Create!

Along with direct action and other forms of resistance, a transformational movement must also have a constructive program that builds new institutions based on the values that the movement aspires to achieve. These may eventually replace the old systems. From small, worker-owned cooperatives to national advocacy groups, hundreds of thousands of people around the country are working to create democratic and sustainable systems that meet the basic needs of all people.

How Could A BRICS+ Bank And Settlement Currency Work?

October 12, 2023 Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. Create! BRICS, De-dollarization, Finance and the Economy, NATO, Vladimir Putin

This first week of October has seen U.S. interest rates soar to the 5% level on long-term Treasury bonds. That has made long-term Treasuries one of most attractive investment vehicles in the world, or even the most attractive. One obvious result is that countries aiming to de-dollarize their central-bank reserves would make an untimely decision to move out of the dollar at this point. To avoid holding dollars in the form of US Treasury securities would mean holding foreign reserves denominated in a currency that is declining against the dollar. No other government is willing to make its currency so attractive to international investors (including central banks) by raising interest-rates so high.

Four Winning Models For Building Community Wealth

October 10, 2023 Deb Nelson, Next City. Create! Community Ownership, Economic Justice, Frontline Community, Local Economy

If we’re ever going to have a just economy, we’ll have to build it from the ground up. Flowing resources to front-line communities that face the worst of the climate crisis and the racial wealth gap is the ideal way to plant the roots of a new economy. Not only is it essential for justice, but it’s also a practical, scalable strategy for seeding system change. As executive director of the Just Economy Institute, I’ve collaborated with many JEI fellows who are leading promising community wealth-building initiatives. These financial activists share a set of principles: They support community self-determination and ownership.

Seattle’s Urban Animal Debuts Veterinary Worker Cooperative

October 9, 2023 DVM 360. Create! Cooperatives, Seattle, Veterinarian, Worker Cooperative

Urban Animal, a Seattle-based veterinary network, has announced it will become the first worker cooperative veterinary practice in the US this fall. This will enable its 110 employees to share in the governance and profits of the company with more than 50,000 clients.1 Urban Animal joins about 30 worker cooperative-based businesses in Washington. By introducing the limited cooperative association (LCA), Urban Animal founder Cherri Trusheim, DVM, will gift a portion of the company to seed it, striving to become a completely employee-owned worker co-op over time. With the influx of veterinary corporatization, Trusheim aims to empower employees and ensure the practices stay locally owned and community minded while offering the best care.

How Cities Are Experimenting With Reparations In Urban Policy

October 9, 2023 Nik Heynen and Nikki Luke, Next City. Create! City Planning, Community Solar, Land trusts, Racism, Reparations

Even as politicians work to reenact Jim Crow-era silences about how white supremacy has shaped America, reparations are on the table as they have never been before. After an upswell of grassroots organizing in 2020, we’re seeing a new level of recognition that descendants of enslaved people, whose labor was stolen, are owed a debt. While that organizing has fueled a collective understanding of the need for repair, progress has been bogged down by the weight of that debt and questions about how such debts can be repaid. These questions have been taken up across the country, from the California Reparations Task Force to the cities of Boston, Evanston, Kansas City, Knoxville and St. Louis, among others.

Tribes To Consider Asserting Primary Jurisdiction Over Yellowstone Bison

October 7, 2023 Last Real Indians. Create! Bison, Environment, Indigenous Sovereignty, Montana

West Yellowstone, MT - As the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service considers the need to list Yellowstone Bison as a threatened or endangered species, there is a growing momentum among the interested Tribes to assert their inherent jurisdiction over wild buffalo and usher in a new era of stewardship over America’s national mammal. According to Nez Perce environmental scientist James Holt, the executive director of Buffalo Field Campaign, such an historic agreement between sovereign nations working with federal stewards would represent nothing less than the beginning of “true reparations” for the long-standing practice of cultural genocide, or ethnocide, that is still being perpetuated by the cattle industry to preserve their monopoly on public lands forage in the West.

Transforming Suburbia

October 6, 2023 Jan Spencer, Resilience. Create! Permaculture, Suburbia, Sustainability, Transformation

From the street, anyone would notice something different about these two properties in the middle of this bi focal suburban block in Eugene, Oregon. The houses on one side of the street date from the mid 50’s, the other side, larger and two stories, have replaced a wholesale nursery over the past 15 years. The two quarter acre properties of interest here, are green all the way to the street with food producing trees, brambles, vines. One place, notably, does not have a driveway. My property is a permaculture landmark in the Pacific Northwest. Literally, thousands of people have visited over the years to see what a nothing special suburban property can become.

The Gulf Islands Food Co-Op

October 6, 2023 Each For All, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cooperative, Farming, Food Security, Mutual Aid

The Gulf Islands Food Co-op was created in 2018 to foster inter-island co-operation and develop new resources and practical supports for food producers and consumers on Galiano, Mayne, Pender and Saturna islands (the Southern Gulf Islands SGI). The co-op’s main goals are to help sustainably increase island food production, food security and resilience by encouraging the growing and purchasing of local food. Its initiatives range from educational programs, such as “healthy soils and regenerative agriculture,” to sharing of local resilient seeds, supporting an Indigenous Venison/Deer workshop offered by The Galiano Conservancy Association, bulk buying of farm supplies, setting up free tables for producers at local markets and supporting growers donating to local food banks.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day Act Reintroduced In Congress

October 4, 2023 Native News Online. Create! Columbus Day, Congress, Indigenous Peoples Day, Indigenous Rights

The bicameral Indigenous Peoples’ Day Act to replace Columbus Day as a federal holiday and designate the second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day has been reintroduced in Congress. The legislation was reintroduced by Representatives Sharice Davids (KS-03), Norma J. Torres (CA-35), Suzanne Bonamici (OR-01), and Suzan DelBene (WA-01), along with Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM). The Indigenous Peoples’ Day Act has garnered 56 cosponsors in the House of Representatives. “Our country has long failed to recognize and acknowledge its dark history of erasure and harm brought upon the first inhabitants of the Americas,” Norma Torres (CA-35) said.

The Case For Child Welfare Abolition

October 4, 2023 Roxanna Asgarian, In These Times. Create! Child Welfare, Children, CPS, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Families, Human Rights

Early last December, CBS Sunday Morning ran a 12-minute segment about the harms of the child welfare system. The report led with the story of Vanessa Peoples, a Colorado nursing student and mother of three who became the subject of an abuse investigation after her two-year-old briefly wandered away from a family picnic. A stranger saw the child and called the police, despite the fact that Peoples, who is Black, caught up with her son shortly afterward. The call initiated an investigation from child protective services (CPS). A month later, a social worker made an unannounced visit to Peoples’ home.

Mexico: Indigenous Farmers Organize To Protect Maize

October 4, 2023 José de Jesús Cortés, La Prensa Latina Media. Create! climate crisis, Food and Agriculture, Mexico, Seed bank

Indigenous farmers from southern Mexico are organizing and creating seed banks to defend traditional maize from the climate crisis, in the midst of the Mexican government’s fight against genetically modified grains, mainly from the United States. In Oaxaca, southern Mexico, Bernardino Cruz, 48, planted two hectares of maize at the beginning of the rainy season, predicting a good harvest until the rains stopped during the last month. For this reason, he changed his planting method from rainfed to irrigated so as not to lose the production of the native “belatove” corn, an ear about 10 centimeters long composed of mostly white kernels.

Imagining South Korea Without America

October 3, 2023 Ko Myoung-sub, Hankyoreh. Create! Book Review, Korea, South Korea, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

Is the ROK-US alliance unconditionally good? A new book raises radical questions about the ROK-US alliance on the 70th anniversary of the two countries’ mutual defense treaty, which was signed on Oct. 1, 1953. The book is “The Naked ROK-US Alliance,” written by Daegu University professor Kim Sung-hae, who completed a master’s in international affairs at the University of Georgia and a doctorate in journalism at the University of Pennsylvania. As the book’s subtitle suggests, this book lists the “reasons for resolving to break up with America” while urging us to imagine what South Korea would be like without the US or their alliance.

Automakers’ Electric Vehicle Lie

October 1, 2023 Lucy Dean Stockton, The Lever. Create! Cars, Electric Vehicles, The Big 3, Unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), Worker Rights and Jobs

The United Auto Workers are entering their third week of the first-ever simultaneous strike against the three big automakers, and for the first time, a sitting US president, Joe Biden, joined them on the picket line. Executives at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis are pushing back on worker demands by invoking the climate crisis. They say it is impossible to give workers what they want while also making a swift transition to manufacturing electric vehicles. On September 14, Ford’s CEO Jim Farley said that the union’s demands — higher wages, better hours, an end to tiered employment, and guaranteed job security in a green energy transition — could send the company into bankruptcy.

Car Culture: Everything You Need To Know

October 1, 2023 Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch. Create! Cars, climate crisis, culture, Environment, pollution, Transportation

When you Google, “America’s love affair with…” the first word the algorithm fills in is “the automobile.” The third is “cars.” (The second is, surprise, surprise, guns.) In the U.S. — and increasingly in other parts of the world too — cars and driving have a significant impact on our daily lives. They determine the use of our streets, shape the design of our cities and suburbs, define coming of age for many young people, and affect the quality of the air we breathe. From anthropomorphized vehicles like Herbie: The Love Bug and the cars of Cars, to road trip epics like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Thelma & Louise to bangers like “Fast Car” and “Route 66,” automotive travel has had an outsized impact on our imaginations.

A Major Win Against Factory Farming In Oregon

September 30, 2023 Nick Engelfried, Waging Nonviolence. Create! climate crisis, Climate Justice, Factory Farming, Family Farms, Food and Agriculture

In July, Gov. Tina Kotek signed Oregon Senate Bill 85, which places a moratorium on factory farms’ ability to use unlimited amounts of groundwater. While some advocates consider the bill to be a diluted compromise, it has potential to significantly limit the destructive activities of CAFOs in a state where a healthy remnant of the family farming economy still thrives. On a national level, it represents the first major state legislative victory against factory farming in the U.S. in years. SB 85 is the product of a years-long organizing effort, whose ultimate goal is to pass a full moratorium on new factory farms in Oregon.

Venezuela To Launch China-Backed Poverty Elimination Program

September 29, 2023 Andreína Chávez Alava, Venezuelanalysis. Create! China, Poverty, Socialism, Venezuela

Caracas, September 21, 2023 (venezuelanalysis.com) – The Venezuelan government has announced a new social program focused on fighting poverty and inequality, which will be supported by China’s International Poverty Reduction Center. On Monday, during his weekly TV program, President Nicolás Maduro said that the “Social Equality and Happiness Mission” was “almost ready” to be launched and its main purpose is to “optimize the fight against inequality, against poverty and to build a more harmonious country.” Although Maduro did not give details, he stressed that the social program will work alongside the Chinese anti-poverty center.

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