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Here's How We Solve the Planet's Food Waste Problem |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51444"><span class="small">Maddie Stone, Grist</span></a>
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Thursday, 22 August 2019 13:22 |
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Stone writes: "Earlier this month, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a dire report highlighting the enormous environmental impact of agriculture. But the report also pointed to a clear way for us to feed more mouths without causing more planetary destruction: We can stop wasting food."
Celebrity chef Ainsley Harriott at the launch of the campaign 'Love Food, Hate Waste,' which found that the UK is throwing away a third of all food bought in the country. (photo: David Parry/Getty)
Here's How We Solve the Planet's Food Waste Problem
By Maddie Stone, Grist
22 August 19
 arlier this month, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a dire report highlighting the enormous environmental impact of agriculture. But the report also pointed to a clear way for us to feed more mouths without causing more planetary destruction: We can stop wasting food.
Globally, we humans squander up to a third of the food we produce, according to the U.N. We leave it to rot in fields and refrigerators. We cull it because it’s too ugly to sell. We stack it in overflowing supermarket displays where some is inevitably squashed. All of this uneaten food required energy to produce; if food waste were its own country, it would have the third highest carbon footprint on Earth—right behind China and the U.S. and just ahead of India. That’s a harsh reality in a world where 821 million people don’t have enough to eat.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can streamline the supply chain to reduce spoiled and lost food, and we can change the way we eat at home. Already, simple technologies like better storage bags, are making a big difference, and wonkier solutions like national policies that standardize food labels are in the works.
Better packaging, transport, and storage
Food must move quickly on its journey from farm to table before it spoils. To prolong its viability, wealthy countries rely on refrigeration and the so-called “cold chain” of climate-controlled trucks and distribution centers. That’s not an option in much of the developing world — so food may rot before it reaches a market.
Expanding access to refrigeration is one obvious solution, although as University of Michigan sustainability researcher Shelie Miller points out, it comes with trade-offs because the cold chain sucks up so much energy. Emerging options include innovations like the SolarChill Project’s solar powered fridges, which are currently used to store vaccines in medical centers in Kenya and Colombia.
Other inventions do away with conventional refrigeration entirely. Eric Verploegen, a research engineer at the MIT D-Lab, an interdisciplinary program focused on sustainable development, has helped develop evaporative coolers for small-scale farmers and vendors in places like Mali and Kenya. These coolers can be as simple as two nested clay pots with some wet sand in between. As the water evaporates, it pulls heat out of the interior of the container, chilling the contents by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit. That can extend the shelf life of produce by several days, giving farmers more time to get their food to market.
While grains last a lot longer, they’re vulnerable to pests, which is why a team at Purdue University reinvented the humble storage bag. So-called PICS (Purdue Improved Crops Storage) bags are triple-sealed and hermetic, meaning any bugs that sneak in alongside the maize or millet will run out of oxygen long before they can cause an infestation.
Since the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began funding this effort in 2007, the bags have spread to nearly three dozen countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. PICS team manager Dieudonné Baributsa said that as of February, 19.3 million PICS bags had sold worldwide, most for between $2 and $3 apiece. A farmer that uses a 100-kilo bag to store cowpeas will typically reap an additional $27 in sales, he noted.
“This is a technology that’s really having an impact,” Baributsa said.
None of these technologies is a panacea—each one tackles a small piece of the problem. But enough of them added together might bring those enormous food loss numbers down.
To eat or not to eat
In wealthier countries, the biggest food-waste culprit is easier to pinpoint: It’s us.
In the U.S., individuals throw away some 27 million tons of food a year, amounting to 43 percent of all food waste nationwide. In the UK, household waste accounts for 70 percent of losses beyond the farm.
Trashing food happens for many reasons: We buy too much. We don’t use it in time. We forget to eat the leftovers. To Liz Goodwin, director of Food Loss and Waste at the World Resources Institute, it all boils down to the fact that food is now a throwaway item. “We know we can get more, so it doesn’t really matter,” she said.
Raising awareness that food waste does matter can work. The UK’s “Love Food Hate Waste” initiative, which Goodwin described as “the single best-evaluated campaign there is,” led to a 20 percent reduction in household food waste between 2007 and 2012, she said.
Somewhat surprisingly, meal kits can also help reduce waste. A recent study by Miller’s team in Michigan showed that meals prepared from Blue Apron recipes resulted in one-third less carbon emissions on average than the same meals prepared from grocery store ingredients. The difference was largely due to the fact that the kit portioned ingredients very carefully, resulting in less wasted food — which more than compensated for the climate impact of all the extra packaging.
“We have this great understanding of plastic and packaging waste as major environmental impacts, but for whatever reason we don’t have that same idea associated with food,” Miller said.
Standardizing date labels could also make a difference. They became common in the 1970s as a marker of food quality, but many of us today wrongly assume that once the “sell by” date has passed, the food’s spoiled. In fact, these dates are often a manufacturer’s arbitrary estimate of when the food will taste most fresh — and different states have different standards. The result is we throw out loads of food that’s still fine to eat, according to Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food and Policy Clinic.
On August 1, congressional legislators introduced a bipartisan, food industry-backed bill to create two standard labels. Under the proposed scheme, companies would have the option of labeling food with a “best if used by” date to indicate peak freshness, and a “use by” date if the food must be thrown out at a certain point for safety reasons, explained JoAnne Berkenkamp, a senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
If the bill becomes law, rollout of the nationwide standards would be accompanied by a mass educational campaign so that Americans can stop needlessly tossing so much food in the trash. “People are confused about what these terms mean,” Berkenkamp said. “Streamlining them has the potential to help consumers make much better choices.”
Putting waste to work
There’s a lot we can do to reduce food waste, even if it’s unlikely we’ll ever eliminate it entirely. But we can absolutely stop sending food waste to landfills, where it emits the potent greenhouse gas methane as it decomposes.
Composting is one alternative. Americans sent 2.1 million tons of food waste to composters in 2015. But with another 30 million tons entering landfills that same year, there’s a lot of room for improvement. Laws that keep food out of landfills can help, said Calla Rose Ostrander, an environmental advisor who pushed for the passage of SB-1383, a California bill that will divert most organic waste away from landfills by 2025. Massachusetts regulations enacted in 2014 stipulate businesses can’t send more than a ton of organic waste to landfills a week.
Food waste is also used to make fuel via the microbially-driven process of anaerobic digestion. The UK company Biogen, for instance, has 13 anaerobic digestion plants that produce some 25 megawatts of electricity for the national grid, enough to power a small town. And new waste-to-energy technologies are in the works. Last week, the startup Electro-Active Technologies announced patents for a bioreactor that uses microbes to convert food waste to renewable hydrogen gas.
While it’s still early days, cofounder and University of Tennessee chemical engineer Abhijeet Borole said the company is aiming to begin testing a pilot reactor by the end of 2020 that could convert food waste from a commercial partner to fuel. It may be awhile before we’re refueling our hydrogen cars with power made from putrescent potatoes though. “Nothing like this exists out there,” Borole said. “There are definitely challenges in getting to a larger scale.”
And the truth is when it comes to food waste, technology only goes so far. Farmers may simply choose not to harvest if they won’t get a good price, according to Rob Vos of the International Food Policy Research Institute. That’s why Vos emphasizes “development of the food value chain at large” — making sure that every step along the farm-to-table supply chain is profitable, from harvesting it in fields to shipping it to markets for sale. In practice, this will look like a lot of technological interventions and policies bundled together.
Ultimately, we need to treat food like the valuable good that it is. Because if one thing’s clear from the new U.N. report, it’s that when we waste food, the planet picks up the tab.
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FOCUS: Bruce Lee Was My Friend, and Tarantino's Movie Disrespects Him |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38164"><span class="small">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Hollywood Reporter</span></a>
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Thursday, 22 August 2019 11:51 |
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Abdul-Jabbar writes: "Remember that time Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. kidney-punched a waiter for serving soggy croutons in his tomato soup? How about the time the Dalai Lama got wasted and spray-painted 'Karma Is a Beach' on the Tibetan ambassador's limo? Probably not, since they never happened. But they could happen if a filmmaker decides to write those scenes into his or her movie."
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bruce Lee during the filming of 'Game of Death,' released in 1978. (photo: Alamy)
Bruce Lee Was My Friend, and Tarantino's Movie Disrespects Him
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Hollywood Reporter
22 August 19
The NBA great and Hollywood Reporter columnist, a friend of the late martial arts star, believes the filmmaker was sloppy, somewhat racist and shirked his responsibility to basic truth in 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.'
 emember that time Dr.?Martin Luther King Jr. kidney-punched a waiter for serving soggy croutons in his tomato soup? How about the time the Dalai Lama got wasted and spray-painted “Karma Is a Beach” on the Tibetan ambassador’s limo? Probably not, since they never happened. But they could happen if a filmmaker decides to write those scenes into his or her movie. And, even though we know the movie is fiction, those scenes will live on in our shared cultural conscience as impressions of those real people, thereby corrupting our memory of them built on their real-life actions.
That’s why filmmakers have a responsibility when playing with people’s perceptions of admired historic people to maintain a basic truth about the content of their character. Quentin Tarantino’s portrayal of Bruce Lee in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood does not live up to this standard. Of course, Tarantino has the artistic right to portray Bruce any way he wants. But to do so in such a sloppy and somewhat racist way is a failure both as an artist and as a human being.
This controversy has left me torn. Tarantino is one of my favorite filmmakers because he is so bold, uncompromising and unpredictable. There’s a giddy energy in his movies of someone who loves movies and wants you to love them, too. I attend each Tarantino film as if it were an event, knowing that his distillation of the ’60s and ’70s action movies will be much more entertaining than a simple homage. That’s what makes the Bruce Lee scenes so disappointing, not so much on a factual basis, but as a lapse of cultural awareness.
Bruce Lee was my friend and teacher. That doesn’t give him a free pass for how he’s portrayed in movies. But it does give me some insight into the man. I first met Bruce when I was a student at UCLA looking to continue my martial arts studies, which I started in New York City. We quickly developed a friendship as well as a student-teacher relationship. He taught me the discipline and spirituality of martial arts, which was greatly responsible for me being able to play competitively in the NBA for 20 years with very few injuries.
During our years of friendship, he spoke passionately about how frustrated he was with the stereotypical representation of Asians in film and TV. The only roles were for inscrutable villains or bowing servants. In Have Gun - Will Travel, Paladin’s faithful Chinese servant goes by the insulting name of “Hey Boy” (Kam Tong). He was replaced in season four by a female character referred to as “Hey Girl” (Lisa Lu). Asian men were portrayed as sexless accessories to a scene, while the women were subservient. This was how African-American men and women were generally portrayed until the advent of Sidney Poitier and blaxploitation films. Bruce was dedicated to changing the dismissive image of Asians through his acting, writing and promotion of Jeet Kune Do, his interpretation of martial arts.
That’s why it disturbs me that Tarantino chose to portray Bruce in such a one-dimensional way. The John Wayne machismo attitude of Cliff (Brad Pitt), an aging stuntman who defeats the arrogant, uppity Chinese guy harks back to the very stereotypes Bruce was trying to dismantle. Of course the blond, white beefcake American can beat your fancy Asian chopsocky dude because that foreign crap doesn’t fly here.
I might even go along with the skewered version of Bruce if that wasn’t the only significant scene with him, if we’d also seen a glimpse of his other traits, of his struggle to be taken seriously in Hollywood. Alas, he was just another Hey Boy prop to the scene. The scene is complicated by being presented as a flashback, but in a way that could suggest the stuntman’s memory is cartoonishly biased in his favor. Equally disturbing is the unresolved shadow that Cliff may have killed his wife with a spear gun because she nagged him. Classic Cliff. Is Cliff more heroic because he also doesn’t put up with outspoken women?
I was in public with Bruce several times when some random jerk would loudly challenge Bruce to a fight. He always politely declined and moved on. First rule of Bruce’s fight club was don’t fight — unless there is no other option. He felt no need to prove himself. He knew who he was and that the real fight wasn’t on the mat, it was on the screen in creating opportunities for Asians to be seen as more than grinning stereotypes. Unfortunately, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood prefers the good old ways.
Lee and Abdul-Jabbar's Game of Death fight sequence can be seen here.
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FOCUS: Why the DNC Must Change the Rules and Hold a Climate Debate |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43707"><span class="small">Naomi Klein, The Intercept</span></a>
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Thursday, 22 August 2019 10:39 |
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Klein writes: "DEAR MEMBERS OF THE DNC: Your meeting in San Francisco this weekend takes place against a backdrop that is literally on fire."
A girl holds a sign that reads 'pull the emergency brake' at a ceremony to commemorate the Okjökull glacier in Iceland, on Aug. 18, 2019. (photo: Felipe Dana/AP)
Why the DNC Must Change the Rules and Hold a Climate Debate
By Naomi Klein, The Intercept
22 August 19
 ear Members of the DNC:
Your meeting in San Francisco this weekend takes place against a backdrop that is literally on fire. You are gathering one month after the hottest month ever recorded in human history. You are meeting on the same week that smoke from a record number of wildfires in the Amazon rainforest turned day into night in the Brazilian megapolis of São Paulo. And you are meeting just days after Iceland’s prime minister led her country in its first funeral service for a major glacier lost to climate change.
This is the terrifying context in which you will vote on a series of resolutions to determine whether the presidential primaries will include a dedicated debate about the climate emergency. Not the already scheduled climate “forum” or climate “town hall,” which will surely be fascinating for those who seek them out — but a formal televised debate among the top candidates vying to lead your party and the country.
I am writing to add my voice to the hundreds of thousands of others who have called on you to use your power to turn that debate into a reality.
Many of you are already on board, including the chairs of several state parties, but you are up against some powerful opponents. Let’s take on their two main counterarguments in turn.
First, you will hear that the rules on debates are already set. And, as DNC Chair Tom Perez has declared, the party “will not be holding entire debates on a single issue area.” But here’s the thing: Having a habitable Earth is not a “single issue”; it is the single precondition for every other issue’s existence. Humbling as it may be, our shared climate is the frame inside which all of our lives, causes, and struggles unfold.
More immediately, climate breakdown is already pouring fuel on every evil that humans are capable of conjuring, from deadly wars to femicide to unmasked white supremacy and colonialism. Indeed, President Donald Trump is currently throwing a tantrum because he is being denied what he perceives as the United States’s manifest destiny to purchase the Indigenous-governed territory of Greenland, which has become increasingly valuable because of the wealth made accessible by melting ice. In short, there is nothing singular about planetary breakdown — it encompasses, quite literally, everything.
Other members of the DNC will argue that the climate debate must be shut down because if you give in to this wave of pressure, spearheaded by the Sunrise Movement, it will open up the floodgates for every progressive constituency demanding a dedicated debate of their own.
In truth, that will probably happen. And in retrospect, it probably would have served the country better to have a series of issue-based debates, rather than the incoherent free-for-alls we’ve been treated to so far. But the political and bureaucratic hassles you will face should you greenlight a climate debate need to be weighed against something far more important: the fact that, by breaking your own rules, you have a critical chance to model what it means to treat climate breakdown like a true emergency, which is precisely what the next administration needs to do if our species is going to have a fighting chance. And when you think about it (and I hope you do), that is a pretty fearsome responsibility.
Here is why setting an emergency tone at this crossroads is so important. Imagine that the party does absolutely everything right between now and November 2020. It elects a beloved candidate to lead the party with a bold and positive platform; that candidate goes on to defeat Trump in the general election; other galvanizing candidates succeed in taking the Senate and keeping the House for your party. Even in that long-shot, best-case scenario, a new administration would come to power with the climate clock so close to midnight that it will need to have earned an overwhelming democratic mandate to leap into transformative action on day one.
The timeline we face is nonnegotiable. According to the fateful report issued by the International Panel on Climate Change last October, if humanity is to stand a fighting chance of keeping warming below catastrophic levels, global emissions need to be slashed in half in the decade that follows a new U.S. administration taking office. Not 10 years to agree on a plan or 10 years to get started on the plan. It will have 10 years to get the job done.
According to the IPCC report, there is no historical precedent for change of that speed and scale, though it is technically possible. Some pathways are much more democratic than others. Some are much fairer than others — to workers, migrants, and the front-line communities that have already been forced to bear the toxic burden of our collective addiction to fossil fuels. There are big choices to be made about what path to take, and they must to be explained and debated before millions of Americans.
But let’s be clear about one thing: There is no pathway that stands a chance of cutting emissions in time that does not begin with treating the climate crisis like a true emergency. That has little to do with the words we use — all kinds of governments, from local to national, are declaring “climate emergencies” and then continuing on pretty much as before. Several of the candidates running for president have talked about the “climate emergency” — but it barely earns more than a passing mention in their stump speeches.
What matters is that we act like we’re in an emergency. Because it is only during true emergencies that we discover what we are capable of. During emergencies, we stop all procrastination and delay. We no longer do things just because that’s the way they have always been done — instead, we suspend business as usual and do whatever it takes to get the job done.
Which brings us to your deliberations this week: A very good place to show the country what this actually looks like is to vote to have a climate debate, precedents and procedures be damned.
There will be objections and they will be legitimate. The climate crisis is not the only emergency we face, and many Americans are in the grips of multiple existential emergencies at once. The Trump administration’s brutality against migrants is a full-blown emergency. Mass incarceration and police violence against African Americans is a five-alarm fire. Attacks on women’s rights and bodies are an emergency. Economic inequality is an emergency. Trump himself is a rolling emergency. All of that is true and more.
It does not help the case for this debate that much of the mainstream climate movement has done a poor job of making clear links between the ways that the wealthiest and most powerful interests in our economy are assaulting the earth, assaulting democracy, and assaulting the most vulnerable among us all at the same time and to serve the same profitable goals.
The reasons behind these failures to connect are many. There’s the blinding whiteness of too much of the climate movement. There’s the fact that dependence on philanthropic dollars has fostered an atmosphere of scarcity and competition between movements that should, by all rights, be working in common cause. There’s the long historical tail of the Red Scare, which has made a great many “progressives” unwilling to align themselves with a coherent left-wing worldview that would make these connections legible. All of these forces have succeeded in divided interlocking struggles into safe, “single-issue” silos, built to contain and restrain us.
Thanks to the climate justice movement and the momentum for a Green New Deal, awareness is growing about the ways that our crises overlap and intersect, which is why the calls for a climate debate have been endorse by diverse groups including the NAACP, United We Dream, Fight for $15, and more. But we have a long way to go before we can honestly say that we have built a truly intersectional climate movement.
None of this, however, absolves you of the historic responsibility you carry as you meet to set key rules for the Democratic Party this week. If anything, it heightens your responsibility because you have the power not only to approve a defining climate debate, but to challenge the candidates and moderators to craft the discussion so that it spans the full spectrum of issues involved in both climate breakdown and potential climate solutions. As 17-year-old climate justice organizer Xiye Bastida tweeted to your chair recently: The climate crisis “encompasses economic, health, ecological, racial, labor, energy, GENERATIONAL, and many more issues.” It’s only “single issue” if you allow it to be.
As you search your consciences to decide how to vote, it is worth remembering that 16-year-old Greta Thunberg is currently on a harrowingly small sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic, making her way to New York’s harbor. This week marks exactly one year since she began her “school strike for climate,” an example that has inspired a movement of young people that now spans the globe. In March, an estimated 1.6 million students joined the climate strike (and on the week of September 20, adults worldwide have been asked to join).
I am betting that most of you have appreciated Greta’s speeches over the last few months; many of you probably shared them on social media. But Greta has been very clear that she knows her actions — whether refusing to go to school or refusing to fly — are not going to lower emissions at anything like the speed or scale required. Rather, she is trying to show you what emergency action looks like. And that begins with refusing to behave like everything is normal when the house is on fire.
For Greta, that has meant breaking the rules of what it means to be a child and going on strike from school. For you, this weekend, it should mean setting aside the rulebook and endorsing a climate debate, one thoughtfully designed to hold within it the many intersecting emergencies roiling our world. Making that choice would not solve the climate crisis. But it would send a powerful signal to the country and the world that we are in extraordinary times calling for truly extraordinary measures.
And that’s a very big deal. Because as Greta says, “We cannot solve an emergency without treating it like an emergency.”
Sincerely,
Naomi Klein
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Bernie Sanders Has a Smart Critique of Corporate Media Bias |
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Thursday, 22 August 2019 08:34 |
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vanden Heuvel writes: "Let's be clear: The Post and the New York Times aren't the same as Fox News, which has turned into a shameless propaganda outfit. But Sanders wasn't repeating Trump; he was making a smart structural critique of our commercial mainstream media."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) waves as he walks through the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on Aug. 11. (photo: Getty)
Bernie Sanders Has a Smart Critique of Corporate Media Bias
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post
22 August 19
 ast week, after criticizing Amazon for underpaying its workers and paying nothing in federal income taxes last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) noted: “I talk about that all of the time. And then I wonder why The Washington Post — which is owned by Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon — doesn’t write particularly good articles about me.” The response was immediate. Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor, dismissed Sanders’s characterization as a “conspiracy theory.” CNN’s commentators accused Sanders of using President Trump’s playbook; NPR similarly suggested he was echoing Trump. Nate Silver, the editor of FiveThirtyEight, descended to psychological babble, assailing Sanders for having a “sense of entitlement,” feeling that “he’s entitled to the nomination this time, and if he doesn’t win, it’s only because ‘the media’/'the establishment’ took it away from him."
Let’s be clear: The Post and the New York Times aren’t the same as Fox News, which has turned into a shameless propaganda outfit. But Sanders wasn’t repeating Trump; he was making a smart structural critique of our commercial mainstream media.
It’s not as if Sanders lacks for evidence that he has particularly suffered at the hands of the mainstream media. The New York Times featured an article on his trip to the Soviet Union decades ago as somehow formative of his views, and got caught quoting a Democratic strategist critical of Sanders without disclosing the strategist’s close ties to Hillary Clinton’s super PAC. Sometimes outlets simply pretend Sanders doesn’t exist, as when Politico headlined a national poll showing Sanders in a strong second place this way: “Harris, Warren tie for third place in new 2020 Dem poll, but Biden still leads.” After one fiercely contested debate between Sanders and Hillary Clinton in early March 2016, The Post published 16 news articles and opinion pieces, many of them critical, about Sanders in 16 hours; a few weeks later, the Times’s own public editor criticized the post-publication “stealth editing” of a piece originally favorable to Sanders.
But, contrary to his critics’ claims, Sanders disavowed any notion that Bezos controls coverage at The Post. “I think my criticism of the corporate media is not … that they wake up, you know, in the morning and say, ‘What could we do to hurt Bernie Sanders?’ ” he told CNN. Instead he offered a criticism that is neither new nor radical: “There is a framework of what we can discuss and what we cannot discuss, and that’s a serious problem.”
In an interview with John Nichols of the Nation (where I serve as publisher and editorial director), Sanders went out of his way to distinguish this critique of the media from Trump’s assault on the free press: “We’ve got to be careful. We have an authoritarian type president right now, who does not believe in our Constitution, who is trying to intimidate the media … That’s not what we do. But I think what we have to be concerned about ... is that you have a small number of very, very large corporate interests who control a lot of what the people in this country see, hear, and read. And they have their agenda.”
In an email to supporters, Sanders wrote: “Even more important than much of the corporate media’s dislike of our campaign is the fact that much of the coverage in this country portrays politics as entertainment, and largely ignores the major crises facing our communities. ... As a general rule of thumb, the more important the issue is to large numbers of working people, the less interesting it is to the corporate media.” The corporate media inevitably turns politics into a horse race and policy into “gotcha” questions or personality disputes. Trump’s ability to dominate the free media in 2016 is testament to this tendency.
The structural bias of the corporate media is particularly clear in these tempestuous times. The elite consensus — the post-Cold War bipartisan embrace of corporate globalization, market fundamentalism and the United States’ global reach — has been shattered in the sands of Iraq and the suites of Wall Street. With the economy — even at its best — not working for most Americans, the old order cannot be sustained. When insurgent candidates such as Sanders shock Beltway pundits, conventional wisdom is exposed as folly. Sanders is particularly frowned on by the Democratic Party establishment and by big business, which disagree with his views, especially on inequality. Not surprisingly, a mainstream media that swims in that same pond takes on the same color. It doesn’t take a call from the outlets’ owners.
But whereas in earlier decades the mainstream media, the keepers of the consensus, could easily set the terms of public debate, new technology gives candidates the chance to challenge that status quo. Sanders has started to build his own independent media apparatus, including a web show, a podcast and a newsletter. While the corporate media focuses on the limits of Sanders’s support, he laps the Democratic field in garnering small donors across the country. While “mainstream” pundits question his reach among people of color, polls show him leading among Latinos and polling favorably among young African Americans.
As Sanders noted, “We have more folks on our social media than anybody except Donald Trump. … We are nowhere near where he is. But we have a lot of people on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, who use it every single day. So certainly one of the technological breakthroughs that has been of help to us in an ability to circumvent corporate media is to talk directly to people, and we do that virtually every day.”
With the elite consensus shattered, this is a frightening and exhilarating time of new ideas and new movements. It is also a time when the gatekeepers of established opinion no longer hold as much sway, when new forms of communication and independent media challenge the old. It’s not surprising that the corporate media gives Sanders bad press. Thankfully, though, that matters less and less.
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recently went to a parents’ meeting at my children’s elementary school in the rural town of Aguacatán, Guatemala, a few hours from the Mexico border. As usual, I was one of the only men there.
