. Just one.
Denzel Mitchell:
Just one?
Jess Del Fiacco:
Just one.
Denzel Mitchell:
Oh, no, so much pressure. Not in My Neighborhood. The author’s escaped my mind right now. So I don’t remember. I’m looking on my bookshelf. But anyway, that’s something I would say everybody should read about the history of redlining and discrimination in Baltimore. I don’t know why I can’t think of the author’s name right now, but that’s the title of the book is Not in My Neighborhood.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you.
Denzel Mitchell:
And you should be watching Lovecraft Country.
Jess Del Fiacco:
I am watching it. It’s very good.
Denzel Mitchell:
It is. It’s very good.
Sophia Hosain:
If I had to pick, I know you said one, but I’m actually going to do two. There’s a book called Dispossession by Pete Daniel that talks about the historical laws and regulations that have led to this place where black people have had their land stolen from them. My other recommendation that has been grounding me is Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown. And it’s just wonderful.
Denzel Mitchell:
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Hmm, I need to read that. Thank you. Thank you. Yup.
Sophia Hosain:
[inaudible 00:39:23] very heavily influenced by Octavia Butler, who was like the first sci-fi Afrofuturism author, who I also highly recommend. I know there’s only one recommendation, but there’s three.
Jess Del Fiacco:
All right. Well, thank you both so much for your time.
Denzel Mitchell:
I had a great time. Thank you very much.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today and even more reading recommendations from Sophia and Denzel by going to archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and put us on social media. We hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco, and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco, and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Photo Credit: Brenda Platt
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41 min
October 01, 2020One Size Fits None: Why Connecting California’s Least Connected Requires a Tailored Solution (Episode 110)
On this episode of Building Local Power, Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks initiative, interviews Rebecca Woodbury, San Rafael’s Director of Digital Services and Open Government, and Air Gallegos, Director of Education and Career for Canal Alliance. Rebecca and Air helped lead a local effort to build a Wi-Fi mesh network to connect residents in the Canal neighborhood of San Rafael, Calif.
Christopher, Air, and Rebecca discuss:
How the mobilization of local volunteers, combined with the efforts and expertise of the city and Canal Alliance, allowed them to quickly develop and implement a solution.
The impacts they’ve seen so far in the community.
The many issues they took into consideration as they planned the network, including power outages, digital literacy barriers, housing inequities, and language barriers, in order to ensure that it works for as many residents as possible both now and in the future.
What other communities can learn from San Rafael’s success.
Learn more about San Rafael and other communities working to connect residents to high quality Internet access on MuniNetworks.org and ILSR’s Community Broadband Bits podcast.
“One of the things that’s been wonderful about this project is we’ve been living with deep inequities in the Canal for a very long time. And I think what’s interesting about COVID is they’re giving us an opportunity to build something new and build something different. It’s allowing a space for productivity and creativity to really happen, so that in some ways has been a really big blessing of everyone coming together… we live in a very crazy world and we have to be willing to try everything.”

Related Resources
Connecting A Neighborhood in Need in San Rafael, California – Community Broadband Bits Podcast Episode 427
Transcript
Jess Del Fiacco:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands.
Jess Del Fiacco:
For today’s episode, we have an interview with two women who are helping to lead a very cool project to connect a neighborhood in the Bay Area of California to internet access. But first I’m here with Christopher Mitchell, who’s the Director of ILSR’s Community Broadband initiative to give us a little context for their story. So, Chris, could you give us a very brief overview of the project?
Christopher Mitchell:
Yeah, I feel duty bound to actually start instead by commenting on the visualization I had in my head as you were reading the intro of ILSR being like a person throwing pottery and shaping their future, so I just wanted to… I wanted to give the listeners the visual.
Jess Del Fiacco:
It’s not exactly what we’re going for there.
Christopher Mitchell:
This WiFi Mesh Network is very interesting. It’s very inspiring. It’s a reminder of the fact that we should all take charge. We should take responsibility, take action and even if we’re not clear on how to do it, stepping up can really get other people excited about stepping up as well.
Jess Del Fiacco:
They’re not going into people’s homes and giving them routers and running fiber, this is outside, right? On the street, although it reaches into apartment buildings, people’s individual homes, right? The WiFi?
Christopher Mitchell:
Yes, for people who may live just off of the street, they may have a signal that’s strong enough to get into their homes. I think a lot of people will probably be using it outside. It’s easier to do that in California than Minnesota depending on the season. And the important part in my mind is that we have people who have gone from having suboptimal internet access, where they had to go to libraries or fast food and then we close those places down in many cases. And some of us reacted by saying, “Well, we should figure out something temporarily in the next, but really focus our time on the next 18 months,” because that’s the timeframe in which we could really make structural changes to fix this problem once and for all. And this is a stirring reminder that other people have to live and educate their children and do their jobs and figure out how to be safe in those 18 months. So, I really think that the work that they’re doing here is important and replicable.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah, I was just like stunned by the amount of things that they took into the planning process for this and they accomplished it, or at least they started it in such a short amount of time. I mean, they were thinking about language barriers, housing issues, power outages there in California, wildfires, not only digital literacy, but literacy, literacy. So, can you just talk briefly about how their familiarity with their community, their ability to know where the needs are, and what the needs are helped make this happen so quickly?
Christopher Mitchell:
Yes, one of the guest, Air, will make this point over and over again, in which she said she got to involve the community in these discussions to make sure that you’re really solving the problems that they have and I think she really nails that. One of my favorite parts of this interview is you’ll hear Rebecca say that her superpower is being naive, not appreciating how hard it will be to accomplish some of these things and I think that’s great. I think we need more of that. We need people to commit to things before they know how they’re going to necessarily answer it because there’s problems that if we just try to wait to do anything on until we know how to solve them, it’s going to take too long. And so, I think that Air and Rebecca here offer a really good pattern that we should see others do.
Christopher Mitchell:
And there’s a point, I mean, I downplayed a little bit. They had a person who works for a major high-tech company who volunteered time to help get this network working and I think that really helped to drive it forward in this case, but I don’t think you need that in every area. And frankly, I think there’s more technical expertise in many areas than people realize. And so, I would also encourage people to pay attention to it when we talk about that, because they talk about how they think there’s more talent in a lot of communities than people realize and it’s just that people aren’t being asked to put their energies and talents forth in a way that would utilize them.
Jess Del Fiacco:
And one last thing, it’s pretty small scale for a project. I mean, it’s focused right in one neighborhood. Could you talk about why this is more approachable? You know, then I think, what makes more sense? Expanding this project that’s already started or replicating it in other communities, because I feel like especially with internet access people will think, “Oh, we need a national network. We need big solutions to fix everything at once.” But what’s more approachable is these little solutions that happen all over the place, right?
Christopher Mitchell:
Right. I think there’s this phrase that I’ve just recently learned about that others have known for a long time, “It’s one size fits none.” And so, what you’re saying I think is an appropriate question. There’s so many people that assume we need the federal government to come out and develop a plan and solve it. And I would just say that to the extent that we do need that, it should be a plan like electrification, in which the federal government made financing available for hundreds of local networks to be developed in the way they saw fit, where you have local folks actively involved, making sure it works in that sort of a thing.
Christopher Mitchell:
And as I’m looking at our problems that we face here in St. Paul, Minnesota, where you and I live, I think a solution for all St. Paul would be great and it really would lead to more economic development, it would be good for education, it would be good for public safety. There’s all kinds of ways that we’ll be benefiting. But right now, what we need is a few neighborhoods that are very poorly connected to have some more free options, I think. And that’s just something people need to get on. And I’m hoping that in a few months, I won’t be looking and listening back on this and thinking, “Oh, yeah, I should have done something.” So, this has inspired me to try and take more action in our community and let’s hope that that goes somewhere, too.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Okay with that, I think we can turn to the interview, unless there’s anything else you want to add before we go?
Christopher Mitchell:
Nope, I’m excited to hear it again.
Christopher Mitchell:
I’m excited to talk about this, a fast response that seems to really have a lot of community support to a problem. This is what we want to see. This is the kind of stuff we want to highlight, but I think it’s worth for people who have never heard San Rafael. What is San Rafael? Where is it? What’s the feeling of the community, its ambience, who lives there, that sort of a thing?
Air:
San Rafael is located in Marin County in California, it’s in the Bay Area and in particular, the community that we’re working with is called the Canal. It’s a neighborhood that’s within San Rafael. So California, Marin County, San Rafael City and then the Canal neighborhood. And when we’re talking about the Canal, the reason it’s called the Canal is because it’s actually surrounded by a canal and actually two overlapping freeways. It’s a very, actually small area, a couple of square miles by a couple of square miles. And the canal is kind of split between like pretty much in half between residential and like industrial space that provides much of the economic functionality of all of San Rafael.
Air:
And so when we’re talking about this community, and the reason it’s important to say all those things is Marin County itself is actually one of the wealthiest counties in all of California and the canal itself actually provides housing for the majority of low income residents in the Marin County. There’s a huge disparity rate, which is sort of what prompted this project that we’ve been working on. Marin County has the highest disparity rate and education in California.
Air:
And so, when I think about the canal, it’s a really, really beautiful place. There are many immigrants that live within the canal. A lot of times there’s crowded housing, but the people that live there are absolutely resilient. They’re an asset to our community. They’re really, really hard working. And during these COVID times, the Canal has really been the backbone of all of our essential workers that help provide for Marin County.
Christopher Mitchell:
And Air, I’m hoping you can also just tell us a little bit about the Canal Alliance. What sort of stuff do you do?
Air:
Yeah, absolutely. So, Canal Alliance is a nonprofit that’s been in the community for 30 years and we work to end the cycle of poverty for immigrants. So, the canal has a huge immigrant population. It’s actually almost doubled in the last decade. And so, we mainly work with the Latinx community and but we work to help out and eliminate poverty through a variety of things. We have an Immigration Legal Services Department, a Social Services Department, an Education Department, a Workforce Department. And so, we really are a central place for everyone to be able to gather and to be able to advocate and develop policy around community needs for immigrants within our community.
Christopher Mitchell:
Now, Rebecca, if I understand correctly, you didn’t know Air perhaps a year ago? It seems like this is something you’ve met in dealing with this challenge. So, can you just walk us back to what you would put at the beginning of this story behind the Wireless Project that we’re going to be talking about?
Rebecca:
Sure. And I would actually start that prior to the pandemic, there were definitely conversations happening between different groups around the need for increasing internet access, especially in the Canal neighborhood. So, there were these early conversations happening, but I don’t think there was a really clear roadmap yet that was really pulling together the sectors around, I think, there was like a shared goal, but not a shared way to get there. And so, when the shelter and home order though went into place, and schools moved online, it really like kicked us into gear. I think, even though we had started having the conversations, we didn’t have a plan in place by any means.
Rebecca:
But there were some, I think there was like the forming of kind of the cross-sector collaboration, that really jelled in this project. So early in the pandemic, I connected with the school district pretty early on as well as a community member that I knew had some experience with digital divide initiatives who was actually working on a master’s degree at UC Berkeley and lived in San Rafael. And I reached out to him really quickly and he like in 24 hours put together like a menu of options with some rough feasibility assessments of what we could start doing.
Rebecca:
And the schools and I, we really just started, like it was like, “Okay, let’s try everything.” It was like “throw the spaghetti at the wall” strategy. And so. we started buying up hotspots. They were very quickly going on to backorder, I think and so, we’d find out if we could buy hotspots and we just like, make a big order. We also started to do promotion of things like a lot of the companies were opening up their hotspots and we wanted to promote the low-cost home internet options. And also working with families to kind of streamline that process as well, because we were hearing early on that there was some barriers to families getting signed up, so we worked with them.
Rebecca:
One thing that was challenging to some of these programs were they were all kind of like opt in programs, and those innately have barriers with them. And so, in addition to things like backlogs and shipping delays, so there was still just a lot of gaps that existed. And then another community member reached out to me and suggested building a mesh WiFi network. I had never done that before. But he said he had some experience with that and could draw up some conceptual designs just as a volunteer, that his company was actually paying him to volunteer in his own community during COVID and that he could give up to 10 days of a time, which I think has turned into a lot more than that [crosstalk 00:12:43].
Rebecca:
But we also did some asset mapping. I got my data analyst on the project and we started to do some asset mapping of the community and put together an initial design concept. And then I reached out to the county and I mean, it just really snowballed from there because I don’t even feel like I finished my sentence before the county just was completely on board, which was huge for us, because we really didn’t have any funds identified at all.
Rebecca:
And so then, we connected with Canal Alliance and really quickly, we had a great team of people between government, schools, nonprofit, and what I think was amazing is community volunteers. And so, we really had this great team of people. And that as I look back as to where we were then and where we are now and I think the reason we’ve come so far is because we just had this like amazing great group of people that came together aligned around this project.
Christopher Mitchell:
Air, do you want to add anything on to that? I’m curious.
Air:
Just my memory of it is getting a call from Rebecca and her pitching me this idea of putting boosters on buildings and things on streetlights, and me being like, “This is really crazy. Maybe it could work.” And her being like, “Do you guys have any buildings?” And one of the things at Canal Alliance, we actually have low-income housing, so we actually do have buildings that are in the canal. We’re like, “You could put them on our buildings.” And just this really, I think what I would say is the digital divide for us, for Canal Alliance, we’ve been fighting this for decades. This isn’t a new thing for us.
Air:
For a lot of our families, that isolation that happens when you don’t have access to information and knowledge has been happening for a really long time and COVID just exasperated it and honestly, it’s made it a much larger community issue, even outside of the Canal, because what we’re seeing with COVID is how interconnected everyone is. And if you don’t have access to go online to make a doctor’s appointment, to help your kids get into school, to know where testing is and then you’re an essential worker that’s going into to work at Target or wherever it is that you work, and you’re coming in interaction with the rest of the community, we’re actually all way more interlinked than we think. And I think that that’s part of what’s really driven this project forward is that we need to understand that we’re only as strong as the weakest person in our community. And so, I think that that has really helped promote this project.
Christopher Mitchell:
The things that you just described I feel like are relevant for any community in terms of those challenges, but I feel like you actually even have more challenges because most communities, at least here in Minnesota and most of the country, don’t have to worry about PG&E deciding to shut off our electricity for days at a time. And one of the things that really struck me was how this was an issue before COVID, where people would, the wealthier folks in the county could leave and go to a place that had electricity, but you had a real challenge for getting information to people with no electricity. And I think it’s just worth revisiting that for a second.
Air:
We had a PST event even prior to COVID where that really did happen and Canal Alliance, we have people putting messages up, like handwritten, getting out on the street, and you add COVID on another layer of that where you can’t actually put boots on the ground in the same way of it being safe. And so, I think that that’s exactly spot on like how do we continue to get knowledge out during these times, so that we can help one another.
Rebecca:
Last October, we had an event that I think you’re referencing to PG&E proactively shut off power more than Marin County, but Marin County went particularly dark. We were probably one of the… I think we had some of the most power shut off in the North Bay and it was pretty eerie and it was for days on end. And one of the other significant things that happened in Marin County is we had more cell towers go down in our county than anywhere else. It was something like 67% of our cell towers went down. So, very quickly, we lost our ability to communicate with constituents. And so, one of our deepest fears was, “Okay, we’re dealing with this crisis, what happens when another crisis happens, and we can’t get the word out about it.”
Rebecca:
And so yeah, during that time, we were actually, we were creating, almost every day, we would create like an emergency update and we would go out to community centers and other areas and tape these up on the walls of buildings. It was pretty frustrating to try to get critical information out during this time. And so, we are now in a time of it’s we have a new thing called rolling blackouts, so these are a little different from the proactive power shutdowns. These are having to do with kind of the heatwaves rather than worried about fire danger. So, we’re getting a lot of experience with emergencies these days.
Rebecca:
And so, one of the things that we’ve been talking about with the network that we’re setting up in the Canal neighborhood is which of our assets are potentially going to be powered by generators during this time. And so, we’re putting some root access points on things like pump stations and community centers that we will be able to power during these shutdowns. And so, while we may not be able to keep the entire network up during a power outage, we think we can create and message which areas of the network will stay up. So, you might not be able to get it right on your block, but you might be able to get it if you go near to the pump station or near to the community center.
Christopher Mitchell:
That’s the kind of information that the community will be able to share amongst themselves. Yeah. “Ask Tommy, he always knows where the internet works.” And one other question I just I had about that, Air, when you were talking about, “We’ll just throw them on the side of buildings.” I feel like a lot of people are like, “Yeah, I have a drill, I could do that.” But you need to put electricity there and that’s more tricky and I’m just curious how you dealt with those sorts of things.
Air:
We put most of our equipment on streetlights. That’s where most of the wireless access points are, so early on, we worked out an agreement to install these on the streetlights and then we have the root access points that are going in some of the buildings. And so, those are the buildings that are owned by Canal Land, so we’re working with them on that installation. And then we’re working with the power and everything on the pump station, so we’ve kind of mapped that out but yeah, definitely the power. Early on when we totally didn’t know what we were doing, we were like “Let’s put them on,” and it was probably me, like “Let’s put them on bus shelters.”
Christopher Mitchell:
Moving trees.
Air:
But yeah, we quickly learned what we were doing and there were people far more technical than I was on the team ready to correct my ideas, but yeah. So, we’ve worked it out. We’re using a lot of street lights, but even with that, it gets complicated. Some of the street poles are owned by the city, some aren’t, so it’s been a puzzle, to say the least. We’ve also had some line of sight issues that we’ve had to resolve, so had to get out there and do a little tree trimming and a lot of site visits. You’re looking at Google Maps and you think something can work and then you get out there and you’re like, “Nope.”
Christopher Mitchell:
In the end did a lot of the money come from the county then to be able to do this work?
Air:
So, the county has made a significant contribution and then a County Supervisor, Dennis Rodoni, was just incredible at fundraising, so he reached out to a lot of other philanthropic arms to get some big checks and so, we’re incredibly grateful for the funds that have come in. The Marin Community Foundation donated a sizable amount and then mark Pincus donated another big check as well as some other smaller checks that have come in. So, the county I would say just knocked it out of the park in terms of contributing themselves and then bringing in the donors.
Christopher Mitchell:
As we’re talking about how you have sprung into action with this, for me, it’s a sign of how many of the people that that I’m looking to about this, who are saying “This is a problem we need to do with it.” And even my own reaction, in some ways is it’s like, “All right. Well, let’s figure out how to deal with this over the next 18 months. Let’s think about some manageable chunk of time.” And in the meantime, I guess people are just screwed, right? But like you guys have really taken action and I’m curious. I mean, it sounds to me and in thinking about your story, it’s really appreciated, it’s important that we actually treat this with urgency and a lot of people aren’t treating it with urgency in other jurisdictions.
Air:
Speaking for myself, I think one of my superpowers is naïveté and it gets me really far, because I actually didn’t know what it was going to take to make this happen. And so like that not knowing just kind of pushed us into gear and just everyone was so positive, and had this kind of new attitude and that’s why I think the team that kind of spontaneously in a way or almost by happenstance, we all came together, we just all worked so well together. And with this can-do attitude, there was no one in the group that was like, “Well, that’s not going to work because of X.”
Christopher Mitchell:
Sure.
Air:
Everyone just jelled in terms of like, “Let’s make this happen as fast as possible,” and like, “If anything pops up in our way, let’s steamroll it.”
Christopher Mitchell:
Let’s take a break. And cut back to Jess.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power. Stories like this one from San Rafael are what we’re trying to bring to you through this podcast and if you appreciate them, if you find them inspiring, we hope you’ll take a minute to go to our website and make a donation to help us keep going.
Christopher Mitchell:
Perhaps even 90 seconds.
Jess Del Fiacco:
It’s very easy. It’s not even going to take you 90 seconds. I think we’ve just updated our donation page to keep it all smooth.
Christopher Mitchell:
Fine Jess. You’re just faster than I am and that’s okay.
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Jess Del Fiacco:
And now let’s get back to Chris’s conversation with Rebecca and Air.
Christopher Mitchell:
Air, I’m curious also, I mean, how do you feel about that? The urgency and do you see in other areas that people aren’t getting this, so they’re just sort of waiting on it?
Air:
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a combination of both. One of the things that’s been wonderful about this project is we’ve been living with deep inequities in the Canal for a very long time. And I think what’s interesting about COVID is they’re giving us an opportunity to build something new and build something different. It’s allowing a space for productivity and creativity to really happen, so that in some ways has been a really big blessing of everyone coming together and like no idea is crazy at this point. Like, we live in a very crazy world and we have to be willing to try everything.
Air:
And I remember, even when we really started jumping on this, we hired some of our youth as promotoras to be able to go out into the community and see what the community need was and really assess what that digital divide looked like on the grounds. And those youth looked at me and said, they’re like, “Air, is this really going to happen? Can we do this?” And so, I think part of that too, is like how do we you look at new fresh ideas, how do we see our youth as being just as wise as our elders, right? All of these different things and that’s kind of what has been able to drive forward this project. But I do think that of course, there are still people that are going to be left behind.
Air:
This is a step towards the right direction, right? This is the first step that we’re really taking and making it happen pretty quickly, but this is not completely resolving the digital divide and I think that’s really important to make clear. We still have tons and tons of people who don’t have access even after the mesh network goes up, because of those deep inequities that have existed. Crowded housing not being able to ask your landlord to change your internet access provider, living in old cinderblock buildings that WiFi doesn’t actually come through.
Air:
There’s a lot of holes and gaps that we’re still seeing on the ground and so this is a really great, great first step, and we have to continue to take action and continue to move forward, because I really think at this point in time, especially during a pandemic, information is now an essential utility. It’s like having water and food and it’s human rights, and so if we don’t continue to move forward in this way, we’re really doing harm to our entire community, not just the people that we might consider to be lower income, et cetera. It really does harm, everybody that lives around us. And so, yes, this is a step in the right direction and we’re looking forward to continuing the process.
Christopher Mitchell:
I think that’s really important to note and similarly, we’ve been talking about the network without really defining how it works. And so, Rebecca, let me just turn to you and ask, “Is this a network that is aimed at trying to get people connected inside their homes, is it mostly out in the open, is it a mixture? What do you think about in terms of the goal of the network technologically?
Rebecca:
So, the first phase is really an outdoor WiFi network, but the apartments that are street facing are going to have pretty good access, so there’s a number of homes that will have access to the network. But again, we’re using streetlights, we have a couple of buildings that are involved in this first phase, we see a natural second phase as one that engages with some of the property owners. Air just mentioned, some of the buildings are kind of the cinderblock, they have these kind of interior courtyards, which means that there are a lot of more interior apartments that are not going to have access to the network at all.
Rebecca:
And so, the second phase that we want to quickly move into is working closely with those property owners or those property managers and seeing how far we can extend that network into those courtyards to reach those other apartment buildings. This is a WiFi network, it does not replace, good solid-wired internet connections and homes. That’s also the next work, speaking to Air’s point like, “This is just the beginning.” And we really want to work towards those. I see both of those efforts being really key, even if we were to reach the goal of getting every apartment connected to wired internet in that neighborhood, I still think this WiFi network adds a lot of value. If you think about your cell phone bill and the cost of data.
Rebecca:
If you are walking outside and you’re able to tap into a free WiFi network and not your data plan, you’re going to have a much lower cellphone bill, so I see these two things as being both really important goals, but the network that we are doing right now, again, it was the thing that we thought we could do the fastest. And so yeah, it’s predominantly an outdoor WiFi network that we’re hoping can extend as far into these apartment buildings as we can get them.
Air:
To the point you made before, Rebecca, like during a power outage, which we’ve had quite a lot, the wired internet at home, although that’s the best and having everyone have digital broadband would actually solve the digital divide. In an emergency of a power outage, those things are also going to go out, so I think this is really thinking about like how do we have a multilayer, multi-tiered approach, so that we can make sure that we’re building sustainability for the future and not just the issues that we’ve been having in the past.
Rebecca:
Right. And to that point, one of the things that we’ve done with the landing page that when people log into the network and the first website they land on, we’ve curated that with critical emergency information. So, we’re using that and that’s going to be our mechanism for getting critical information out during a disaster. As soon as people log in, they’re going to see the most critical information. So, right now you land on there and it tells you where you can get a free COVID test and critical health information right now. As soon as we’re going to need this in a power outage, it’s going to have different information, so we’re going to use that landing page as a communication vehicle.
Christopher Mitchell:
Are you also surveying people? I think I saw something along those lines to get a sense of how people are using it?
Air:
we have definitely been surveying people, we actually started this entire project because really wanted to be able to understand community need by doing surveys, we knew that there was a digital divide. But part of the problem is, is when people have tried to measure the digital divide before, we’re using digital technology to measure the digital divide, right? So, we’re sending surveys out over email or a variety of different tools. And one of the things in particular in the Canal is a lot of people who are immigrants don’t have access to have their voice be heard.
Air:
So, what we did is we hired promotoras to be able to be on the ground to go different places that we could make sure that language wasn’t a barrier, that literacy wasn’t a barrier for people, and that having internet access wasn’t a barrier. So, a lot of people that live in the Canal, many of them speak Spanish, but sometimes Spanish is their second or third language. They might speak an indigenous Central American language, et cetera and so we had that, a lot of them, a lot of people that we work with in our education department are considered sliced students, which means they have limited or formal education, so they might have only gone to school to like second grade or third grade, so literacy is also an issue.
Air:
And then also you can’t use the tool that you’re trying to measure to be able to send it out, so we did a lot of research in the area and we just found that the disparity was huge and Canal residents, only about 43% of them owned a computer at home compared to 90% of people living outside of the Canal. That’s a huge difference that talks about digital inequities. And so, once we were able to kind of measure all of this and see where we are, I think our goal is to continue to measure through the landing page, what people’s experiences are of the mesh network, and then to continue on throughout the year getting back out and on the ground to see sort of if we’ve made a difference in any of this data, like can we ask the same questions and see that more people are connected.
Air:
One of the other huge questions we asked is whether or not your internet is fast enough to load a website in 10 seconds? A variety of other questions, and most people said, “No.” So, when you think about this, we really started I think, Rebecca, correct me if I’m wrong, but we had really started with an envisionment of just K through 12 Education and the fact that we had tons of students that weren’t able to get to school and do the online learning. And then we really realized “No, this is bigger.” This is like a community project where all information now during COVID is moving into an online platform, so we need to have a broader and wider reach. But that’s sort of where, all of this information really drove through, like drove for the passion of this team to make a difference because we have tons of people that are living in the Canal that need better access.
Rebecca:
This project really did kind of get spearheaded by the schools in some ways. I mean, there was that initial like, “Oh, my God, the kids.” And then, but then we did. We quickly realized we want to make sure that we are definitely solving for this online school, so we can try to prevent that equity, the educational equity gap, that is immense right now, but then we certainly identified this need for just general community information access to all of this great information that is out there and that a lot of people have access to and then there’s a lot of people that are left behind.
Christopher Mitchell:
That I think brings up a point that the additional challenge can be digital literacy. Are you able to, in the midst of all this work, also offer some kinds of training or point them in the right direction for families that need that sort of a thing?
Air:
Yeah. We made that definitely a part of our project, so we actually have launched a second donation fundraising campaign to be able to hopefully not only fill some of these gaps with hardware, right? So, we’re seeing that only 40% of people own their own computer, right? So, we want to be able to gift computers to the community so people can get connected, but then we also need to teach them how to utilize those computers. We have tons of parents, who haven’t had that connectivity that might have received a school Chromebook, but aren’t sure how to power it on or how to login or how to get on to Google Classroom or don’t have an email address.
Air:
And so there’s a lot of layers of digital literacy that we still need to implement and which we’ve seen become a huge barrier. So, we have a lot of community partners now that are actually working with the school district to be able to see how can we do two forms of digital literacy? How can we do an on the ground support for people who really need support in terms of figuring out how to plug it in, how to turn it on, people who’ve never used a mouse before or a keypad before? And then how can we also filter other people who need more long-term digital literacy around like Google Classroom or Zoom, but can click on a link and join? And then how can we do that from a distance and be able to support.
Air:
So, we’re still working on setting up all those things at the same time that we’re launching the mesh network, but the need is really huge and from Canal Alliance’s perspective, we have families that come to us every single day, moms in tears because they can’t get their kids online and all they want is what any parent wants, right? Which is to be able to help their children learn and to be able to help their children succeed. And so, that’s something I think that we’re also committed to. It’s not enough to just put up a network and give somebody a Chromebook. We have to do a lot deeper knowledge and a lot more restorative practices around the device that we’ve created and harbored over the last decades.
Christopher Mitchell:
Yeah, I just, I want to really emphasize that because what you just said I think should be emotionally powerful, it should be emotionally jarring for people that have been able to transition to working at home and feeling like the pandemic is mostly a problem for other people in terms of it is an inconvenience for my family, but for other people it can be really devastating. And so, I just want to again highlight how important it is that you all acted quickly. Now, Rebecca, I think you wanted to jump in.
Rebecca:
One of the early questions we were wrestling with was tech support. We’re setting up this network, what happens-
Christopher Mitchell:
That’s the biggest cost. Yeah.
Rebecca:
So, what happens when people have trouble with it? And so, one of our early ideas and this is also kind of bridging into the digital literacy is that we’ve got a small library branch in the neighborhood and they’re doing curbside pickup right now. And so, one of our early ideas is they are going to become also tech support that you can walk up and talk to about kind of troubleshooting with the network or how do I get on or how do I do this and they’re all bilingual there.
Rebecca:
And so, that’s one of our early ideas of how to solve some of the tech support challenges that might occur when people are trying to log into the network and not able to. Again, it’s a small walkable neighborhood and so, we want to advertise just walk down between these hours, you can walk down to the library, and you can talk to a person who can help you connect to the network.
Christopher Mitchell:
Excellent. Rebecca, I want to come back to something that I wanted to ask you about, which is I’d seen in some of the coverage, including my own from Ry on our team, that there were some holes in the Comcast Internet Essentials coverage and I’ve tried to give them praise where they’re due. That program has brought millions of people online and they deserve credit for that. They’ve done more than any other national company in this direction, but I’m curious about what holds you observed in terms of things that you had to address that you felt that wouldn’t be addressed through that program?
Rebecca:
Big picture, I think there’s always innate challenges to any opt-in program. Any type of program where somebody has to sign up for something where somebody has to give personal information to something to any kind of company. There can be fear. There can be literacy challenges. There can be eligibility challenges and some are real and some are perceived, and the perceived ones can be just as bad as the real ones, because they stop people from even trying.
Rebecca:
And so, I think it’s important to explore things that are really reducing the barriers as much as possible and not creating signup processes for things. And so, one of the early wins and actually, Comcast was great to work with was the schools came to Comcast and they said, “Look, every student here is on reduced lunch. Can we streamline the process, so that families that go to our school don’t have to prove they’re eligible? Can they just if they say there’s families from this elementary school, can they just or the school district, can that eligibility be streamlined?” And Comcast worked with them on that and that was I think a really great win to kind of streamline those eligibility issues.
Rebecca:
I think one of the things that we don’t have a lot of data on, but I’m still exploring and need to do more research on is whether Comcast Internet Essentials is even available in every apartment building. There are some apartments, there’s a lot of dishes in the neighborhood which leads me to believe that Comcast may not even be able to get into some of these apartment buildings. So, that’s something I want to research a little bit further. So, I think and then, I think there’s just the again, I kind of alluded to earlier, but for some immigrant families putting their name and address on any sort of form, there’s some fear associated with that. And so we have there’s barriers in a lot of ways to this.
Rebecca:
I think, also in thinking about, what are our real end goals if you can… there never should be an end. But what are our bigger goals around this, and in my opinion, it’s really ensuring that every household there has access to affordable and really high quality internet. It’s not enough to me to give people internet. It should be good and usable. And I think that we should be striving for things that are even better than the Internet Essentials, in terms of bandwidth and quality. So I think that it is a really great start and it is a really great program and it’s connecting a lot of families. But I think inevitably, there are gaps that need to be addressed.
Christopher Mitchell:
Thank you. And Air, I’m curious what you can tell us about what we know in terms of how many people are using the network at this point and things like that?
Air:
I mean, we’re still in the early stages of it, so I don’t know that we necessarily have that data yet. We still haven’t gotten all of the stages up, but so I’m not sure that we can answer that, but what I do love about what Rebecca just said is I think this project and what really drove it forward is this real idea, which was I was happy in all of our partnerships with which we kept expressing and I think everyone really heard like you have to meet communities where they’re at and a lot of times, I think we don’t ask people where they’re at or what’s going on, or taking time to slow down to be able to understand that. And I think that this group really did do that.
Air:
You have things like public charge, and tons of other things that people really are living in fear, especially during a time that’s so uncertain and things are changing all of the time. And to be scared of being deported, or choosing between putting food on the table and getting your kids to school like that is not an okay choice for a parent to have to make. And so, I just really want to like refocus on that of you have to be able to meet the community where they are and be willing to come up with things that are innovative and asking for people’s names and addresses. And all of these other things produce a lot of barriers for people that live in our community.
Air:
And so I think, this is a great first step to actually seeing what the community need is and then I also just wanted to mention that it’s just been great partnership, too like we don’t have full numbers on how many people are connected yet, because the whole network is not up, but we’ve been doing wonderful and innovative things and also meet in a community where they are like we’re creating a tutorial video, in both graded English and graded Spanish that has pictures, that shows people, it has subtitles for accessibility, and we’re going to be texting it to everybody that lives in the zip code that the Canal is located within, both from Canal Alliance and from the school districts, so that there’s not an accessibility issue and that people can actually learn how to connect their cell phone, how to connect their students, Chromebook, et cetera in a really simplified way.
Air:
And I think that’s another great example where we’ve really tried to think at every single different angle, like how can we put the community in the center and really understand what that community need is. And I think that’s what’s made a difference in the partnership. It’s not just relying on an outside network, right? Whether it’s Comcast or AT&T or whatever those things are, it’s really reversing the role and saying what does our community actually need versus what is being offered? If that makes sense.
Christopher Mitchell:
Yes.
Rebecca:
I don’t have numbers as of today, but I know that last week, last week is…
Air:
Brand new.
Rebecca:
… pretty new and actually we haven’t done super heavy promotion. We really just did promotion, like heaviest promotion, and like the small area where the network is first available, we’re really talking about a couple of blocks and in the first couple of days, we just put out like signs on the blocks that said in English and Spanish “Free WiFi is available on this block.” And we put those out on the streets, on the sidewalks and within the first couple of days we had several hundred unique visitors which surprised us when we’re just talking about a couple of blocks worth of a neighborhood. And so, we were pretty impressed by those numbers. I don’t have the numbers from this week, but that was within the first couple of days. It was pretty exciting to see more people logging on and checking it out than we expected.
Christopher Mitchell:
And Rebecca, I have one final question which it wasn’t mine, someone else had come up to it and that’s the question of what if you, at this point now that you’re an IT expert and network design wizard, if you had to go back in time and you didn’t have a person with that technical expertise able to volunteer their time, do you have a sense of how another community might be able to move forward if they don’t have that fortunate situation?
Rebecca:
We had so many volunteers that sprang up from this.
Christopher Mitchell:
Someone would have had that expertise.
Rebecca:
They’re really, they’re everywhere, look for them.
Christopher Mitchell:
In Marin County.
Rebecca:
No, but I mean, I really do think like and reach, I mean, I don’t know. I guess, reach out to communities that have done it. I mean, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to open source our model. Talk to others about how we made this happen. You’re right. We were lucky that we had some pretty stellar community volunteers. One of the volunteers that came on board to donate, I don’t even know how many at this point hours of his time, is somebody who has expertise building mesh networks on private islands. So you’re right, that is a Marin County specialty.
Christopher Mitchell:
But I think your point is correct, is that it’s a barn raising. And I think there’s a lot more willingness in our communities to step forward and figure this out than people might assume.
Rebecca:
Yeah, I do. I’ve been really, like seeing the volunteers that come from the community and come from local businesses to just say, “We’ll absolutely do this for free.” I mean, we had a local electric company offered to do all the installation on the streetlights for free.
Christopher Mitchell:
Wow.
Rebecca:
It’s been incredible to see everyone come in with the real dollars in hand and then also the pro bono services in hand that’s really made this happen. But I do think there’s… one of the things I love about working in public service is the way that we can scale good ideas across the world is so inspiring. I love that about public service. We’re not in competition with any other community out there, so the more we can open source what we’ve done and create these playbooks for other communities to learn, the better. And that’s I think why most people are doing this kind of work.
Christopher Mitchell:
Any closing comments, Air?
Air:
Yeah. I think just to add on to Rebecca, what Rebecca said, it’s we have other areas in Marin that are just as in need as the Canal and we’ve already been in conversations around like, “What would that look like to be able to put it into more places?” And I think there’s a fine balance between sharing all of that information and still doing what I talked about in terms of like really centering the community and the community needs, because what works in the Canal might not work in another neighborhood, right? There’s just going to be different issues and different things that come up.
Air:
So, I think, exactly what Rebecca said, what’s great is there’s so many people that are willing to share their knowledge and also we need to make sure that we’re really centering the people from whom we say that we’re serving or we’re trying to make a difference for. It’s really their opinion and their life that is being lived that matters. So, I think it’s kind of a combination of those two things. And so, I think working on Canal Alliance’s perspective, we have felt very blessed to be a community member that’s been involved in the conversation that’s been able to really lead change in the community.
Rebecca:
Yeah, I absolutely agree that honoring the local expertise, like that boots on the ground and elevating that is so critical to success. And I think that the power of this project is the people that have made it happen and that we’ve really had such diversity on the team from technical expertise to community expertise to fundraising expertise, there’s just been all the right people at the table, all with a can-do positive attitude, all with bigger dreams than might be possible, but it’s always good to reach higher because if you try to reach too low, then nothing good ever happens.
Christopher Mitchell:
Well, you might accidentally succeed. I’ve studied hundreds of different community approaches, this one is one of the most inspirational, particularly for this time and so, I just really want to thank you. I want to thank everyone involved with it and I hope that this inspires lots of other people to build on it. Thank you very much for your time today.
Air:
Thanks.
Rebecca:
Thank you.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s I-L-S-R.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco, and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is by Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
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51 min
September 17, 2020 How Local Control Empowers Cities to Fight Climate Change (Episode 109)
Host Jess Del Fiacco talks with John Farrell, Director of ILSR's Energy Democracy Initiative, about how cities are taking action around climate change. This episode also features perspective from leaders in Burlington, Vt.; Boulder, Colo.; Pueblo, Colo.; and Minneapolis, Minn., who have tackled ambitious clean energy goals.
48 min
September 03, 2020 Zephyr Teachout on Building an Antimonopoly Movement (Episode 108)
Zephyr Teachout, author of the new book Break 'Em Up, shares her thoughts on building an antimonopoly movement, what she finds encouraging and discouraging in our current moment, and how she approaches antimonopoly work as a democracy activist.… Read More
41 min
August 20, 2020 Can the People Take Power Back From Big Tech? (Episode 107)
Host Jess Del Fiacco talks to ILSR's Stacy Mitchell and Ron Knox about the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee's recent hearing on monopoly power in online platforms, which featured testimony from the CEOs of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. The hearing was part of a year-long investigation of anti-competitive behavior in these companies — the first time in more than 40 years that Congress has conducted a detailed investigation of monopoly power.
35 min

About Building Local Power

From the publisher's feed

Building Local Power brings you thought-provoking stories and new ideas for breaking the hold of corporate monopolies and expanding the power of communities to chart their own futures. We deliver insights from trailblazing lawmakers, scholars, business leaders, and advocates. Plus, conversations with in-house experts at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance help reveal the patterns and policies that shape our economy and communities. These stories and conversations help map solutions that distribute power to everyday people.