Radical feminist, artist, and media activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls herself, "the cybernetic dream of a one room black reconstruction schoolteacher." She spreads knowledge, healing, and empowerment through web-based projects like MobileHomeComing, a traveling "intergenerational community documentation and education project" that challenges our culture's heteronormativity, and BrokenBeautifulPress, which "lifts up black feminist practices throughout history and transformative community models in the present." Gumbs was named an Utne Reader Visionary in 2009. Keep up with her at Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.  

From Beyoncé and Oprah to Serena and Venus Williams, African American women are some of the most celebrated people in today's media-saturated culture. Despite the largely positive nature of this attention, misconceptions and stereotypes are often reinforced when we see these women on screens and in the pages of magazines. In a new book of poems contemplating celebrity, race, and representation, Alexis Pauline Gumbs considers "what it is possible to know about the most famous Black women alive today." Gumbs describes her book, One Hundred and One Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Alive, as "part prayer part polemic [...] an intervention into the consumption of Black women."

Without denying the strength of the 10 women she profiles, Gumbs questions the media's representations of them and attempts to carve a space for the actual people behind those larger-than-life personas. In the video above, Gumbs notes that "there's some critical thinking that should be going on as we observe and participate in the media representation of black women that often isn't going on. For me this is about practicing and making space for that thinking and rethinking and questioning." One Hundred and One Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Alive is available for a small donation through Scribd. Below is Gumbs' poetic introduction to the book.

Ten Things That Are Not True About This Project Instead of a Preface*

There are no risks to speak of when loving black women becomes a religion.

This is a joke.

This is a game.

The media made me do it.

I could have said it better but I didn't.

I didn't have to do this but I did.

I have a working TV. And I know what you are thinking.

Restorative justice is possible here.

Dignity is possible here.

You are ready for this.

Love,
Alexis Pauline Gumbs

*After Diane Di Prima's "10 Things That Are Not True About the She-Wolf"

Kalle Lasn is the co-founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation, editor-in-chief of Adbusters magazine, and author of the books Culture Jam and Design Anarchy. Lasn was recognized as an Utne Reader visionary in 2001 for his efforts to reclaim Western culture from the influence of corporations, consumption, and advertising. 

This article originally appeared at Solutions Online and is licensed under Creative Commons. 

Image: Banksy Balloon Girl by Stew Dean, licensed under Creative Commons. 

The votes are in and President Obama has a second term with a virtual guarantee that he will again face a gridlocked Congress. So what is a president to do?

Those suggesting Obama reach out to Republicans forget President Clinton’s second term, when his impeachment became the top priority of congressional Republicans.

Governor Romney and a good many pundits are calling for him to reach out to the same Republican opponents who made a pact after his first term election to do everything in their power to assure the failure of his presidency—and persistently voted as a solid block to fulfill that promise.

Some suggest it may be different in President Obama’s second term because he will not be running again. They forget President Clinton’s second term, when his impeachment on the flimsiest of grounds became the top priority of congressional Republicans.

When Senator Obama won the election that put him in the White House, I wrote a national address I hoped he might deliver as president outlining policies for a new economy equal to the challenges of the 21st century. Since he did not choose to deliver it during his first term, I was thinking I might dust it off and put forth a similar proposal for his second term.

Reading it now, I realize that most of what I proposed requires congressional action that will never happen so long as congress remains captive to my-way-or-the-highway extremists. President Obama will have his hands full simply getting a budget bill through congress that is adequate to keep the country running and avoid a financial default. If he succeeds in this, it will be a heroic accomplishment.

That said, there is critical need to move the nation forward to address critical questions mostly or totally absent from the political debates of this now-past election cycle—including climate change, extreme inequality, and the corruption of our political and electoral processes. Realistically, the next congress is not going to move us forward on any of these issues, no matter how what President Obama does.

Any progress on these matters at the federal level will depend on using the considerable powers of the administrative branch of government—and President Obama should give high priority to doing so. That said, I do believe that most Americans are fed up with the scorched-Earth politics of ideological extremists with deep-pocket sponsors.

There is a need and opportunity for President Obama to reach out across political lines to launch a national conversation that involves all Americans, irrespective of political affiliation, interested in addressing the three defining challenges of a 21st^-century world:

1. Balancing human consumption with the generative capacity of Earth’s biosphere while;
2. Providing every person with the opportunity for a healthy, secure, and meaningful life; and
3. Achieving true democracy in which every person’s voice counts.

This conversation has the potential to force a realignment of both of America’s major political parties and might well lead, over time, to a significant restructuring of America’s political institutions to create effective space for a far greater range of voices.

A second-term President Obama can afford to take the lead in engaging such a conversation specifically because he will never again be campaigning for re-election. It could be his most significant legacy for America and for the world.

Dr. David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World.  He was recognized as an Utne Reader Visionary in 2011. 

Editor’s note: This post was originally published by YES! Magazine, and is licensed under Creative Commons.To repost, follow these steps. 

Image by Austen Hufford, licensed under Creative Commons.   

Woody Tasch is the founder and chairman of Slow Money, an organization that urges Americans to invest in small, sustainable, and local food systems. The Slow Money alliance doesn’t maximize investors’ profits regardless of environmental and human costs—which is exactly the point. Instead, profits are centered around stronger, more stable and sustainable communities. Tasch is the author of Inquiries in the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. He was recognized as an Utne Reader Visionary in 2010.

 
A few years ago, in Mark Anielski’s book The Economics of Happiness, I came across the words of Robert F. Kennedy, from the 1968 Presidential campaign. After recovering from the chagrin of not having heard these words previously, it became my pleasure to share them occasionally during public events. It was surprising to learn just how many folks have never heard them and wonderful to see how deeply audiences resonated with them. 

We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads. … It includes … the broadcasting of television programs, which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

And if the Gross National Product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials … the Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America—except whether we are proud to be Americans.

Today’s world of sound bytes and fast money has no time for such discourse. A billion dollars of fast money purchasing TV ads, it seems, is all too much like hundreds of millions of tons of NPK fertilizer applied to industrial farm fields—past the point of diminishing returns we zoom, degrading public discourse and diminishing the fertility of the soil as we go.

Which brings us around to the leaping earthworm, one Brook Le Van, who, with his wife Rose, operates Sustainable Settings, a few hundred acres organic farm near the Crystal River, at the foot of Mt. Sopris, in Carbondale, Colorado, and who, at the dais of a recent anti-fracking rally in Denver, displayed considerable imagination and erudition.  It takes considerable reserves of both, when talking about cows and pigs and raw milk and food sheds and the water resources of Thompson Divide, to leap all the way to “anthropocene reductionism.” But Brook did it. In public. In a five-minute talk. I was there.

I’m looking forward to my next conversation with Brook, who is a Slow Money founding member, so that he can elucidate the relationship between Slow Money and anthropocene reductionism.

In the meantime, let’s appreciate the nuanced thinking behind RFK’s rhetoric and the strength of Brook’s grounded activism and remind ourselves that every time we support a small food enterprise, we are voting in a powerful, direct way for life after fast food and fast money.

Image: "Money" by Aaron Patterson, licensed under Creative Commons. 

This post originally appeared on TomDispatch.  

The first horseman was named al-Qaeda in Manhattan, and it came as a message on September 11, 2001: that our meddling in the Middle East had sown rage and funded madness. We had meddled because of imperial ambition and because of oil, the black gold that fueled most of our machines and our largest corporations and too many of our politicians. The second horseman came not quite four years later. It was named Katrina, and this one too delivered a warning.

Katrina’s message was that we needed to face the dangers we had turned our back on when the country became obsessed with terrorism: failing infrastructure, institutional rot, racial divides, and poverty. And larger than any of these was the climate -- the heating oceans breeding stronger storms, melting the ice and raising the sea level, breaking the patterns of the weather we had always had into sharp shards: burning and dying forests, floods, droughts, heat waves in January, freak blizzards, sudden oscillations, acidifying oceans.

The third horseman came in October of 2008: it was named Wall Street, and when that horseman stumbled and collapsed, we were reminded that it had always been a predator, and all that had changed was the scale -- of deregulation, of greed, of recklessness, of amorality about homes and lives being casually trashed to profit the already wealthy. And the fourth horseman has arrived on schedule.

We called it Sandy, and it came to tell us we should have listened harder when the first, second, and third disasters showed up. This storm’s name shouldn’t be Sandy -- though that means we’ve run through the alphabet all the way up to S this hurricane season, way past brutal Isaac in August -- it should be Climate Change. If each catastrophe came with a message, then this one’s was that global warming’s here, that the old rules don’t apply, and that not doing anything about it for the past 30 years is going to prove far, far more expensive than doing something would have been.

That is, expensive for us, for human beings, for life on Earth, if not for the carbon profiteers, the ones who are, in a way, tied to all four of these apocalyptic visitors. A reasonable estimate I heard of the cost of this disaster was $30 billion, just a tiny bit more than Chevron’s profits last year (though it might go as high as $50 billion). Except that it’s coming out of the empty wallets of single mothers in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the pensions of the elderly, and the taxes of the rest of us. Disasters cost most of us terribly, in our hearts, in our hopes for the future, and in our ability to lead a decent life. They cost some corporations as well, while leading to ever-greater profits for others.

Disasters Are Born Political 

It was in no small part for the benefit of the weapons-makers and oil producers that we propped up dictators and built military bases and earned the resentment of the Muslim world. It was for the benefit of oil and other carbon producers that we did nothing about climate change, and they actively toiled to prevent any such action.

If you wanted, you could even add a fifth horseman, a fifth disaster to our list, the blowout of the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 2010; cost-cutting on equipment ended 11 lives and contaminated a region dense with wildlife and fishing families and hundreds of thousands of others. It was as horrendous as the other four, but it took fewer lives directly and it should have but didn't produce political change.

Each of the other catastrophes has redirected American politics and policy in profound ways. 9/11 brought us close to dictatorship, until Katrina corrected course by discrediting the Bush administration and putting poverty and racism, if not climate change, back on the agenda. Wall Street's implosion was the 2008 October Surprise that made Americans leave Republican presidential candidate John McCain's no-change campaign in the dust -- and that, three years later, prompted the birth of Occupy Wall Street.

The Wall Street collapse did a lot for Barack Obama, too, and just in time another October surprise has made Romney look venal, clueless, and irrelevant. Disaster has been good to Obama -- Katrina’s reminder about race may have laid the groundwork for his presidential bid, and the financial implosion in the middle of the presidential campaign, as well as John McCain’s disastrous response to it, may have won him the last election.

The storm that broke the media narrative of an ascending Romney gave Obama the nonpartisan moment of solidarity he always longed for -- including the loving arms of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. But it’s not about the president; it’s about the other seven billion of us and the rest of the Earth’s creatures, from plankton to pikas.

Hope in the Storm  

Sandy did what no activist could have done adequately: put climate change back on the agenda, made the argument for reasonably large government, and reminded us of the colossal failures of the Bush administration seven years ago. (Michael “heckuva job” Brown, FEMA's astonishingly incompetent director under George W. Bush, even popped up to underscore just how far we've come.)

Maybe Sandy will also remind us that terrorism was among the least common, if most dramatic, of the dangers we faced then and face now. Though rollercoasters in the surf and cities under water have their own drama -- and so does seawater rushing into the pit at Ground Zero.

Clearly, the game has changed. New York City’s billionaire mayor, when not endorsing police brutality against Wall Street’s Occupiers, has been a huge supporter of work on climate change. He gave the Sierra Club $50 million to fight coal last year and late last week in Sandy’s wake came out with a tepid endorsement of Obama as the candidate who might do something on the climate. Last week as well, his magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, ran a cover that could’ve run anytime in the past few decades (but didn’t) with the headline: “It’s global warming, stupid.”

There are two things you can hope for after Sandy. The first is that every person stranded without power, running water, open grocery stores, access to transportation, an intact home, and maybe income (if work isn’t reachable or a job has been suspended) is able to return to normal as soon as possible. Or more than that in some cases, because the storm has also brought to light how many people were barely getting by before. (After all, we also use the word “underwater” for people drowning in debt and houses worth less than what’s owed on their mortgages.) The second is that the fires and the water and the wind this time put climate change where it belongs, in the center of our most pressing issues.

We Have Power! How Disasters Unfold 

A stranger sent me a widely circulated photograph of a front gate in Hoboken with a power strip and extension cord and a little note that reads, “We have power! Please feel free to charge your phone.” We have power, and volunteers are putting it to work in ways that count. In many disasters, government and big bureaucratic relief organizations take time to get it together or they allocate aid in less than ideal ways. The most crucial early work is often done by those on the ground, by the neighbors, by civil society -- and word, as last week ended, was that the government wasn’t always doing it adequately.

Hurricane Sandy seems to be typical in this regard. Occupy Wall Street and 350.org got together to create Occupy Sandy and are already doing splendid relief work, including for those in the flooded housing projects in Red Hook, Brooklyn. My friend Marina Sitrin, a scholar and Occupy organizer, wrote late last week:

“Amazing and inspiring work by community and Occupy folks! Hot nutritious meals for many hundreds. Supplies that people need, like diapers, baby wipes, flashlights etc., all organized. Also saw the first (meaning first set up in NYC -- only tonight) scary FEMA site a few blocks away. Militarized and policed entrance, to an area fenced in with 15-foot fences, where one gets a sort of military/astronaut ration with explanations of how to use in English that I did not understand. Plus Skittles?”

Occupy, declared dead by the mainstream media six weeks ago, is shining in this mess. Kindness, solidarity, mutual aid of this kind can ameliorate a catastrophe, but it can’t prevent one, and this isn’t the kind of power it takes to pump out drowned subway stations or rebuild railroad lines or get the lights back on. There is a role for government in disaster, and for mobilizing all available forces in forestalling our march toward a planet that could look like the New Jersey shore all the time.

When Occupy first began, all those tents, medical clinics, and community kitchens in the encampments reminded me of the aftermath of an earthquake. The occupiers looked like disaster survivors -- and in a sense they were, though the disaster they had survived was called the economy and its impacts are usually remarkably invisible. Sandy is also an economic disaster: unlimited release of carbon into the atmosphere is very expensive and will get more so.

The increasingly turbulent, disaster-prone planet we’re on is our beautiful old Earth with the temperature raised almost one degree celsius. It’s going to get hotter than that, though we can still make a difference in how hot it gets. Right now, locally, in the soaked places, we need people to aid the stranded, the homeless, and the hungry. Globally we need to uncouple government from the Big Energy corporations, and ensure that most of the carbon energy left on the planet stays where it belongs: underground.

After the Status Quo 

Disasters often unfold a little like revolutions. They create a tremendous rupture with the past. Today has nothing much in common with yesterday -- in how the system works or doesn’t, in what people have in common, in how they see their priorities and possibilities. The people in power are often most interested in returning to yesterday, because the status quo was working for them -- though Mayor Bloomberg is to be commended for taking the storm as a wake-up call to do more about climate change. For the rest of us, after such a disaster, sometimes the status quo doesn’t look so good.

Disasters often produce real political change, not always for the better (and not always for the worse). I called four of the last five big calamities in this country the four horsemen of the apocalypse because directly or otherwise they caused so much suffering, because they brought us closer to the brink, and because they changed our national direction. Disaster has now become our national policy: we invite it in and it directs us, for better and worse.

As the horsemen trample over all the things we love most, it becomes impossible to distinguish natural disaster from man-made calamity: maybe the point is that there is no difference anymore. But there’s another point: that we can prevent the worst of the impact in all sorts of ways, from evacuation plans to carbon emissions reductions to economic justice, and that it’s all tied up together.

I wish Sandy hadn’t happened. But it did, and there have been and will be more disasters like this. I hope that radical change arises from it. The climate has already changed. May we change to meet the challenges.

Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit

As in 2004 and 2008, Rebecca Solnit and her blue-state henchwomen and men will probably invade northern Nevada on election week to swing with one of the most swinging states in the union. She is, however, much more excited about 350.org’s anti-oil-company campaign and the ten thousand faces of Occupy now changing the world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 15 books, including two due out next year, and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com . She lives in San Francisco, is from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the once-robust California public educational system, and her book A Paradise Built in Hell is the One City/One Book choice of the San Francisco Public Library this fall. She was named an Utne Visionary in 2010  

Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video, licensed under Creative Commons.