The eyes of the food justice movement are turned towards the Motor City, where the local city council will vote Tuesday on a corporate investor’s proposal to purchase nearly 2,000 city-owned lots. Millionaire money manager John Hantz, who first proposed the scheme in 2009, says that the land will be used to create the world’s largest urban farm, returning Detroit “to its agrarian roots.” But community activists fear the sale will displace residents of the city’s Lower East Side neighborhood, most of whom are low-income black families.

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Since its founding in 1996, the Community Food Security Coalition has been the leading voice for people of color and the poor in a food movement that often marginalizes them in favor of well-heeled “foodies.” This summer, the coalition announced that 2012 would be its last year of operation. The announcement left those of us in the food movement reeling.

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via Colorlines

LaDonna Redmond, a longtime urban farmer from the west side of Chicago, wants to shake the movement from its somnolence, with her call for a gathering of people of color and indigenous leaders in the Twin Cities at the end of this month, the Food + Justice = Democracy conference, to craft principles of food justice.  “The food movement is characterized by projects like urban farming, but we don’t have principles that unite us or policies to support,” Redmond, a senior program associate at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a nonprofit food policy think tank, explained.

The food justice movement is at an impasse. And the timing couldn’t be worse. More of us are hungry than ever before. One in seven rely on a food stamp program, likely to be eviscerated in Congress’ next round. A disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos suffer from obesity and diet-related health issues, compounded by lack of access to healthy and affordable food. And the drought that devastated the Midwest this summer, laying waste to staple crops, has experts predicting rises in food prices to levels seen in 2008, when the high cost of eating led arguably to political uprisings, such as the Arab Spring.

Yet, amidst all of this bad news, the primary national network for the food justice movement, the Community Food Security Coalition, announced last month that they were closing their doors, much to the shock and dismay of their members. In the absence of leadership, the loudest voice in food advocacy is coming from a surprising corner: the private sector.  This Sunday, the Financial Times reported that the incoming CEO Tony Vernon of Kraft Foods spoke up against cuts to food stamps. “The SNAP program is a program we are supportive of,” he told the paper, adding that food stamp recipients “are a big part of our audience.”

The problem is that corporations are acting on behalf of their own self-interests, not the public good. Our food system is broken, in large part because the business of growing and making food is dominated by large corporations. Economic power, as I wrote in ARC’s Good Food and Good Jobs report is consolidated in a few corporate hands with annual revenue over $1 billion. The names should be familiar to anyone who’s perused grocery shelves: Walmart, Nestle, PepsiCo, and, yes, Kraft Foods. These very same companies also spend millions lobbying D.C. to keep subsidies for corn, the raw material for high fructose corn syrup, the omnipresent sweetener found in soda and other processed foods. More recently, the likes of Monsanto and DuPont have sunk over $27 million on an opposition campaign to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in California, Prop 37.

Redmond thinks there needs to be a change in approach, and that activists can use recent history as a guide. The historical precedent in the environmental justice movement inspired Redmond, when people of color converged in the early 1990s to craft the principles of environmental justice. “Environmental justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making,” reads one of the principles, “including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation.” This was a key milestone because the principles unified people of color into a multiracial movement. And, the principles elevated the leadership of those most impacted by ecological and economic catastrophe and asserted the right of peoples for self-determination. Redmond hopes the same will happen for the food justice movement.

Without principles for food justice, Redmond fears, the rhetoric of food justice can be used to amplify more corporate control in the food system. We’ve already seen this when Walmart partnered with First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, to provide healthy food to low-income communities. The corporation pledged to open up 300 stores in so-called “food deserts.” However, research shows that the entrance of a Walmart store exacerbates the quality of food, not to mention jobs, available in an area. Food & Water Watch reported that milk the corporation touts as “organic” actually comes from a factory farm.

But for Redmond, the fight for food justice was deeply personal. “I didn’t chose food work, it chose me,” Redmond quipped. Like any mother, LaDonna Redmond was concerned about her son’s health and well-being. “My son developed food allergies early on, between the age of six and seven months old, when we introduced him to soft foods. He had severe allergic reactions and asthma: his eyes would swell up, he cried and wheezed so hard that we had to take to the emergency room.”

But, Redmond was Black and her family lived in the west side of Chicago, a working class Black and Latino neighborhood. “I tried to provide the best food for my son, free of carcinogens and pesticides, but it wasn’t available in my neighborhood,” Redmond explained. “It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford it, it just wasn’t available. We had to travel several miles outside to buy food to make our meals.”

Redmond decided to grow her food for her family, converting the family’s backyard into a vegetable garden. Her efforts then expanded into vacant lots and a farmer’s market selling collard greens and turnips, inaugurated a year after her son’s birth. But Redmond realized that lack of food access was a broader issue afflicting many communities of color. She became involved with food policy, but found that she often was the only Black person in the room.

“People would stereotype me because I was Black: I’m on food stamps or I’m a single mom,” Redmond remembered. “There was a real ignorance of my reality as a Black woman, but these people were setting policy for my community.” Not for much longer, if the gathering reaches Redmond’s hopes. “If we could swing the magic chicken to get the food system that we want, most people don’t know what we do want. We haven’t really sat down to say we want this and we want that. Our conference is about the what and the how.”

A former warehouse worker and a slow food advocate who’s father washed dishes for 19 years discuss how their twin movements for healthy food and fair jobs can restore humanity to the food system.

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By Darwin Bond-Graham and Yvonne Yen Liu via Race, Poverty, and the Environment

The foreclosure crisis has disproportionately impacted communities of color because people of color were sold adjustable rate mortgages at a higher rate than whites, even where income levels and financial risk were on par.[1] The upshot of this predatory lending practice has been a massive dislocation of workers and families (most of whom considered their homes their only economic asset) side by side with an unprecedented transfer of wealth to financial institutions and the private sphere.
Advocates abroad call this type of activity by a name more familiar to the third world—a land grab.[2] Multinational corporations have acquired 15 to 20 million hectares of land in wholesale purchases in the global south to establish large-scale industrial farms for food and biofuels.

Closer to home, in the Detroit area, speculator John Hantz is trying to purchase 200 acres to create a large corporate farm.[3] Indeed, land grabs have been afoot for some time within postindustrial landscapes from where capital has fled in search of cheaper labor. What makes the current land grabs especially troubling is the opportunistic use of the tsunami of foreclosures by banks to seize properties. Their willful enablers in this transfer of assets have been the states and their housing policies, ostensibly created to reduce the number of vacant bank-owned properties by converting them into rental units.

Foreclosures: Excellent Investment for Some
A handful of fast-growing real estate management corporations are now stepping into the foreclosure crisis. Backed by billions of dollars in private equity, property management companies are viewing the crisis as a rare opportunity to amass tens of thousands of single-family homes and convert them into rentals—i.e. long-term high-yield investments. Beyond the stresses on families in neighborhoods experiencing the land grab, this nascent industry—promoted by federal policies—will in all likelihood facilitate the transfer of tens of billions in wealth from distressed homeowners—largely Black and Latino—to a few wealthy private equity firms.

The Bay Area has rapidly emerged as the headquarters for many of the most aggressive companies and largest investors in the land grab. Oakland-based Waypoint Homes, founded in 2008, has led the way in developing the technology and business model necessary to take advantage of the situation. Waypoint is the partnership of two wealthy entrepreneurs who struck up a conversation at an investment conference in San Francisco in 2008. Observing trends in the East Bay, especially in the suburban cities, such as Antioch and Concord where foreclosure rates have been phenomenally high and home values have plummeted in half, Doug Brien and Colin Wiel agreed to pool their money to buy as many distressed properties as possible. By the end of 2011, Waypoint reportedly had accumulated about 1,000 foreclosed homes, mostly in Contra Costa and Alameda Counties.

In an effort to “scale up” their operation, the firm’s founders welcomed a $400 million investment from GI Partners of Menlo Park, a politically connected private equity group that handles hundreds of millions of CalPERS funds. Executives with GI Partners have said that they intend to back Waypoint’s foreclosure-to-rental mill up to $1 billion. Waypoint has indicated that the focus of its purchases will be in the Bay Area and southern California.

It is worth noting that many among Waypoint’s senior staff were previously with companies that caused the foreclosure crisis or were poised to reap rewards from it. Waypoint’s chief operating officer, for instance, was a vice president at Wells Fargo for 11 years and head of its home finance group. The chief financial officer used to work at Kenwood Investments, Darius Anderson’s politically connected development firm. And until recently, the vice president of acquisitions was employed by Ridgeback Partners—a  “real estate investment and development firm formed in 2007 to take advantage of compelling opportunities in the distressed residential and land sectors in the U.S. market.”[4] Cofounder Wiel is also involved in a Panamanian land grab as founder of Rainforest Capital Management, which has purchased 10,000 acres in Panama’s Mamoní Valley with the intention of developing an “eco” hotel called Junglewood, and is also developing multiple energy projects, selling carbon credits, and logging timber for sale in international markets.[5]

Land grabs in places like Panama and in Africa have occurred as a form of arbitrage. Wealthy private equity funds and corporations purchase land at prices far below the actual value and derive immense profits from developing, farming, mining, or leasing—activities not very different from the Bay Area’s foreclosure-to-rental mill. A recent Bloomberg Report story about Waypoint’s arbitrage operation began as follows:“Ken Major climbs the steps of a county courthouse in a San Francisco suburb with $500,000 in cashier’s checks in one hand and a list of addresses in the other. Major is a buyer for Waypoint Real Estate Group LLC, an Oakland-based investment firm that’s scooping up foreclosed homes in California. On this December afternoon, he joins a dozen house flippers as an auctioneer starts hawking the latest batch of defaulted properties to hit the market. Major bids on a three-bedroom house in Antioch, and after other buyers counter, he wins at $147,600.”[6]

Although generally praising Waypoint’s entrepreneurship and innovation, the story does hint at the social costs exacted by this massive transfer of homes into the hands of wealthy investors, noting that upwards of three-quarters of residents whose homes are bought out from under them by Waypoint end up displaced.

“Most of the time, occupants have to leave within 15 days of Waypoint’s purchase because they can’t afford the rent or choose to go. Gordon returns to one residence where a family has refused to move out for six months as they pursue a legal claim that they’re the victims of mortgage fraud. No one’s home, but two brand new radio-controlled toy cars sit under the Christmas tree and family pictures line the mantle. Gordon sighs. It’s going to take more time before Waypoint earns a return on this property.”

According to news reports, Waypoint earned as much as a nine percent return on its foreclosure-to-rental investments in the last quarter of 2011.

Replicating the Model
Numerous other real estate management companies, backed by major investors, are seeking to copy the Waypoint-GI Partners model in the U.S. where little has been done to prevent or repair the massive foreclosure rates of major banks—even where they are in violation of state and federal laws and regulations.[7]

San Francisco headquartered Landsmith, LP is targeting homes in Arizona, where the foreclosure process is faster and homeowners have fewer protections owing to weaker state laws. According to press reports, Landsmith purchased 225 foreclosed single-family homes in Phoenix in 2011 and is converting them into rentals, hoping to earn a yield of 14 percent. Also seeking to scoop up foreclosed homes in hard-hit Arizona is American Residential Properties, which reportedly bought 800 homes in the Phoenix suburbs in 2011.[8] For expansion, the company is reportedly seeking funds from the New York-based Ranieri Partners, whose founder describes himself as the “father” of the securitized mortgage market.[9]

McKinley Capital Partners is another Bay Area firm that has been rapidly purchasing foreclosed homes. According to McKinley’s website, the company has invested over $100 million through three funds to purchase nearly 400 “distressed single-family homes” in California.[10] McKinley is backed by New York’s Och-Ziff Capital Management, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, entrusted with money from private investors, as well as public pension systems like CalPERS.

Foreclosure hot spots like California, Arizona, and Florida are also investment hot spots for opportunistic private equity groups and hedge funds. Now thanks to policies developed by the Obama administration (in close cooperation with private equity and corporate real estate managers), the federal government is poised to hand over tens of thousands of homes currently owned by the government-sponsored housing enterprises (GSE) and millions of foreclosed homes owned by banks, to private equity.

Policies Promote Major Housing Grab
The administration’s intentions to feed distressed U.S. housing stock to private equity investors was officially announced on August 10, 2011, when the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) put out a request for information “to solicit ideas for sales, joint ventures, or other strategies to augment and enhance Real Estate-Owned (REO) asset disposition programs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).”[11] The government’s bias towards the private equity-funded model of Waypoint and GI Partners was clear in statements, such as these: “FHFA, Treasury and HUD anticipate respondents may best address these objectives through REO to rental structures.”[12] The FHFA reportedly received 4,000 comments, many of them from the very corporations and investment firms that hope to earn billions of dollars from government-owned “distressed” homes.

On February 1, 2012, the FHA finalized plans and invited interested investors to pre-qualify for a pilot “REO disposition initiative.” At stake are roughly 83,000 foreclosed homes from the government-sponsored enterprises inventory.[13] While this figure might seem small in comparison to the 1.17 million home foreclosures that occurred nationwide in the first half of 2011,[14] the government’s plans for federally-owned housing poses serious problems in terms of racial justice. The inventory of Fannie, Freddie, and FHA foreclosures are disproportionately owned by non-whites and low-income families, and located in urban minority-majority communities, such as Oakland and Los Angeles.

The government’s pilot program, unveiled on February 27, 2012, targets federally-owned homes in Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Florida because these metropolitan areas contain the largest stocks of geographically concentrated REO single-family housing. Foreclosed homes held by Fannie, Freddie, and the FSA are especially valuable to private equity because they can be sold in large blocks in single metropolitan regions, allowing companies like Waypoint to profit from economies of scale. Such transactions essentially transform traditional single-family homes into massive multi-family apartment housing.

Federal policymakers see this pilot program as the start of a larger effort to sell off GSE-owned foreclosed homes across the U.S. The full program will surely include the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento regions, which accounted for 1,546 Fannie, Freddie, and FSA-foreclosed units in December, 2011. As of March, 2012, there were over 18,000 foreclosed homes in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties alone.[15]

Occupy to Liberate the Land
Clearly, this is a story of Goliath swallowing up David. But, in communities of color around the country, people are organizing—often in conjunction with the Occupy movement—to sling rocks at the ravenous monster. The first volley included defending the right of families to stay in their homes while undergoing foreclosure.

More recently, the organizing has been on the offensive, rather than the defensive. On December 6, 2011, Occupy Our Homes launched its “Go out of the streets and into the homes” campaign to expropriate empty buildings and convert them into residences for the homeless and families who have lost their homes to foreclosure.[16] In East New York, organizers converged to help a family squat a vacant home.

The movement’s next offensive move—perhaps its most radical challenge to capital—was to occupy buildings for collective use. The first salvo in this campaign was fired on November 2, 2011, the day of the general strike in Oakland. Euphoric from a triumphant day, in which tens of thousands had turned out to shut down the Port of Oakland—the fifth largest in the nation—a small group attempted to reclaim a former homeless services building that had been closed following austerity measures.[17] Oakland police responded immediately with bean bag projectiles, tear gas, and flashbang grenades—a troika of weaponry that has sadly become the signature of the OPD—and the occupation ended quickly but the spirit was irrepressible. Three months later, Occupy Oakland attempted to set up a community center in an unused building. Dubbed the “Move-In Festival,” organizers were “armed” with peace sign shields, armchairs and furnishings for the occupied space. That attempt also ended in violence—perpetrated by Oakland police.

But the notion of liberating land for collective use resonates with the Occupy movement, which has adopted the slogan: ”You can’t evict an idea whose time has come!” Max Rameau, founder of Take Back the Land, Florida, issued a call for a spring offensive, in which the Occupy and Liberation movements—the latter made up of low-income people of color displaced from their homes and land—join forces to wrest control of the land away from the 1 percent. An example of a possible outcome of this offensive may be seen in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), where 350,000 families now occupy 20 million acres of land, challenging global capital, which has set up white picket fences around the commons of the world. MST’s flag, showing a couple holding aloft a machete, celebrates the industry of landless workers and their willingness to fight—and shed blood if necessary—for land reform.[18]

The flag accompanied MST leader Janaina Stronzake when she visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park last November.[19] “Occupation is a time to grow,” she told the assembly. “To grow education, empowerment, and food community.” The crowd roared back: “Occupy, Resist, and Grow!”

Endnotes
1.    Applied Research Center Report. Race and Recession. May 2009. <arc.org/content/view/726/136/>
2.    Eric Holt-Gimenez, Yi Wang, and Annie Shattuck. March 2011. The Urban and Northern Face of Global Land Grabs. Food First.
3.     Laura Berman, Urban farming idea slowly sprouts in Detroit, Detroit News
<detroitnews.com/article/20120320/OPINION03/203200352>
4.    <ridgeback-partners.com/about.html>
5.    <rainforestcap.net/news/projects/>
6.    Edward Robinson, “Private Equity’s Foreclosures for Rentals Net 8%: Mortgages.” Bloomberg News. March 13, 2012. <bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-13/private-equity-buying-u-s-foreclosures-for-hot-rentals-net-8-mortgages.html>
7.    “Foreclosure in California: A Crisis of Compliance.” Report of the Office of the Assessor-Recorder, San Francisco. February, 2012. <aequitasaudit.com/images/aequitas_sf_report.pdf>
8.    John Gittelsohn, “Investor Support for Housing May Suffer in Obama Rental Plan.” Bloomberg News. September 12, 2011. <mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-12/investor-support-for-housing-may-suffer-in-obama-rental-plan-1->.
9.    Biographical blurb on Ranieri. “Proposed Qualified Residential Mortgage and Risk Retention Rule: Net Impact Bad for Housing.” Comments on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act submitted by Ranieri Partners to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. July 20, 2011.
10.    <mckinleycp.com/about-us/company-overview> <mckinleycp.com/investments/distressed-housing>
11.    <fhfa.gov/Default.aspx?Page=360>
12.    Joint Press Release, August 10, 2011. <fhfa.gov/webfiles/22367/FHFARFIReleaseFinal.pdf>
13.     FHFA: “Request for Information: Enterprise/FHA REO Asset Disposition Supplemental Data.” <fhfa.gov/webfiles/23259/REO_Portal_StateMSA_12_26_2011.xlsx>
14.    “Foreclosure Activity Off 29 Percent for First Half of 2011.” RealtyTrac. July 13, 2011. <realtytrac.com/content/press-releases/midyear-2011-us-foreclosure-market-report-6681>
15.    <realtytrac.com/trendcenter/ca-trend.html>
16.    Sarah Seltzer, “Occupy Our Homes: From the Streets to Foreclosed Homes, OWS Finds a New Frontier.” Alternet. December 5, 2011. <alternet.org/module/printversion/153318>
17.    Micah White, “#OCCUPYHOMES: We reclaim our property.” Blackspot Blog. Adbusters. November 9, 2011. <adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot blog/occupyhomes.html>
18.    <mstbrazil.org/about-mst/mst-flag>
19.    Julia Landau, “Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement in New York: From the Un to Zuccotti Park. Civil Eats. November 8, 2011. <civileats.com/2011/11/08/13578/>

Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist and author. Yvonne Liu is a senior research associate at the Applied Research Center.

via Sojourners

IN THE U.S. food supply chain, 20 million workers labor in hazardous conditions for low wages. Uylonda Dickerson was one of them. Dickerson, a 39-year-old single African-American mother in Will County, Illinois, would show up every morning, hoping for work, at one of the many warehouses that litter the landscape of her area southwest of Chicago.

The Chicago region, once a proud steel and manufacturing hub, is now a major portal for food and other commodities produced cheaply overseas, transported by rail from West Coast ports, and slated for destinations in the Midwest or on the East Coast. Ironically, the workers—more than 80 percent of whom are African American or Latino—who were displaced from good, union jobs when factories closed are now employed in bad, temporary jobs, moving goods made in China.

The warehousing and storage industry, which feeds big-box retailers such as Walmart, relies on a pool of temporary laborers. This exempts employers from paying living wages or providing basic benefits and workers’ compensation; it also short-circuits worker attempts to organize into a union. Their costs of living are then displaced onto society. One in four warehouse workers relied on public assistance to survive, according to Warehouse Workers for Justice’s report “Bad Jobs in Goods Movement.”

People of color are particularly concentrated in the lowest-paid sectors of the food chain: agricultural labor and retail service, according to “The Color of Food,” a recent report by the Applied Research Center. At all stages of the supply chain—production, processing, distribution, and service—people of color make less than white workers. In the distribution sector (which encompasses warehouse and storage workers such as Dickerson), the typical yearly wage for a white worker is $42,234, while a worker of color earns only $27,452.

For women, there’s an additional penalty: Women of color make 30 to 50 cents less for every dollar earned by a white male worker. Food chain workers are also particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment; for example, in a 2010 survey of women farm workers in California’s Central Valley, 80 percent reported experiencing such harassment.

A manager in the logistics industry has the potential to earn a family-sustaining wage, but, with only one managerial position for every 100 warehouse jobs, few opportunities exist for warehouse workers to move up the career pathway. Not many of those opportunities go to people of color: Whites make up 74 percent of managers and 85 percent of chief executives. Women of color are even rarer in the executive class, making up just 10 percent of all managers.

Much of the labor in the food system cannot be outsourced—a key leverage point for worker advocates. Across the country, warehouse and storage workers are contesting the precarious conditions in which they labor. Warehouse Workers for Justice has filed nine lawsuits and numerous complaints with state and federal government demanding enforcement of labor laws. Advocates representing warehouse workers in California’s Inland Empire are pursuing similar measures. And Uylonda Dickerson is now an organizer with Warehouse Workers for Justice, working to shine a light on the conditions for the workers who stock the grocery shelves at Walmart.

On a day when the world celebrates the rights of everyday workers, we sat down with activists of color to talk about Occupy Wall Street.

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via Mobilizing Ideas

Marshall Ganz calls Occupy a moment, but we have a history and a future.  My generation, in North America, was birthed over 12 years ago, in the streets of Seattle, when trade unionists joined with anarchists to disrupt the workings of global capital, well, in this case, the meeting of a major player, the World Trade Organization.  We refused to accept capitalism as a natural way of ordering our social world; “Another World is Possible” was a popular slogan.  We manifested alternatives in organizing our collective refusal.  Instead of relying on institutions created under capitalism, we created our own clinics, schools, decision-making bodies, and media outlets.  Some of which have formalized into counter-institutions that exist today.  The global network of independent media centers and community health centers, like the Common Ground clinic in New Orleans, started after Hurricane Katrina, are our legacy.

The Millennials may find inspiration when their peer, 26-year old Mohamed Bouazizi, educated yet unable to find a good job, self-immolated himself on the steps of the Tunisian governor’s office, sparking the uprisings of the Arab Spring.  Or, when 24-year old Bradley Manning, in a fit of frustration with military bureaucracy and the war abroad, uploaded confidential documents onto the Wikileaks website.  What is the future of the Occupy movement?  Approximately a half-year in and many camps have been violently evicted from the land on which they pitched their tents.  Many of us spent this late fall awake in an overnight vigil to defend a camp or recovering from being pepper sprayed by cops when trying to setup a new one.  At the time of writing this, only Occupy D.C. remains intact.  But, that is not the end of Occupy.

Like seeds released into the wind, we lodged into soil, to hibernate through the winter, and to unfurl new shoots in the spring.  For what Occupy has created is an opportunity for us collectively to create new subjectivities and to dream of a new world.  Social theorists have long thought about the relationship between the individual and society as a dialectical one, each informing the development of the other.  George Mead, for instance, wrote that social reality was an external thing that impressed itself upon and shaped a child during the process of socialization.  But, the self that had ideas that challenged social norms could win acceptance by the larger group, therefore changing society.

Under capitalism, Herbert Marcuse thought, the individual lost her capacity to think critically and the desire to yearn for freedom.  We lost our sense of self, subjectivity, and became objects in the process of production.  All of human life was organized for the instrumental means of achieving profit for the 1%.  We became mechanical producers, who worked to make a salary to enable us to passively consume mass culture and media.  This one-dimensional thinking dominated culture and ideology, focused only on keeping calm and carrying on.

One outcome of Occupy can be foretold by the example of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement or Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST).  Today, 350,000 families occupy 20 million acres of land, a challenge to global capital, which has setup white picket fences around the world, cordoning off what was once the commons.  MST’s flag celebrates the industry of the landless worker, represented by a couple holding aloft a machete, and their willingness to fight for land reform, with blood if necessary.   This flag accompanied MST leader Janaina Stronzake, when she visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment, before it was evicted from Zuccotti Park.  “Occupation was a time to grow,” she told the assembly, “To grow education, empowerment, and food community.”  The crowd echoed after her, amplifying Janaina’s words using the human microphone, “Occupy, Resist, and Grow!”

Janaina grew up in a MST occupation.  Her family lost their land to banks in the late 1970s because, like many family farmers in the global south at the time, they borrowed money in order to adopt industrial agricultural techniques.  Indebted and unable to pay back what they owed, the bank seized their land, displacing newborn Janaina, her eight older brothers, and parents to the city, where they survived precariously as field laborers.  But, in 1985, her family joined the MST and they moved into a camp, with 225 other families, for two years, where they studied and prepared to occupy land in the western part of the Parana state.

The MST uses a two-step method to expropriate land lying fallow, owned by corporations or latifundios, for collective use.  First, families are moved in rural camps, typically dwelling in shacks alongside highways, until land is identified for settlement.  This can take anywhere from six months to five years, but camp living has proved to be important preparation in transforming atomized individuals into collectively minded occupiers.  Camp residents receive a rigorous dose of participatory education, on politics and critical thinking as well as practical matters such as sustainable farming techniques and how to manage a cooperative.  Without this experience, families that move directly onto occupied land typically leave within a few months.  But, with this preparation, more than 90 percent stay for the long run.

The second step is occupation of the land by families, usually at dawn when security guards and police are sleeping.  Janaina remembers arriving early one morning with her family to an unused piece of land, but the police were waiting and prevented the families from entering the land.  So, they camped on the side of the road for two months, where conditions were difficult,  “hunger and cold were always stalking us,” Janaina recalled.  Brazil is unique in that, beginning in the nineteenth century, one had legal claim to land if it was serving a social function.  While petitioning through bureaucratic pathways for the title, the MST also moved the camp to occupy the plaza in front of the state capital, Curitiba.  After participating in seven occupations, Janaina’s mother finally acquired land, collectively.

Once land is occupied, the collective immediately begins to dig in and grow roots.  Peter Rossett describes how “crops are planted immediately, communal kitchens, schools, and a health clinic are set up, and defense teams trained in nonviolence secure the perimeter against the hired gunmen, thugs, and assorted police forces that the landlord usually calls down upon them.”  This is the new society that the MST is building alongside the current model of global capitalism.

Already, we are experimenting with land occupations.  A faction of Occupy Oakland tried to takeover a foreclosed homeless shelter on the day of the general strike.  They were unsuccessful, but planted a seed.  A seed that took root on December 6, the national day of action, where organizers across the country occupied foreclosed properties.  Next, come spring, as Max Rameau promises, we will emerge and bloom.

Neither the public nor private sector is doing much to create jobs, and those that are popping up aren’t very good ones.  So a lot of folks are taking matters into their own hand.

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A trailblazing activist, Betita Martinez reflects on everything from motherhood to Occupy Wall Street.

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