Standing outside new Democratic Club are: Mark Winston Griffith, City Council Candidate, 36th CD; Renee Collymore, Founder, Parliament Democratic Club, Geoffrey Davis, James E.Davis Stop the Violence Foundation and Reverend Ken Bogan, of the Greater Restoration Baptist Church. Photo: Mark Stewart
“We are very grass roots,”said Renee Collymore, standing outside the new Parliament Democratic Club, housed in a narrow storefront on Putnam Avenue, between Grand Avenue and Downing Street.Ms. Collymore is just coming off her work as Deputy Campaign Manager for Queens Democratic Council Member David Weprin during his run for city comptroller and is still geared for action.“Democracy has to be exercised and it is not being exercised to its fullest here in Brooklyn.The people have to be energized.Political freedom is very important and the people have been giving up their power to the elected officials because of lazy voting and inertia.”
While there are other political clubs in the area, Ms. Collymore says that the way for a political club to have an impact on the community is to actually perform useful services, and that is where her club will differ.“It cannot be just politics while people are not getting assistance.Politics mixed with social programs is the key,” says Ms. Collymore.“Politics alone makesa club handicapped.We have implemented a pilot program, The Fundamentals of Citizenship, to sixth-graders where I will be teaching them their responsibility as citizens, and what their duties are as citizens.Even as sixth-graders, they are citizens.
“This is a Democratic Club with an independent voice.We have Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians in this club. This is a club of inclusion.I want to popularize the idea of political clubs again.I want to pull people out of poverty and give them political clout.I want the little political club on the corner to be like a small branch of government.We will be working block-by-block to include people so that they can exercise their power locally.”
Bill Thompson grew up on Putnam Avenue between Stuyvesant and Malcolm X Blvd.The journey from those streets to being elected City Comptroller in 2001, managing a staff of more than 700 with a budget of $68 million and being overwhelmingly reelected in 2005,is a long one with middle-class struggles, and successes achieved by hard work.It is a journey that has attuned Comptroller Thompson to the problems that the middle class and middle class aspirants feel every day.It has also given him the confidence to use the strategy necessary for this mayoral battle.“The only way to compete with the richest man in New York City is to build from the ground up.If you’re going to get into a dollar battle, you’re going to lose very quickly.”
Thompson was speaking at a fund-raiser in the UN Plaza home of Edward Bergman and his family, high above the East River and about as far from Putnam Avenue as you can get. Here, Bill Thompson was speaking about educationand the need to go in a different direction.“Our young people are being taught to take standardized tests,” he said.“Our children are not taught critical thinking.They’re not taught comprehension.Not taught the skills they will need in the future.We’re being given a false sense of accomplishment and all it is leading to is that our children are not being taught to compete.”
Bill Thompson has an empathy with ordinary people that Mayor Bloomberg feels can be achieved by riding the subway four or five times a week.But the Brooklyn Papers reported that in their interview with the Mayor, they asked about community benefit agreements, such as that signed by Bruce Ratner for the Atlantic Yards Project.“I’m violently opposed to community benefits agreements,” the mayor replied.“A small group of people, to feather their own nests, extort money from the developer? That’s just not good government.”This statement alone disqualifies him as a choice for Mayor of New York City.Here he is the richest man in New York, oblivious to the irony of his being “violently opposed” to small groups of unemployed Black men, many living pressed in by the explosion of construction in downtown Brooklyn, feathering their public housing nests, by demanding the opportunity to do hard work.
He accuses them of extortion for insisting that developers of the gilded city rising only blocks away, put aside a portion of contracts and work for local people and companies.He has $16 billion dollars, but helping someone bring home a paycheck for rent, food and clothing is “not good government.”His concept of good government would have met with a vigorous nod of approval from Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who, the apocryphal story goes, when told the starving masses had no bread, thought she’d be cute and said, “Let them eat cake.”True or not, it was 1793 during the French Revolution and the people objected to the haughty attitude and the lady lost her head.
The mayor’s team seems to have lost their collective heads as well or they must have read something in the polls saying it won’t be a double-digit win, to risk bringing in Rudy Giuliani, the biggest loser in the Republican presidential primaries, and someone anathema to the African-American community, to campaign with the mayor. Giuliani knows as much now as when he snickered at the Republican Convention at the thought of a “community organizer” becoming president.
Rudy’s connecting an election of William Thompson with a probable rise in crime and Bloomberg, frankly dishearteningly, going further, saying that New York can go the way of Detroit if Thompson were elected, was certainly the most offensive local politicking we’ve seen in some time.Why does a billionaire have to resort to running a morally bankrupt campaign? Maybe it is as former mayor David Dinkins said at the Manhattan fundraiser, they have forgotten the great Negro Baseball League player Satchel Paige’s admonition, “Don’t look back, they may be gaining on you.”
I don’t know what the calculus is here, perhaps the old tactic of tricking poor whites that they and the plantation owners share a bond, but it is certainly dismissive of the Black vote and those who would rather have the men of the neighborhood going to and from work rather than standing around chronically unemployed.The mayor’s office has to become centered on the problems of regular working people and those who want to be working, and the city budget has to be used to not only deliver services but to circulate in the communities that need them most, lifting the quality of life for all New Yorkers.It’s time for the Bloomberg era to come to a close.Polls open 6am, November 3rd.Every vote counts.
Bill Thompson was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of hard-working parents, an educator and a judge.
He’s lived almost all of his life in Central Brooklyn.
He grew up in Bedford Stuyvesant on Putnam Avenue between Stuyvesant and Marcus Garvey Blvd. (then Reid Avenue) in the house his grandparents William and Louise Thompson succeeded in purchasing 70 years ago.They were the second Black family on the block.They later took pride in their grandson being an acolyte at St. Phillips Episcopal Church on Decatur Street.
Mr. Thompson’s mother, Elaine Thompson, who taught at various public schools, including P.S. 262, was a member of a team of compassionate educators — Almira Coursey, Elaine DeGrasse Perkins, Virginia Pope, June Fleary and others — who privately pushed young strivers to reach their potential.And they never took public credit for it.
Over the years, Mr. Thompson has lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Heights and other areas, before finally returning to his boyhood home where he resided until last year; he now lives in Harlem.
And while the years have been good to him, he has not forgotten where he came from or where most hard working New Yorkers are coming from.
“My parents taught me to work as hard as you can, do the best job you can, and know that no one is going to give you anything; you have to go out and earn it.”
And Mr. Thompson has earned it.
In fact, the best man for the job of Mayor of New York City — it’s being decided by admirers from the tony penthouse apartments on the Upper East Side to the brownstones of the Comptroller’s old neighborhood — is Mr. Thompson.Plus, they say, he is asking for your vote based on his ability to lead and to talk eye to eye.He’s not paying for it.
In 2001, Mr. Bloomberg spent $74 million to run in the mayoral race. He said then that his spending was “obscene” and that he would not spend that much on a campaign ever again.
In 2005, he spent $85 million for his re-election bid in 2005.
This year, his spending is estimated upwards from 100 million dollars, pointing out not so much how powerful he is as much as how fearful he may be of Thompson’s power.
In some respects Mr. Bloomberg’s wealth is not the central issue; after all, it is his money.“No matter how much money is spent, our votes can’t be bought, that’s the message,” Thompson has said, and adds in a reference to Mr. Bloomberg’s successful push in reversing term-limits rulings. “Eight is enough.”
This Tuesday, November 3rd Central Brooklyn will have an opportunity to vote for new leadership. If this does not happen, apathy will win the election, not Mr. Bloomberg.
The new Africa starts here: how to make the people prosper.If Africa is to thrive, a revolution in thinking is needed — and it must begin out in the farmers’ fields.
By Wangari Maathai
The Times (London)
June 6, 2009
Not long ago I was in Yaoundé, Cameroon, as part of my work as Goodwill Ambassador for the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem, a position to which I was appointed in 2005 by heads of state of the ten Central African nations. I was meeting the secretariat of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership and the Commission for the Forests of Central Africa (Comifac) based in Yaoundé, as well as economic and environment ministers from the region.
As I stood outside the hotel in a light rain I looked across to one of the seven hills that surround the city. My eyes focused on a woman in the distance who was making rows of small depressions in the soil parallel to the gradient of the hill. “She shouldn’t be making furrows in that direction on such a steep slope,” I thought, “because when the rains come, very quickly all that soil will be lost.”
But when I asked a hotel security guard why the woman was cutting furrows downward, instead of across, he explained that the rain would run along the furrows and therefore not disturb the crops.
This directly contradicted every principle of soil conservation that I know, because when the rains fell the soil that the woman farmer had so carefully formed, and so desperately needed to make her bananas, maize or yams grow, would be swept down that hillside — in the very furrows she had just dug. She was creating the perfect environment for soil erosion, making it less likely that anything would grow on that hill in the future.
There was an added irony to the situation. I was waiting for a car to take me to meetings to discuss safeguarding the Congo Basin forest — an ecosystem of 700,000sq km (270,000sq miles) that is the largest intact expanse of forest in the world after the Amazon.
Yet I realized, no matter what else we were doing, unless those of us who would assemble at the Comifac headquarters could work with that farmer, multiplied several million times in Cameroon, the Congo region, and indeed throughout Africa, not only would we not save the Congo forests, but we might also be unable to halt the rapid desertification under way across the continent.
Of course that woman farmer and others like her are not the primary threats to the forests of the Congo Basin. Mining and timber concessions that feed the seemingly insatiable global demand for raw wood, as well as residual conflict, are more directly destructive. But once the timber Lorries and mining companies have made their inroads and cleared the trees, it is people such as this subsistence farmer who follow — completing the cycle of destruction.
Soils in tropical forests are often not well suited to agriculture. Unless farmers practice good land management, when trees are cut down the land is degraded, further increasing the risks of soil erosion and desertification. When the rains fall, the topsoil is washed into rivers, leaving the land behind barren.
No blame should be apportioned to the woman on the hillside for attempting to eke out a living. But as I stood there that morning, she came to represent for me the collective challenges that face agriculture and development as a whole in many African nations. I wondered how much of the revenue of the luxurious hotel where I was staying — owned by a foreign corporation — was making its way into the Government’s coffers and, in turn, how much of that the Government was investing in its agricultural extension service to assist that woman to farm in a sustainable manner. Probably not enough.
I also reflected that if African states’ agricultural extension services had not been under-funded or neglected in the decades since independence, that woman farmer could not only have learned the right way to prepare soil for planting, but might also have had access to information, modern equipment and governmental support that would have enabled her to grow crops more efficiently and less destructively.
If, in turn, development practitioners and international agencies had, in their work with national governments, given more priority to investing in Africa’s farmers, the continent’s agricultural systems might not be in such poor condition today.
If the continent’s governments had set development priorities so that productive land had been distributed more equitably and used more wisely, natural resources conserved and suitable urban planning undertaken, that woman might not have been forced up that hillside. If they had addressed the inequities of land distribution left from the colonial period and taken advantage of by the ruling elite, then this farmer might not have been tilling such unproductive soil.
If African leaders had invested more in education and the creation of sustainable employment options and inclusive economies, and if they had been more concerned with the welfare of their people and not their own enrichment, then perhaps this farmer would have had more opportunity. Today she might be in another profession altogether, or be managing a larger, more efficient farm that could have freed her from grinding poverty.
It is my many experiences similar to that encounter in Yaoundé that lead me to believe that if Africa, particularly south of the Sahara, is to progress so that it no longer depends on aid or remains a byword for poverty, conflict and corruption, it is on hillsides such as these, and with women such as that farmer, that we must work.
For too long Africa has been on its knees: whether during the dehumanizing exploitation of the slave trade or under the yoke of colonialism or seeking aid from the international community or servicing illegitimate debts or praying for miracles.
To change the life of that farmer, and millions like her, a fundamental revolution in leadership is needed. This would ensure that Africans experience good governance, respect for human rights, development that is equitable and sustainable, and, eventually, peace. The most important quality that African leadership needs to embrace, and that is desperately lacking across the continent, is a sense of service to the people in whose name leaders govern.
But this revolution cannot be confined only to the ruling elites. Even the poorest and least empowered of African citizens need to rid themselves of a culture that tolerates systemic corruption, inefficiency and mismanagement of state affairs. Such a system also privileges one ethnic or socio-economic group over another. This, too, should be unacceptable.
For decades African elites have ignored small-scale agriculture because it is assumed that it is only for the uneducated. But much of Africa is represented by that woman farmer on the hillside. Clearly African governments need to invest in making small-scale farmers more productive, especially as the effects of climate change intensify and growing sufficient amounts of food becomes even more challenging.
At the same time, other regions have increased food production and have used subsidies, fertilizers, mechanization and sheer hard work to not only feed themselves but also to produce food so cheaply that it undercuts local African markets. Because of corruption, mismanagement and unstable international commodity prices, the cash-crop economy has not enriched ordinary Africans.
At the very least one would want to see co-operatives that provide farmers with accurate and timely information about their crops and weather. Affordable inputs and vibrant local and regional food markets that are sustainable would be a better option. Governments should institute and enforce policies that ensure fair prices for their farmers in the global economy.
Governments and individuals in Africa need to do all they can to improve land management — principally, preventing erosion. Africans should continue to welcome the international agencies, donor nations and private ventures that have an interest in helping the continent to develop in a manner that is sustainable and just.
But, ultimately, the fate of Africa depends on its own leaders and its own citizens. Only Africans can resolve to provide leadership that is responsible, accountable and equitable. It is Africans who must decide whether they will manage their natural resources responsibly and distribute them equitably, using them for the good of fellow Africans. It is they who must determine whether they will continue to allow outside forces to seduce and bully their governments into arrangements that allow those resources to be siphoned from the continent for a pittance.
It is for Africans to choose whether they will work hard to build up their own talents and abilities, strengthen their democracies and institutions of governance, and foster peoples’ creativity and industry.
Can Africa take a different path so that her future generations will not look back and shake their heads at the expanding deserts and degraded lands? Or lament the large numbers of people migrating in search of water, land, food and work, and the inevitable conflicts over scarce resources? This is the challenge for Africa, including that woman on the hillside in Yaoundé.
Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, is founder of the Green Belt Movement and the author, most recently, of The Challenge for Africa:A New Vision
Gardener Kenny Harris works with Chelsea Williams in a Clinton Hill backyard vegetable garden.
Strategies for a Recalibration …
Climate change and the economic crisis are linked by the one element that created them: those who control the resources.
And it will take those who do not… those who believe in human capital, fostering an awareness of the importance of being in harmony with nature …to bail us out.As was repeated in many sessions at the recent high-level United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, we must go to the farmer
in Africa to find some of these answers.
There is an irony in going to that farmer; she subsists in areas where poverty and hunger are at some of the highest levels in the world.Meanwhile, according to a study by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, “Foreign nations are showing growing interest in Africa’s production base as they seek to secure their own growing needs for food, feed, fiber and fuel.These claims pose an additional threat to Africa’s food security.Proactive and timely adaptation measure, both technical and institutional, might help rural Africa to capitalize on this increased demand instead of becoming victim to it.”
So what does this have to do with changing lightbulbs, weatherizing windows, using real plates instead of paper, and recyclable grocery bags?More than you think.Central Brooklyn has severe health issues, high foreclosure rates, low income, and high unemployment.In Many respects, we are more Third World than not.
That farmer, bent over the soil, bringing life to a plot of land, is not so far from removed from us.“In fact, we (of Southern and Caribbean backgrounds) are the most environmentally-based people,” said Desmond Prince, a local green entrepreneur.“So our connection with the soil and with green is part of our heritage.”
Unfortunately, that history maybe getting blurred from the multiversity meltdown, and that could bring on a dynamic which would be tragic: the selling of “green” literacy programs or initial ancestral basic inventions back to us.If that happens, we will be worse off than ever.So that is why a Greenprint for Change needs to encompass something a little deeper than a grocery list of things to do … although they should be done.
The platform of this Greenprint will unfold over time; its core is grounded in changing value systems, recalling and respecting ancestral traditions, equalizing opportunity.It is a revitalization of the mind set, focus on things that need to be done to help the family, the community, the nation, our children survive beyond us.It is at that point we begin to think about how we will design our own sustainability futures and push for bold agendas, and not have designs or agendas foisted on us..
Greenprint Strategies:
Education:
A series of Boot Camp courses on Sustainability or Green Tips and Techniques to all Block Association Presidents.
Revise the city’s school textbooks to reflect accurately the histories of Native Americans and
enslaved Africans and their contributions to the “planting” of New York. Also what they brought to
these shores that still survive.
Different communities sharing, through community board day-long conferences, how they are greening their neighborhoods, and sharing resources.(This could also occur with the Chamber of Commerce board and the membership of, say, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Lions’ Club.)
Neighborhoods should develop “green” partnerships with neighborhoods in other cities, again all for the purpose of sharing.
Information sharing would extend to family reunions; many families from Brooklyn travel South.They should tour the cities, and see what is being done or not being down to thwart the challenges of global warming.Develop Local Food recipes for a Family recipe book, and include family history.
Get junk food out of the schools, as State Sen. Eric Adams said at the Brooklyn Food Conference, recently.A door to door outreach campaign to fix the food system would begin to increase awareness of health sustainability.
The United Nations Millennium Development Goal is to halve poverty and hunger by 2015. Set a goal in your neighborhood for developing a Food Coop by that time, and another Farmers Market.UNEP says “25% of the world’s food production may become lost due to ecological breakdown by 2050.”
Micro-finance – utilizing small donations from block residents – a business for teen members of the Block Associations, as long as that business has a green aspect.Within legal restrictions, they could test the soil of a backyard and grow, then sell their produce to block members.Or write a book about the block which would include profiles of everyone who agreed in advance to purchase a copy.
Parents should demand agriculture, gardening, carpentry and other hands-on course be put back into the curricula, and this includes such “green” other “green” activities as home economics.
The U.N. delegate from Seychelles advised: develop a neighbor to neighbor food trading system: one homeowner grows tomatoes; plants okras; other collards, and they share with each other.
The U.N. delegate from South Africa said:If you see an empty unused lot, take it over. Just do it.
Organization like Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration might offer free Weatherization seminar, while Neighborhood Housing Services of Bedford Stuyvesant would offer Lead Prevention workshops – a t a Block Association meeting.
Universities should take an interest in priming the pipeline before children reach high-school with mini-institutes of science in the classroom or at a nearby center – free.
Local schools can connect with HBCU agricultural colleges for week-long summer NASA-like programs for young people and their parents.This could be by lottery with corporate sponsorship.
Every major corporation located in a striving neighborhood should invest in the environment of that neighborhood.
The Mayor should provide incentives for groups and blocks that engage in green/sustainable projects or develop their own plan for neighborhood sustainability.
Offer neighborhoods new learning opportunities to explore stimulating challenges – solving the crisis in Africa, interpretations of it through art and music, group discussions, create new ideas and engage young people in pen pal situations.
Technology companies can deploy their staffs to train in micro-green site development.
The City should create a Green Business Plan competition, open to all Block Associations, with start-up funding going to the best plan.
Universities receiving grant money for community work can split the money with the community, as well as resources and teaching labs.Sometimes, that translates to a couple of $100,000.
Greenprint for Change continues, in an upcoming issue.