Spirit in Action
Democracy Spring: Frances Moore Lappé
Frances Moore Lappé is putting herself on the line as part of the April 2016 Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening.
- Duration:
- 55m
- Broadcast on:
- 03 Apr 2016
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ I'm really excited about my main guest today for Spirit in Action. I was given copies of Francis Morelape's book's "Diet for a Small Planet" and "Recipes for a Small Planet" the week after I decided to see if I could be a vegetarian back in 1976. So I'm so excited that she could join me today. But first we're going to visit with Myron Buckles in the second installment of "History and Our Best Future." Myron's retired this past year as a high school history teacher and I'm so pleased that he's finally agreed to share his insights weekly. Today I invite Myron to comment on an issue very much on the mind of Francis and many others Democracy and Campaign Finance. The elephant in plain view in the middle living room Myron is campaign spending. It's just ballooned, gone, crazy through the roof. And I think that most of us fear that those big dollars are buying our politicians and elections instead of those decisions being made by voters. What's your perspective on this both historically and in terms of actually running a campaign right now? One of my all-time favorite music videos goes back to 1972 and Alice Cooper recorded and videoed the song "I Wanna Be Elected." And in that song in the video he had scenes of well-dressed chimpanzees pushing wheelbarrows full of money. And yes, in 1972 money was a terrible problem in our election system, especially for president. But by today's standards it looks almost normal. Something has gone terribly wrong. Not only does money buy the election, it also buys our law making, which I will argue is worse than the election. If we have good candidates bought into office and they truly pass legislation that helps the poor in the working class, I wouldn't mind it a bit. But the reality is, and there was just a very in-depth study released on this showing that when the 1% promotes legislation, they have over a 45% chance of getting that legislation passed. On the other hand, legislation that comes from the 99% has almost no chance of being passed. This should be sounding alarm bells all over the country. The old statement that you get the government you deserve is painful because I don't think we deserve this government. I am presently in a campaign against an 18-year incumbent who at last check had $2 million in his campaign account. I know there is much concern about the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court ruling that basically money is speech, and I am all in favor of having an amendment to overturn Citizens United. However, I think there's another question that should be asked. And the question that the electorate should be asking of its candidates is why do you need $2 million to campaign for a spot in the U.S. House of Representatives? I have a budget of $250,000, which on one hand sounds to me like a King's ransom, and on another hand sounds like five teachers. And I frequently fret that maybe if I raised $250,000, using it to help pay the salaries of five teachers would be a better bang for the buck. I think a question that we should be asking is why do you need as much money as you do, and then why do you have to throw that much money at the issue? Maybe we should be judging our candidates on how cheaply and efficiently they run a campaign, not how much money they can throw at it. Because quite frankly, incumbents win 90% of the time. And one of the reasons incumbents win 90% of the time is the money hammer that people like me who think that, gee, I would like to run, maybe I have a message that might be received, are told from the get-go that you have no chance of winning if you don't have $250,000 in the bank before you even declare. Well, who has that? Certainly not a citizen legislature. So the amount of money that is there for campaigning works in a couple of different ways, and it keeps good quality candidates from taking the challenge. I am going to run a grassroots campaign. I am asking for donations of $25 to $50. I am hoping that I can get 5,000 people to chip in. And that's all I need. And with that amount of money, I believe I can run a very efficient campaign and have a shot at winning. Because I grew up in Wisconsin, Myron, I'm aware of the wondrous ways of Bill Proxmire. He was a Democrat, and he was among the most frugal of politicians. His Golden Fleece Awards were part of US Senate history. I believe that the last two times he was re-elected, he spent less than $200 each for those campaigns. Was he just as frugal starting out as during his re-elections? I knew about William Proxmire growing up out in North Dakota. That Golden Fleece Award was known all across the country. And William Proxmire, by the time he runs for Senate, has the other thing that incumbents always have. And that is name recognition. And so with his tremendous name recognition, he could run a very frugal campaign. Most people, just entering the fray, don't have that opportunity. Thanks to Myron for the second episode of History and Our Best Future. And now on to Frances Marla Pei. As I said earlier, she's been an inspirational companion for me for the past 40 years. As a vegetarian, a person who wants to live lightly on the earth and a person concerned about our democracy. Frankie's latest books include Getting a Grip and World Hunger 10 Myths. And I just had to get her on the phone before she heads off to get arrested this coming week as part of Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening. Frankie, thank you so much for joining me today for spirit and action. I'm delighted Mark. It's all the more exciting to me that you're able to do this given where you're headed this weekend. Tell me a little bit about your plans as part of Democracy Spring. Well, I'm going to be giving on the train with my backpack and my sleeping bag. And I'm headed to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. So it will be something I've never done before, along March for what I believe in. But everyone who's ever done anything like this says it's a fabulous experience. You learn, you bond, your insights go deeper the longer you walk. So we're going to be marching from the Liberty Bell to the Capitol. And then there's a sit-in on Capitol Steps, which I'm participating in, which we will risk arrest for democracy. So we get to Washington on the 11th. That's when our sit-in is. And we are asking Congress to act on core, core, democratic values of passing legislation that would enable people to run for Congress without having to depend on big private donors or corporations. It's a system of citizen-funded elections. We're asking Congress to vote to protect voting rights and reinstate them where they've been betrayed. Also, it's taking action to begin the process of constitutional amendment that would make sure that corporations do not have equal rights that real people do that have enabled them to so control our governance. It's so unfortunate that that decision is normally referred to as citizens united, more like citizens untied, which I guess is an anagram. Right. I've often wished that from the beginning that we citizens had refused to call it that. Citizens defeated or citizens enraged or anything but citizens united. It feels to me, Frankie, like for the USA and for democracy, we're perched on a precipice and who knows what way we may fall off. I was really inspired by the Occupy movement, I guess, at its peak five years ago. And I read some comments in an interview with you about how democracy spring awakening movement is different from the Occupy movement. I think it's important that people hear that. Well, the way I think of it now, I think Occupy was extremely valuable in focusing the whole country on the crisis of extreme inequality and how it's just getting worse and worse and how our whole system is contributing. So, Occupy did a huge service to us all and what I believe that democracy spring can do is to really begin a movement, a democracy movement that we need in order to actually make the system changes that are required so that what I'm participating in this March, making these demands, I see it as one piece of a growing movement that I hope will end up creating circles of democracy as a way I think of it. In communities, we continue to connect with each other and figure out what we can do locally and when we can act nationally and statewide as well, but really the sense that I had in the 60s, but even more so, that I was part of a movement. I was part of civil rights movement, certainly an anti-poverty movement in the 60s. And I want this generation, I want for myself at age 72, I want to feel that we are all part of a democracy movement together. There are many elements now that have come together, but certainly one of them is that there's so much anger, that our system is rigged and people know it is rigged and they just said, "Enough is enough, we've got to get democracy and if we are to solve any of our problems." You know, something just occurred to me, but I wonder if the candidacy of Bernie Sanders may well have been, at least in some way, inspired by the kind of thought and energy and longing that was exhibited by the Occupy movement. You know, I wouldn't all be surprised. I also think that he couldn't have imagined, I don't think, I couldn't have imagined his success. I mean, if somebody had asked me, you know, a year ago or even six months ago, what can Bernie accomplish? I have to admit, I would not have guessed, I would not have predicted. So I bet that he thought that, well, I've got to do this, but I really can't predict the outcome. I so admire him. In fact, his impact so far even confirms one of my favorite cliches of my own cliches here, is that it's not possible to know what's possible, that if you really live in what I call an eco mind, ecological worldview, that is characterized by connection, continuous change and co-creation. I think of it as the three seas. That's the nature of nature and our societies. And truly, it's not possible to know what's possible, so we might as well go for it. And that's what Bernie did and stayed true to it. So, yes, I agree with your first insight that he must have been inspired by how well received the Occupy movement was. And in some countries, like I wrote an article about Spain, where the equivalent of their Occupy movement became a party that now has seats in Parliament. Yeah, it's amazing the possibilities ahead of us. And I want to get to some of your writings on that. But first of all, I want to mention my connection to you feels deep, even though you've only met me one time before. I saw you in 2012 at the MREA, the Midwest Renewable Energy Association Energy Fair when you spoke there. And we spoke for just a moment back then. When I saw that you were going on the Democracy Spring Witness, and I said, I have to get back in touch with her. I promised her back four years ago. But the first way you impacted my life was back in 1976. For some odd reason in January of that year, I decided to try being a vegetarian. The first week, I had no idea what to eat. You know, a salad I can eat fruit, okay, I can make spaghetti. I mean, that's kind of what I thought. And that weekend, I visited some friends in Madison, Wisconsin, and I told them what I was doing. And they said, "Well, Mark, you've got to have recipes and diet for a small planet." And so they had to double copy, so they gave me theirs. So you were with me since 1976, and I've been a vegetarian all those years as my first resource. And the first cake I ever baked was a chameleon spice cake. Oh, I love that cake. I heard I read that in ages. You better try it. When you get back from your trip, I think. Right, right, right. I want to make sure that folks understand, because I'm sure that some folks will want to be joining in the Democracy Awakening or Democracy Spring. You're starting in Philadelphia this weekend, so tell me the dates and the transition. You're walking to the Capitol. Yes, I am taking a two-day break coming to Wisconsin for the annual meeting of Organic Valley Cooperative. They asked me to speak, and I love them so much. And I actually met the founders in Morocco, Wisconsin, right, as they were thinking about, forming the co-op back in the late '80s. And it's one of my favorite tales about it's not possible to know if it's possible. Because, Mark, when I'm honest with myself, I was a little, you know, "Oh, isn't that nice?" You know, you're going to form A, and maybe you will help a few dairy farmers in Western Wisconsin. Isn't that nice, you know? And now it's a billion-dollar business. So I have to pay on over honors due and admit that I had no idea what they could accomplish. So they're 1,800 farmers. I met about six that day. But you've become significantly enlightened since '19. I think that was 1988 when you did that. Right. When I met them in a little church in Morocco. But Francis Morlape was of great honor because, already, by the time I was going through college, you were championing ideas that were turning the world on its head. How do you go from there to, at the age of 72, marching from Philadelphia to the Capitol risking arrest? Do you really want to go to jail? Is it better housing for a 72-year-old? I have to admit, the only other time I've been arrested was in San Francisco when I was protesting Ronald Reagan's policies in Central America where he was funding what he called the Freedom Fighters. If you remember that, trying to topple the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, et cetera. So I got arrested, Mark, with stand-up comedians. Well, that's great. Maybe I'll get lucky again because I remember laughing a lot. I don't know what will happen this time, but I'll be in great company. I'm sure I'll learn a lot from the conversations, and I'm ready for anything. And you know what? I have three granddaughters now, and I'm going, I mean, it is cliché to say this, but I'm doing it for them in part, and I want them to know that I'm doing it. So I've been telling them about it. And my understanding is that via the website, if people looked at democracyspring.org, they could sign up to agree to be part of the civil disobedience. There's over 2,000 people, I think, who signed up. Yeah, almost 3,000 now. 3,000? Almost 3,000, yeah, almost. Last time I looked. And Ben Cohen, I'm hoping that he's bringing Ben and Jerry's ice cream to fuel this. Yeah, that's a good thing. But we should also say if people don't, for whatever reason, can't risk arrest. In no way means you can't participate in a number of activities that are going on next week in the following week. So this goes on until the 18th, and there are going to be a lot of things happening to teach in, but I'm looking forward to also, assuming I'm not in jail, is hands around the capital. We're going to be making a circle around the capital. That's later in the week. So you can get the schedule on these websites, and I really encourage people if they can go, if they know anyone who's there, closer, you can just participate in any way you can. And again, those websites would be democracyspring.org, democracyawakening.org. And whenever you want to track down Francis Morelape, Frankie is at smallplanet.org. There's also blog entries and such that you'll find on the NortonSpiritRadio.org site. I'll have all of these links there so you can track it down. But again, you're going to be participating on that starting this weekend. That's right. Second of April, we gather at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. Everybody's gathering between 10.30 and noon, and then we begin our march towards Washington. And so I'll be participating, except for two days when I take off over the continent, and then I come back and I meet up with people in Baltimore and march from Baltimore. Well, let's talk a little bit more about the ideas that get you to this, because I've got sitting on my desk here, Democracy's Edge, and I just finished reviewing Getting a Grip, which is one of your most recent publications. I did read Hope's Edge several years ago. So there's a progression I've noted in your writing. Of course, diet for a small planet. A lot of people have read it, used it, had formative ideas about how we can eat better on this planet. Your ideas have continued to deepening, but you told me earlier that actually when you finished college, you wanted to go to learn how to organize. Somebody might have predicted you wanted to be a TV chef or something because you've got died. Oh, no, no, never, never. So give me a little bit of the idea of progression of your life that leads to these ideas. And not all Texans share the same values as you do. No, I had very unusual parents. I credit them with so much. Let me just tell you one thing about my parents that tell you a lot about me. My parents found as a Unitarian church in Fort Worth, Texas during the McCarthy era. So what else do you need to know about Francis more a bit? But I understand that that was because you had gone with a classmate to her Sunday school class, came back talking about fire and brimstone, that kind of thing, right? All right. That's the family lore that I came home and said, "Mommy, Daddy, what is hellfire and brimstone? What does that mean?" And they looked at each other and said, "It means we have to start a Unitarian church." So that was a big part of my life growing up. I mean, I did fit into the Texas culture. I was actually a cheerleader in high school. Oh, wow. Yeah. But I hung out when I could with my organization, which my kids think is really a funny name. The organization of youth was called liberal religious youth. They were my buddies, but there were so few of us that we had to gather from five states to get enough people together to have a church camp. It was where I went every summer and we had winter camps also for teenagers and huge influence on me. But I ended up in a Quaker College, Erlen College in Indiana, and leaving there, this was 1966. I was really eager to get into the mix. I felt like this was a height of civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. Just before the women's movement, I mean, it was just such a time of incredible sense of disability, and I wanted to jump right in. So I went to a Quaker organizing school outside of Philadelphia in Chester, Pennsylvania, that became called the Martin Luther King School for Social Change. When I was there, our homework seriously was standing in Britain House Square in downtown Philadelphia and preaching against the war in Vietnam while the FBI took photographs of us. But I didn't last there either. I lasted one term, but then I wanted to actually do what I was being trained to do, so I moved into Philadelphia, and I took a job with the housing authority. Now, here is what is quite surprising. The housing authority person who hired me hired me under the guise of being a housing inspector, and I actually took the test and passed it to be a housing inspector. But my job was to go door-to-door in the really poor community in Germantown and to help organize a welfare rights organization, because these radicals inside the housing authority believe that people couldn't really transfer to home ownership and getting out of poverty unless they were organized and found their power together and developed a sense of dignity and knew their rights. So it was a really interesting time, because here I was in an African-American neighborhood, and I was this little white girl, you know, 23-year-old white girl going door-to-door. And it's interesting, in that time, that wasn't – that was okay, you know? I felt so accepted, and we were such buddies, and then the woman I was closely with died of a heart attack in her early 40s, and I was convinced that Lily died of poverty, not a heart attack. The stress was so intense. I mean, our work was to just try to ensure that people got what they were entitled to under the welfare laws. So stressful for them. So that was the beginning of my adult life, her death and Lily's death. That was also then right about the time of the great society programs under LBJ, and the transformation that had, which actually over a 10-year period, I understand reduced poverty in the U.S. by 50%. Yes. I should have mentioned that my job was actually funded by the great society program, because it was the housing authority that was carrying it out, but it was – the idea of it was called the Neighborhood Renewal Project. And the whole idea was how to help people who are very poor, stand up to their landlords, if the landlords were slum landlords, and how to help them transit to home ownership. The byword of the War on Poverty was maximum feasible participation. So now what I call living democracy was even there in the seed of the War on Poverty that I was part of then. That's quite amazing, and that's all before you actually wrote diet for a small planet, isn't it? I was 23 at that time, and then we moved to California where I entered graduate school in community organizing. But again, I was impatient because I could not see how the organizing was actually getting to the roots of my friend Lily's untimely death. And so I made the big decision of my life, and that was to stop doing anything to try to save the world until I understood how what I was doing related to the underlying causes. Then a light bulb went on, I think that light bulb had to do with the beginning of the food movement in the Bay Area and San Francisco area. It dawned on me one day that if I could just understand why people are hungry in the world, that that would unlock the mysteries of economics and politics. So I set my sights on that question, why are people hungry? And that really was the leading question of my life that led to diet for a small planet, because I was so shocked to learn that, in fact, it was not a lack of food. Plenty of food, but somehow it's not getting shared in ways that work out. Do you think that the ideas that you had as part of diet for a small planet, do you see them as having grown? Yes, and no. I mean, it's very complex. It's a both-and situation, and I'm so gratified that today there is a vibrant food movement, and so many people are finding that food and organic agriculture in particular prefer to call ecological agriculture, that it's such a powerful entry point to a meaningful life and a sense of empowerment and everything from the whole movement of farm to school and community gardens and school gardens and just the value of healthy food and the standing up to the junk food industry that is such a powerful contributor to ill health in our country and the world. All of that, I feel that some piece of that that I contributed to, and it's very, very gratifying. On the other side, I just finished my 18th book. It's called World Hunger 10 Miss. And while I think it's a much better book than the original World Hunger 12 Miss, and there are many things that we can say in the new book where we've progressed, nonetheless, Mark, I'm still making the same case. Hey, everybody, there's enough for us all, and we know how to feed everybody, but we're not doing it. And so there's this sense of deep frustration that I'm still in some ways saying the same thing that hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food, it's caused by a scarcity of democracy. And we're still the fact that we're contributing to the reduction of the capacity to feed us, just one statistic, three quarters of agricultural land is used to produce livestock that contribute just 16 to 17% of our total calories. So it doesn't make any sense that, D, for example, very, very inefficient. And all the calories that cattle eat, we only get 3% of those in the flesh that we, or at least some of us, eat those who eat meat. So this is an extremely inefficient way of feeding ourselves, and we now know it's also not a very healthy way meat-centered diet. So you see both the andness of my answer that, yes, I'm very gratified, and yet the core insight is the reason I'm marching. In fact, we took a picture of me this morning carrying my poster that says, "To end hunger, fight for democracy. Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of democracy." And I should mention again, small-planet institute is something that you and I think your daughter, Hannah, founded. Actually, we wrote a book together in 2002, the one you read to Hope Veg, and that's the year that we started the institute, so it's 14 years old now. And the model for small-planet institute is living democracy feeding hope. Again, the website is smallplanet.org. You are listening to Spirit in Action, and I'm Mark Helps-meat, your host for this Northern Spirit Radio production. On the web, you'll find us at northernspiritradio.org, with more than 10 and a half years of our programs for free listening and download, but there's 18 books by Frances Moore-Lappé, so she outdoes me significantly. Also, on the northernspiritradio.org site, you'll find a place for comments. We love that you add yours when you come, because we make democracy by having two-way communications. There's also a place to donate, that is entirely how this full-time work is supported, so click that when you come, even more important. And I would say this is crucial to all democracy movement. The local community radio station, where you are, provides an invaluable slice of news and of music you get nowhere else. Alternative voices are so important in terms of supporting democracy, so start by supporting them. Again, Frances Moore-Lappé, Frankie, is here today with us for Spirit in Action. She is doing a trip coming this weekend, and she'll be going from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. with a side trip to Wisconsin, beautifully enough. And risking arrests, along with, it appears up to 3,000 people now, committing to that as part of the Democracy Spring movement. democracyspring.org, democracyawakening.org, two different sites you want to check out, and be part of that, because we do need a strong United Front in order to make a change. You know, one thing I didn't actually see you writing about, although I imagine you have, you have a blog that you do regularly, and so many articles all over the place, is the Princeton study that documented, yes, we no longer have democracy in this country. I assume you're familiar with that. Yes, I do cite that. It cited on our website this field guide. And I didn't realize until recently that that study you're referring to where two political scientists looked at data about whether there was any correlation between the views of citizens and policies that were passed, and what was the correlation between business interests and policies that passed, and they actually found near zero, that's their phrase, near zero, association between citizens' views on policies and what actually happened. What I didn't realize until I looked into a little more recently is that those data were collected during the '80s and '90s, before many of these devastating Supreme Court decisions that have strengthened the hand of private wealth in our political system. So it's just a reminder that clearly a profound change is needed, because it's not just that, oh, citizens united, that terrible Supreme Court judgment that equates spending and speech, it's not that things fell apart then, yes, were made even worse, but this challenge we have of a lack of accountability to citizens' views is very, very deep. And at the same time, I just want to make sure that people listening know that we have great examples of what can work. The state of Maine is an example, and we have a video on our website that my son, Anthony LePay made, called Getting to a Group on Money and Politics, and it features a woman who was waitress in Auburn, Maine in the year 2000, and was encouraged by friends to run for office and became highly esteemed legislators in Maine and was even on the Judiciary Committee, very distinguished. She could do this, I make the point, she could do this because of clean elections there, where she could get a certain number of small donations from a certain number of people, and then she qualified for public funding, and that's how Deborah Simpson succeeded. But then in 2012, the dark money came in and carried out a very deceitful campaign against her, and she lost, and since then, Maine has strengthened its law. So we have a number of states where we're learning about how, through legislative change, we can strongly blunt the power of private interest in our political system. One of the things that you start getting a grip by talking about is that we have a mistaken analysis of why things are messed up, that it's not just evil, human nature, sin, depravity. You talk about the kind of debate between that and maybe Matthew Fox's idea, original blessing, or as Quakers would say, that of God and everyone, that if we think that sin and depravity, original sin is our root, that's why, of course, we're messed up, but you say that's bunk. Well, let me be clear. I believe that the evidence through our long social evolution and the evidence when we've been the guinea pigs in the laboratory shows that most of us, not just a few bad guys, not just a few Nazi madmen under the Holocaust days, but most of us in the wrong conditions will behave brutally. And so I do believe that most of us have that potential. And I also know that through our long social evolution, and again, studies done on us, including in our eye scans, know that we have profoundly social proclivities. You know, for example, our sense of fairness, that lives inside us, even its little toddlers have a sense of fairness. And it's not just our species, but others do, I don't know if you've seen these studies where the cappuccine monkeys will actually throw back a treat that they've been given. If they think their neighboring monkey is getting a better deal, yeah, if their neighbor gets a raisin and they get cucumber or something, they'll get resentful. So the point is that we have deep, deep pro-social qualities, for example, cooperation. I know that when they've looked at our brains with MRI scans when we're cooperating, they actually find that cooperation is so pleasant. It shows up in our brains if we're eating chocolate. So my point, Mark, is that I believe that both are in us, our capacity for absolute evil and our profoundly pro-social tendencies, which have allowed us to evolve who we are. I mean, we are the most social creature, and we have now what they've discovered mirror neurons where we can actually our brains as we're observing others, that we actually are experiencing some of what we're observing in our own brains. Therefore, my punchline is that all important are what are the conditions that we ourselves create. Do we create the conditions that bring out the best or the worst in us? And what are the conditions that do? And I claim that there are three now that are proven over our long history to bring out the worst, the reverse, the best. If we're stated in the negative, to bring out the worst, we experience concentrated power, lack of transparency, number two is lack of transparency or secrecy. And the third condition that brings out the worst in us is more of a cultural condition of blame, where we're encouraged not to accept responsibility but to blame the other guy. So concentrated power, secrecy, and blaming. If those conditions are present, most of us do not behave well. However, where power is shared and there's a mutual accountability and things are transparent and we drop the blame game and we realize that, hey, if we're all connected, then we're all implicated, then we do much better. This is really different from either, oh, we're all evil, oh, we're all good. There are very different ways of looking at things. I call it the eco mind because it's really saying we're like every organism in nature. What shows up depends on the context. What's different is that we humans know now what context brings out the best in us. And so we're called upon to do everything we can to instate, to bring about the conditions that bring out the best. And that's really why I'm marching because democracy is my shorthand for those three conditions, dispersion of power, transparency, and mutual accountability that defines living democracy. From my point of view, it's very interesting, Frankie, to think about what social dynamics, what's happening in our society that have empowered the downside, the evil. The one that struck me right away is, in one place you wrote it, instead of transparency, the opposite of that is anonymity. One of the things that I think our society has enabled us to do now, it used to be everybody in the village knew what everybody else did. It was all our same business, and that could be significantly confining and produced conformity. But it also meant that people were responsible for their actions. They had to actually think of the impact, whereas now we don't have to think about it. Yeah, well, one example I give is I learned that during the prelude to the financial meltdown that the financiers in Wall Street, they knew that what they were putting forth as viable investments were really incredibly risky, these mortgage-based derivatives. And their slogan was, "IBT, YBG, I'll be gone, you'll be gone." They knew exactly what you're saying, that nobody, once they made their money, they'd be out of there by the time, you know, what it's a fan. So it's exactly what you're saying. They were anonymous, and they knew they were anonymous, and therefore they could get away with, and they did get away with, actually, the destruction of millions of lives. And this goes right with the idea of what thin democracy is, and thin democracy, where all you need are free elections, or elections where you can vote for whoever is advocated by those who control the media market, and the free market, the economic market. That's all we need. And some people think we still have democracy, but as the Princeton study very clearly documented, no, then the people don't have democracy, we need a whole number of other attributes and ways of doing it, which lead to living democracy. Why don't you talk about what that looks like? Partly, I think of it as a contrast between thinking of democracy as something we inherited, and yes, that works just, you know, as long as you have elections plus a market that you have it. Of course, we look around the world, and we sell to the countries. You think of India, for example, that has a quarter of all the hungry people in the world, and they have elections, and they have a market, right? So clearly, that alone is not a definition that really makes a viable society. So the contrast I see is to understand democracy as a culture. It's a culture where we learn to do democracy from the earliest ages. I was just in Athens, Ohio, and met the teacher who told me the story about his sixth graders, who said they didn't trust the EPA to clean up the town creek after a toxic spill, and so what did they do? They constituted themselves as the Amesville sixth-grade water chemist, and they went out and they tested the water, and the town took them seriously, and then they became water testers for local farmers, and then when they got to the eighth grade, they were so empowered that they insisted that the school cafeteria get rid of its styrofoam trays. So we learned democracy by doing it. That's something that is prized and learned what I call the arts of democracy. So democracy then becomes a way of life, a set of skills that we learn and are encouraged to learn, and that it doesn't have to do with control by money, but rather really the engagement of ideas. But let me just tell you a story about small D democracy that's about this culture. I grew up in Texas, as you know, so I was particularly struck by a story from the 1990s where when George Bush was governor, he allowed and encouraged the utility companies to consult with their users about what kind of energy they wanted, and they work with a professor, James Fishkin at the University of Texas, and gathered these collaborative meetings they called "deliberative polls," but they're really almost like a citizen's jury where the citizens, the users of the energy got to weigh in and decide whether they wanted to stick with fossil fuel or move to renewable energy. This was the utility companies who involved the users in this way, and by the end of the, I believe it was a long weekend anyway, several days where a group of citizens were engaged in learning about options that I believe over 80% of the citizens said they would pay more for renewable energy. And today, Texas has so much wind energy that if Texas were a country, it would be the sixth largest producer of wind energy in the world, and now these utilities are at night, they're giving away their wind energy because it's so inexpensive, they're giving it away at night. I love that story, and it's an example of living democracy in practice, and think of all the different ways that we could do that. For example, during those town hall tirades I call them when we were shouting matches at each other during the first years before Obama was elected, what if instead of that format we had actual, say for the healthcare reform, what if the Obama administration had said, why don't we all meet in our libraries and church basements, and here are some guides for the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves about how we want our medical system to work. And I'm going to have a website where we collect all the different views, and then, yes, the Congress will decide, but we will take your considered views into consideration. That's the kind of thing we can do now, you know, and make it all very transparent. Imagine how different it would be today in terms of the role of the pharmaceutical companies, for example, in their power over our cost of our medication. I mean, it would be very different. Yes, very different. You know, I wanted to check with you. There are a couple things that, as I've been reading your writings, a lot of it is so compelling, and folks, you can track it down several ways. I'll have lots of links on nordonspiritradio.org. If you go to smallplanet.org, you'll find Francis Morlepe's information connection to our blog. You can find many more links to stuff that she's written and ideas that she's propounded. But one of the ideas that I was confronting as I was reading your things was when did things change direction? You mentioned that the Princeton study was based on things from 80s to 90s. So we've identified by that point already what's happening in our legislatures is not what the public wants. It doesn't correlate at all. So when did that turning point happen? For me, one of the litmus tests has been the change in attitudes towards unions. Unions were very strong up through the 60s, getting into the 70s, and certainly by the 80s, there was a drastic eroding of their influence. So I figured the turning point was somewhere between the 60s and the 70s. Does that make sense to you? Well, yes, and I emphasize in my own, when I look back in my own experience, I very much emphasize the 1980s and Ronald Reagan's influence. Because that was really the mindset of the government is the enemy. I mean, basically the famous quote that government is not solution, government is the problem. And the denigration of government then led fewer people to want to pursue work in the public sphere, and it was considered that this constant repetition of the idea that government can't do anything right, and the privatization of everything from schools to prisons, and to think that prisons are now privatized in the operation so that you have prison industry lobbying for more prisoners, right? I mean, to think that either healthcare or prisons are something that could be run by the profit motive primarily is just seemed on the surface to be absolutely illogical because you want those running them not to want more patients or more prisoners, right? So the point is that I see that denigration, that constant drum beat of government as the problem, and then Grover Northquist, the right wing leader, saying that he wanted to shrink government besides he could drown it in the bathtub, so there was that strong, strong movement, anti-government period that I think had a huge effect. Part of that also that showing up today was that the Federal Communications Commission withdrew the fairness doctrine, which I think that the consequences are still coming to us now with the way that the fairness doctrine meant that our airwaves, after all, we the people, these are our airwaves and that those who used them were required to have a balance in their perspectives so that they had to show that they were presenting the range of views on issues and that was withdrawn in the mid-80s, I believe. I know it was the 1980s, so I think that combined then with this drum beat that government is the problem, instead of democratizing the government to become more and more the solution of a key tool, has been, to me, the single way that I understand what has happened, and that I'm now reading a book called Listen Liberal by Thomas Frank, which I think is brilliant. It's very compelling, it's really a page turner, but it's very worrisome because he shows how they'll put in, for example, then actually did everything that we associate with the Republican Party the way that he removed the regulations from the banking industry, for example, which led directly to the crisis in '08, that that was a Democrat, not a Republican who deregulated the banking industry. So it's a very interesting history of how the Democratic Party has been so willing to go along with the program that we associate with the Republican Party defending the interest of big business, and so we're left with no party then that is truly representing the working people, and that's where Bernie Sanders comes in, right? Yeah, of course. In 1980, I was very aware as the election was coming in, I thought it's very unlikely that Ronald Reagan could win this election, how could that be? But I was actually taking a second bachelor's degree at that time, and I was in class with people who were enthused about that, and it surprised me, so I know that there was something in the society that was poised ready to give support to the ideas that Ronald Reagan was advancing, and so I think that the point happened somewhere before there that made possible the changes that we're seeing. One of them, and this comes as a result of some introspection on my part, is I think that in spite of all the wonderful things that came out of the ideas of the 1960s, which I am a champion of, one of the negative side effects that goes along with our whole economic development in the past 50 years, is that you could not be a joiner, that one foot out, one foot in, so I think that a lot of people, for instance, who were Democrats before, or were union members or part of liberal churches, that they decided to not be joiners, and even though they still had what were maybe liberal or pro-union or concerned about the earth ideas, that they tended less to band together in effective coalitions. That's so interesting. Anyway, that's my thought about it. I think I see that symptom, and I think that we've self-sabotaged the effectiveness of some of our coalitions and are working together, the ideas that we hold very strongly. Yeah, it's very interesting, Mark. It's very interesting. This is something that now that this is the rest of my life, by the way, my living democracy of this is, every time I say this, I want to put my hand up in the air, you know, the pledge to the universe, because I've been swimming in this stream that has several currents, and the food in Hunger World is very, very close to me, but I want to keep this focus on the mother of all issues, living democracy, so I really want to think over what you just said, and so the challenge for me, and I hope anyone listening to this advice for me, would send it along because this is the rest of my life to make real this living democracy. I hate to say vision. That sounds like a far off thing. It is emerging. My next book is going to be called Democracy Rising, which will document the extent to which, invisibly to most of us, forms of living democracy are actually emerging, and I see this march as part of that, but I think that we together need to create a real sense of what democracy looks like that can actually work, because we human beings, we can't create what we can't name and see, and that's why I think this very practically, how can the machinery of democracy work better, with real transparency and rules that keep money out to a very large extent. Maybe we can't keep private wealth completely out of the system, but we can do a great deal. I also want to mention there that we have a fact sheet on my website, smallplanet.org. That's a global look. It's not a very sexy fact sheet. It's kind of wonky, but it's only four pages. If you want to see a big picture of what other countries do around the world, I pulled that together last summer. It's the global glance. It's money in politics with global work. I think we have a lot to learn from others, and some of it's very encouraging about what can be done. That's where my energy is, to get a better sense of what's possible and the steps to get there and to really make a democracy movement that people can feel. When they get up in the morning, yes, I'm part of a democracy movement. I'm making it happen. I love your energy, Frankie. I love it. It comes through in everything that you've written. It comes through in the witness of your life. By the way, for a living democracy, if you don't want to refer to it as a vision, you could perhaps use a Quaker word. Try this on, see if it works for you. A leading. Oh, yeah. Exactly. A leading. Yeah, I like that. Francis Morelape has been doing so much valuable thought. Having us scrutinize and learn and try to find out how to make this a better world. It started with a diet for a small planet for me, but she's written so many other good books just recently. You take a look at getting a grip and your latest book, World Hunger 10 Myth. And by the way, getting a grip, I did that in two editions. The second one is just getting a grip, too. We are actually giving that away to anyone who will pledge to us to send us feedback that I can use in my next book, Democracy Rising. Because democracy rising is a follow up to getting a grip. It's building on that book. So I'm eager for people's ideas because I want to keep it short as getting a grip to short. So I'm just saying if anybody wants to send us an email, if they pledge to give me real feedback, then we will be happy to send them getting grip for free. And so again, go via smallplanet.org for that. There's so much that I want you to follow up, folks. Frances Morela pays in the thick of it. She's going to be part of Democracy Spring as of this weekend. Democracy Awakening continues for another seven or so days after that. I hope your bodies show up, your hearts show up. I hope you're doing it in your town and in Washington, D.C. with a few thousand people are going to show up willing to do civil disobedience over the next two weeks. I think that we have a real chance for opening the mind and maybe bringing the people together. We need to listen to one another. Frances Morela pay gives us the ideas to open our minds, open our possibilities in the future. And that's something I'm extremely thankful for, Frankie. Thank you so much for all that you've written, all you've done to change my life and to change our country. And thank you for joining me for spirit and action. Thank you, Mark. And I hope many people will see this as an opportunity to make history together. And I hope to meet you on the march. Let's all go join Frances Morela pay in the front lines of democracy at the democracy spring and democracy uprising events between Philadelphia and Washington D.C. between April 2nd and 17th. You can follow Frankie's thoughts and exploits on smallplanet.org. Track down her 18 books from diet for a small planet on to today's books. And I have multiple links to her and her writings, of course, on northernspiritradio.org. And there's more of my conversations with Frances Morela pay in the bonus excerpts on my site. More gems, and sorry we couldn't fit them all in the broadcast. But this just means that you have more riches to be gathered at northernspiritradio.org. Thanks to Frankie for joining us, and we'll see you next week for spirit in action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of northernspiritradio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.
Frances Moore Lappé is putting herself on the line as part of the April 2016 Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening.