If he wanted, filmmaker Avi Lewis thinks he could probably scare you into total paralysis.
“I can make the case to you that we’re fucked,” he says over the phone from New York as he spoke with Common Dreams about his new film, the perils of climate change, the inequities fostered by modern capitalism, and the prospects of humanity’s current efforts to make a course correction away from planetary destruction. “I could say that we should just turn on the TV, take our drug of choice, and just tune it out. I could make that case for you and it would be completely convincing.”
But, he then adds, “What on earth is the point of that?”
With his new documentary film——making its U.S. debut this Friday night at the International Film Center in New York City, Lewis says the goal was not to “shock people into action.” Rather, the film was conceived with the idea that if the story of the climate crisis was told with the proper balance of fact-based concern and a very specific view of hope, it could inspire transcendence of the helplessness that prevents many from taking action.
“It’s the balance of cold-eyed realism which shows us that we’re on a truly catastrophic path and that we’re hurtling in the wrong direction as a global society and the importance of choosing to be hopeful, because people don’t act out of despair,” Lewis says.
Put another way: “Despair breeds paralysis. And hope can lead to action.”
Considering the current political moment—just one year after over 400,000 people gathered in New York City for the historic People’s Climate March and just two months before the much-anticipated COP21 UN climate talks begin in Paris—Lewis says the world remains in a crucial period where understanding of the crisis, and the energetic desire to do something about it, must be matched with a new vision for what the world can be. “If you’re going to embrace hope,” he argues, “it has to be credible hope. It has to be hope that’s actually based on something and it has to be hope that is mitigated by an acknowledgement of how bad things are. And that is the very fine balance that I tried to strike in the film.”
“Ask anyone on Earth if you can have infinite growth on a finite planet and everyone is going to say, ‘Of course not.’ It’s common sense. And yet, our entire global economic system is premised on that crazy idea.”
Citing evidence for this theory of inspiration matched with policy, Lewis cites two individuals who have generated perhaps the most palpable levels of excitement in the U.S. recently: Pope Francis, who just concluded a two-week visit to the Americas, and presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose presidential campaign calling for “political revolution” has ignited grassroots passion not seen in decades.
Both the Pope and Sanders, says Lewis, “are talking about inequality and climate change and making the links between the two—and bing!—they’re resonating crazy across society.” Because those issues are the tandem themes of the film, Lewis says it’s thrilling for them to be getting a larger audience. “But it’s also unsurprising,” he says, “because the fact is, people know. Ask anyone on Earth if you can have infinite growth on a finite planet and everyone is going to say, ‘Of course not.’ It’s common sense. And yet, our entire global economic system is premised on that crazy idea.”
What the film does show, he argues, is that people all over the world “are ready for a deeper, much more systemic critique and much more grassroots, radical solutions.”
It would be too easy to assume that the new 90-minute documentary is simply a film based on the book of the same name authored by Lewis’ wife, Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein—but that’s not entirely accurate.
Conceived and executed as a parallel project nearly from the get-go, Lewis’ film—which made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month—is just the latest installment of a synchronized and orchestrated endeavor which, though it is narrated by Klein and drew enormous inspiration from her best-selling book, also includes a website and a sophisticated outreach effort (run by a dedicated team of colleagues) which serve to promote and expand the work that has now occupied the last five years of their lives.
“People are ready for a deeper, much more systemic critique and much more grassroots, radical solutions.”
As Lewis explains, “I didn’t have the book to look at, but I was making a movie about a book that hadn’t been written yet.”
Shot over four years on five continents and in nine countries, the film takes a global look at the intertwined crises of corporate greed, neoliberal capitalism, and climate change—but does so by sitting down with and listening to some of the very people who are standing their ground against those forces. Following the New York premiere at the IFC on October 2—which will include a Q&A with both Lewis and Klein—the film will open on the West Coast in Los Angeles on October 16, before a nationwide release—including select theaters, community screenings, and on iTunes—on October 20.
Captured at least in part by the trailer that follows, the film explores the key themes of the book, but does so with a particular emphasis on meeting those individuals and communities from around the world who are confronting—not abstract disparities and economic theories—but actual injustices that have intruded on their lives in the form of polluted water and air, stolen land and traditions, and the systematic erosion of democracy which has been wrested from them by powerful fossil fuel companies and elite interests.
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The bigger story, however, is about more than destruction. It is about resistance, renewal, and the opportunity that lies just below the surface of what is commonly understood about global warming and its most negative impacts.
As Klein, who acts as narrator in the film, asks provocatively, “What if global warming isn’t only a crisis? What if it’s the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?”
One of the key examples of this—and one of the most important episodes in the film, says Lewis—is the energy transformation that has taken place in Germany over recent years.
“This is not some tiny outlier,” he explains. “Germany is the most powerful industrial economy in Europe and one of the top economies in the world. And in the last fifteen years they’ve shifted their electricity system to 30 percent renewable; they’ve created 400,000 news jobs and—more importantly perhaps—900 energy cooperatives where they de-privatized electricity utilities across the country through referendum and a citizens’ movement. And now renewable energy is run, in many cases, locally by communities who receive the economic benefit from selling that electricity to the grid and use the revenue to pay for local services.”
And this transition didn’t happen, Lewis goes on, “because politicians just decided it would be a good idea. It was the anti-nuclear movement in Germany that pushed for many years on this. And once they turned the tide on nukes, they set their sights on renewables, and now that they’ve got the energy transition going on in a very satisfying way—imperfect, but in a very exciting way—they’re moving to shut down coal, which is the final missing piece in Germany.”
“We’re not winning. But there’s been an incredible string of victories that really need celebrating and I think point the way forward strategically.”
Lewis explains it as a shift in which people pushing from below in strategic ways can absolutely impact the outcome of policies. “Look,” he argues, “the one thing that politicians are really good at is figuring out what’s popular and trying to be popular. So I think our job is to propose policies and build political power behind them until we can get the politicians to come to us. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in the climate justice movement globally.”
But don’t get him wrong. “I’m not saying we’re winning,” he quickly adds. “We’re not winning. But there’s been an incredible string of victories that really need celebrating and I think point the way forward strategically.”
That idea, which Lewis expanded on throughout his conversation with Common Dreams, cannot be overstated.
The film doesn’t candy-coat realities, he says, but the realities are not one-sided. “We don’t pretend that the tar sands aren’t a vast crime in progress against the earth,” Lewis explains. “But on the other hand, there are people up there—like Crystal Lameman of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation—who are fighting the titanic struggle to fund a lawsuit against the Canadian government that makes the case that the cumulative impact of tar sands development is violating their constitutional guarantee to a traditional life. And there have been a string of incredible Supreme Court decisions in Canada that have advanced aboriginal land rights enormously—like nowhere else in the post-colonial world—that give that lawsuit a real chance, a real hope, of being a game-changer.”
Lewis confesses that though inspirational quotes have never been his thing, he did, in fact, print out one short line written by the poet, farmer, and philosopher Wendell Berry which he hung up over his desk and returned to often as he and his wife labored over their joint project during these last years. It reads: “Be joyful… though you have considered all the facts.”
If there’s a single underlying notion that might serve as the “spirit of the film,” Lewis hopes it’s that one.
“When you make connections across various issues—and fundamentally get at the economic logic that’s driving our multiple, overlapping crises—you actually see the way towards multiple, overlapping solutions. That’s the place where people are getting really excited.”
And then what about the sorrow or helplessness produced by the devastating warnings issued by the world’s scientific community? Such despair, says Lewis, is simply “an indulgence we don’t have time for” any longer.
“The earth is screaming at us to get off this path,” he explains. “And when you make connections across various issues—and fundamentally get at the economic logic that’s driving our multiple, overlapping crises—you actually see the way towards multiple, overlapping solutions. And I think that’s the place where people are getting really excited.”
And finally, Lewis concludes, “I believe that the momentum behind Bernie and the euphoria around Pope Francis and the extraordinary generosity of spirit that we’ve seen recently among populations around the world towards refugees, speaks to the better side of ourselves. And the ugly side is always there, of course. It’s still there—and it still hold the reins of power—but I think these are moments that remind of us who we can be. That’s why in the film, you know, Naomi says, ‘It’s not about polar bears. It’s about us.'”
“It’s about whether we are going to give in to this message that we are selfish, greedy, self-interested people. Or whether we’re people who know how to take care of each other, and of the land—and whether that’s the side of ourselves that we can live in, together.”
So think about that. Even as you know the facts.
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With scientists and experts from around the world telling world leaders with increasing urgency ahead of upcoming climate talks in Paris that “It must be done,” a new report says “It can be done.”
As the planetary impacts of global warming become more apparent with every passing day, the goal of building and maintaining an energy system run on 100 % renewable power has become one of the driving demands of the world’s environmental and climate justice movements, new research presented by Greenpeace on Monday shows that if the political will can be mustered, there are neither technological nor economic barriers preventing humanity from building a fossil fuel- and nuclear-free world by 2050.
“I urge all those who say ‘it can’t be done’ to read this report and recognize that it can be done and must be done for the benefit of people around the world.” —Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace
“The phase out of fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy is not only needed, but can be achieved globally by mid-century,” said Kelly Mitchell, the climate and energy campaign director for Greenpeace USA. “In the US, we must prioritize keeping coal, oil and gas in the ground while accelerating the transition to clean energy like wind and solar. Doing so would both create new jobs and ensure a healthier planet for future generations.”
According to the report:
Produced in collaboration with researchers at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), the new Greenpeace report—titled —is the latest global energy analysis which shows that not only is the transition to cleaner energy sources possibly in the coming decades, the actual financial costs of taking on a such a massive transition would actually be cheaper over the coming decades than retaining the “dirty energy” status quo in the face of climate change.
Greenpeace admits the cost of its plan is “huge” but that “the savings are even bigger.” According to their estimates, the global average of additional investment needed in renewables is roughly $1 trillion a year until 2050. However, because renewables don’t require continuous fuel inputs, the savings over the same period would be $1.07 trillion a year, more than covering the costs of the required up-front investment.
Calling for a strategic phase-out of both fossil fuel and nuclear energy by mid-century, the Greenpeace plan targets the most carbon-intensive fossil fuels first—including lignite and coal—before moving on to less-polluting sources like oil and gas.
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“We must not let the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying stand in the way of a switch to renewable energy, the most effective and fairest way to deliver a clean and safe energy future,” said Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo. “I urge all those who say ‘it can’t be done’ to read this report and recognize that it can be done and must be done for the benefit of people around the world.”
What’s more, the group says, this energy transformation would be a source of millions upon millions of jobs, more than enough to replace those lost by the shuttering of the coal, oil, and gas industries.
The report says that nearly 20 million jobs in the renewable energy sector could be created between now and 2030, because of strong growth and investment in renewables. The solar photovoltaic (PV) industry alone, the research estimates, will provide 9.7 million jobs, equal to the number of people now working in the coal industry today. In the wind sector—which has shown unprecedented growth in recent years–job growth will continue grow to over 7.8 million jobs, twice as many as are employed in oil and gas today.
“The solar and wind industries have come of age, and are now cost competitive with coal,” said Greenpeace’s Sven Teske, the lead author of the report. “It is very likely they will overtake the coal industry in terms of jobs and energy supplied within the next decade. It’s the responsibility of the fossil fuel industry to prepare for these changes in the labor market and make provisions. Every dollar invested in new fossil fuel projects is high risk capital which could end up as stranded investment.”
With the UN climate talks in Paris fast-approaching, Greenpeace says the urgency of the crisis must compel political leaders to finally act—and act boldly—on the message that the scientific community and civil society leaders have been issuing with growing levels of intensity in recent years.
With their new report as a blueprint for what’s possible, said Naidoo, “the Paris climate agreement must deliver a long term vision for phasing out coal, oil, gas and nuclear energy by mid-century, reaching the goal of 100% renewables with energy access for all.”
Read the full report here:
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Betraying repeatedly stated vows to bring all U.S. troops home before he leaves office, President Barack Obama announced on Thursday that as many as 5,500 soldiers will remain in the country until at least 2017.
Citing unnamed officials, the Associated Press was the first to break the news and noted the announcement will ensure Obama—despite numerous promises to the contrary—”hands the conflict off to his successor.”
At a press conference at the White House, Obama said it would be a mistake to bring all the troops home and announced a slow-down in the pace of withdrawal and confirmed that a substantial force would remain beyond the end of his term.
“Afghan forces are still not as strong as they need to be,” Obama explained to reporters, while flanked by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford and and Defense Secretary Ash Carter. “Meanwhile, the Taliban has made gains particularly in rural areas and can still launch deadly attacks in cities, including Kabul.”
The news comes less than two weeks after the U.S. bombed a hospital in the northern city of Kunduz—killing 22 people, including patients and medical staff. Though Doctors Without Borders/MSF, the international group which ran the hospital, has submitted a formal request for an international and independent probe of the attack, the U.S. government has to consent.
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For those who have paid close attention to the failed adventures of the U.S. military in Afghanistan since 2001, Thursday’s news did not come as a surprise.
As Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and a longtime critic of Obama’s foreign policy, acknowledged in an early-morning tweet responding to the expected announcement : “Obama to announce the Afghan War isn’t over after all (which has been clear since he declared it “over” months ago).”
And as independent journalist Ali Gharib observed in the Guardian following Obama’s press conference:
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The UK’s long-awaited, much-delayed Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, examining Britain’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is finally set to be published next summer—and it’s “shaping up to be a whitewash,” warns one anti-war coaliton.
Then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown commissioned the report in 2009; the panel heard from its last witness in February 2011. The endeavor is estimated to have cost approximately £10 million ($15 million USD) and has been repeatedly delayed over the past six years.
The report is now expected to be ready for publication in June or July, according to the latest update from lead investigator Sir John Chilcot.
“My colleagues and I estimate that we will be able to complete the text of our report in the week commencing 18 April 2016,” Chilcot wrote in a letter on Wednesday (pdf) to Prime Minister David Cameron. “At that point, National Security checking of its contents by a team of officials, who will be given confidential access to the report on your behalf, can begin.”
Chilcot explained that the “considerable size” of the report, which reportedly runs more than two million words, means it will take time to prepare the report for printing.
Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon, 19, was killed in a bomb attack in Basra in 2004, said she was “disappointed” by the news. “We thought it should be out a lot sooner than this,” she told Sky News. “I thought it would be out by the end of the year, because they have everything there.”
Saying the delays were keeping grieving families of slain veterans from getting “closure,” a group of 29 families threatened earlier this year to sue Chilcot if he did not set a date of publication for the report. They blamed the logjam largely on the government’s “Maxwellisation” procedure, which gives individuals criticized in official reports time to respond to allegations.
“It’s another let-down,” Gentle declared on Thursday. “It’s another few months to wait and suffer again.”
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Even Cameron himself, citing “the families of those who served in Iraq,” said in his official response to Chilcot that he was “disappointed…that you do not believe it will be possible logistically to publish your report until early summer.” The Prime Minister said he would “welcome any further steps you can take to expedite the final stages of the Inquiry.”
The office of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, meanwhile—whose role in the conflict is at the center of the Inquiry and who on Sunday admitted that the invasion of Iraq helped the rise of ISIS—issued a defensive response to Chilcot’s announcement.
“The reason for his delay has been the excessive care taken to allow those who are criticized in the report to respond to those criticisms before it is published, a process which has not only held up its findings but has given them an advantage in trying to get their justifications in first.” —Stop the War Coalition
“Mr. Blair…wants to make it clear that the timetable of the Inquiry and the length of time it will have taken to report is not the result either of issues over the correspondence between him as Prime Minister and President Bush; or due to the Maxwellisation process,” the statement read.
Even when it is finally published, there is no guarantee that the Chilcot report will answer critical questions.
As anti-war Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said in a speech earlier this year, “I think I shall be disappointed when it is published. I suspect that it will be full of redactions and that we will have to read a million words before we discover which bits have been redacted.”
The Stop the War Coalition added Thursday in a press statement: “The reason for his delay has been the excessive care taken to allow those who are criticized in the report to respond to those criticisms before it is published, a process which has not only held up its findings but has given them an advantage in trying to get their justifications in first.”
An additional eight or nine months before publication “will mean more spin and obfuscation,” the coalition added. “Chilcot is the third British report into the Iraq war. Like its predecessors, Butler and Hutton, it is shaping up to be a whitewash. The long delay in publishing it is unlikely to hide that fact.”
To that end, journalist and author Peter Oborne on Wednesday published his own, independent inquiry into the war.
Oborne’s report, conducted in concert with the BBC, charges that Blair “misrepresented the evidence” on the existence, possession, and condition of weapons of mass destruction; “used vital testimony selectively in order to build the case for war;” stayed silent on pre-war assessments that showed invading Iraq would make the UK more vulnerable to terrorism; and blamed France “for the US/UK failure to persuade more than two other members of the UN Security Council (Spain and Bulgaria) to vote for war.”
Oborne’s evidence, based on publicly available testimony and “background narratives” by UK scholar David Morrison, shows plainly that “there is little reason to doubt that the Blair government misrepresented the intelligence to parliament and to the British public in order to make the case for an illegal war in which 179 British soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died,” Oborne writes.
“The invasion of Iraq was intended to deal with international terrorism. It is plain that the terrorist threat to Britain has increased beyond measure as a result of the decision to go into Iraq,” he continued. “Let’s see if John Chilcot agrees.”
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While Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed in 2013, “Spying among friends is never acceptable,” a new media report alleges that the lengthening list of targets of Germany’s intelligence agency included the FBI, the UN children’s agency, and a German diplomat.
The German public radio station, RBB Inforadio, said Wednesday that the agency, the BND, also spied on French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, weapons maker Lockheed Martin, and the World Health Organization.
Reuters described the new reporting, which does not identify the source of the allegations, as “the latest twist in a growing scandal over the activities of Germany’s BND stemming from revelations in 2013 by U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.”
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An inquiry by the German parliament already revealed earlier this year that the BDN helped the NSA, with whom it’s had a cozy relationship, carry out surveillance against “top officials at the French Foreign Ministry, the Elysee Palace, and European Commission.” And last month reporting by the public radio station and Spiegel Online claimed that the BND had also spied of its own accord on “European states and allies.”
In addition, just this weekend the news publication Der Spiegel claimed that the BND’s surveillance targets included the U.S. Department of the Interior, interior ministries of EU states, and NGOs including Oxfam and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
In the wake of the latest reporting, Green Party lawmaker Konstantin von Notz tweeted: “The utterances of the Merkel government after #Snowden are a foreign policy embarrassment of the first order.”
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That’s a question asked by the Des Moines Register‘s editorial board this weekend, who also pointed out that the “first-in-the nation caucuses are held in one of the world’s great agricultural centers.”
It should be a major issue for presidential candidates, the Register says, because
The editorial also points to research showing that Americans want to change the food system, have broad support for government incentives to encourage sustainable farming practices, and express strong concern that one-third of children today will develop type-2 diabetes. The editorial also notes the “wave of consolidation is sweeping through agriculture” that “will have ramifications throughout the food chain,” such as the proposed Dow/DuPoint merger.
“What will it take to get politicians to talk about butter as much as about guns?” the editorial asks.
One organization that agrees that food should be a major issue for presidential leadership is the Union of Concerned Scientists.
They, along with Food Policy Action and the HEAL Food Alliance, launched the Plate of the Union Initiative to urge political leaders to talk about reforming the food system.
“Plate of the Union is the first coordinated campaign effort to get candidates running for President talking about our broken food system,” Tom Colicchio, co-founder of Food Policy Action, said in October 2015.
“The truth is, our current food system is out of balance,” he added. “It prioritizes corporate profits at the expense of our health, the environment and working families. The next President needs to take bold steps to reform our food system to ensure all Americans have equal access to healthy, affordable food.”
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As Ricardo Salvador, director of the UCS’s Food and Environment Program, sees it, “the system as currently practiced, promoted and subsidized exploits both people and nature.”
But what we need to do is clear as well, he writes: produce food that makes us healthy, produce it in a way that is safe and sustainable, and recognize that “healthy food is a necessity not a privilege.”
And “There is political tailwind to support the first presidential candidate to realize that by fixing food many other high priority issues can also be fixed,” he writes.
In a blog post this weekend, Salvador adds:
To see more about the Plate of the Union initiative, watch the video from UCS below:
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Last week, reports alluded to the existence of a clause in the Dutchman’s contract with Red Bull that would allow Verstappen to leave the Milton Keynes-based outfit before the end of 2023 in the event that Honda departed the team.
But Horner has denied the existence of any such agreement between Red Bull and Verstappen, insisting the 23-year-old remains totally committed to his team’s future.
“There is no such clause in his contract,” Horner told Red Bull’s ServusTV on Monday evening.
“The contracts between the driver and the team are private, but there is definitely no engine-related clause in Max’s contract.
“He is competitive. He feels very comfortable in the team and believes strongly in the Honda program. I think he also sees that Honda has brought forward the engine from 2022 to 2021. That is encouraging, of course.
“So we will take another step forward next year. He’s excited about this, and he still has a long way to go until 2022.”
Honda’s departure is nevertheless a blow for Red Bull and leaves the energy drink company scrambling to secure a new engine supplier for 2022 by the end of the year.
A partnership with Mercedes or Ferrari appears very unlikely, mainly for competitive or political reasons, leaving Renault as the most achievable option, if the two former partners can let bygones be bygones following their acrimonious at the end of 2018.
However, commenting on Renault’s recent change of management, marked by the arrival at the helm of former Seat boss Luca de Meo, Horner believes a “fresh wind” is now blowing through Renault’s corridors.
“We must now start thinking about an engine partner for 2022,” he said. “We need clarity by the end of the year.
“Of course, we have to consider all possibilities, all options. But in the end, Mr.[Dietrich] Mateschitz must decide how to proceed. But it is important for us to have enough power to challenge Mercedes in the coming years.
“Of course, I understand why people assume that we will talk to Renault. Since the separation, Renault has changed. The new board brings a lot of fresh wind and some changes. Things are moving forward.”
Read also: Honda open to shifting engine development to Red Bull from 2022
Honda F1 boss Yamamoto-san recently said that the Japanese manufacturer could be open to letting Red Bull take over the development of its engine from 2021.
But Horner appeared skeptical of such a prospect, the complexities of which could prove too costly for Red Bull.
“The cost of getting a new manufacturer on board under the current regulations is simply far too high,” he said. “So there will be no new manufacturer until a new engine – possibly 2026 – comes on the market. The costs for development are enormously high.
“The FIA and Liberty have to get a grip on this. They have done a good job on the chassis. Now we need homologated engines and we also need budget caps for the power units.”
Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers
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DESSAU, Germany — Ursula von der Leyen wants Europe to tap into its inner avant-garde.
To meet some of its most pressing strategic goals — managing a sustainable industrial transition and finding new green technology to mitigate climate change — the Commission president has pledged to revive Bauhaus, the experimental art school founded in interwar Germany to marry artistic form with functional design.
“We need to give our systemic change its own distinct aesthetic — to match style with sustainability,” von der Leyen said in her State of the Union speech last month. “This is why we will set up a new European Bauhaus — a co-creation space where architects, artists, students, engineers, designers work together to make that happen.”
The European Commission is yet to set out how this will work in practice, saying only that it’s in talks with a number of organizations that may take part. “It’s just an idea and concept at the moment,” one EU official conceded.
“The main ambition will be to create houses and public buildings that help cities become greener and that reconnect us with nature,” a Commission official said of the project.
If the scope of the historic Bauhaus school is any indication, plans to revive it for the modern age — hazy as they still are — are likely to be more ambitious than other EU-funded academic projects and institutions.
The manifesto of the original Bauhaus school — founded by German architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 — was to “create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting.” The school made a name for itself by pushing boundaries and attracted high-profile artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Anni Albers, along with architects like Mies van der Rohe.
A century later, the school’s architectural style has been exported around the world, and the name Bauhaus is shorthand for interdisciplinary education. Tuition at the school covered everything from bookbinding to ceramics, carpentry, painting and more.
“They wanted to rethink the world, to find new answers to fundamental questions,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the opening of a new Bauhaus museum in Dessau last year. “They asked: How do we live? How do we work? How do we modernize and improve life and society? These are questions that are timelessly topical but, of course, are asked today under completely different conditions.”
Green Bauhaus
From tubular chairs and nesting tables to Marianne Brandt’s teapot and lamp, Bauhaus has become a byword for simplified, functional design made for the masses. Because the 1920s were marked by a scarcity of goods in postwar Germany, the school also embraced an economical use of materials.
The German artist Josef Albers, who taught crafts at the Bauhaus, would instruct students to collect discarded materials and make objects out of what they found, all while avoiding creating any additional waste, according to Regina Bittner, interim head of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.
“This, one could say, is a recycling strategy,” Bittner said in an interview in her office deep inside the bespoke Dessau school building, designed by Gropius himself with huge windows and spacious, airy corridors. The building, the school’s second home after it left Weimar, is now partly used as a postgraduate study center, and was refurbished in the mid-2000s ahead of the Bauhaus centenary celebrations last year.
But being frugal with materials doesn’t necessarily make Bauhaus a good model for sustainable development, some caution.
“Elements of what we now call the greening of the economy existed a century ago, but Bauhaus was essentially not a green institution,” said Max Welch Guerra, a professor of spatial planning at the Bauhaus University Weimar.
That underscores the contradictions at play in the Bauhaus. While it’s seen as a beacon of progressive attitudes today, women were barred from most of the programs. On sustainable practices, Bittner said the school was embedded in the “industrialization and resource exploitation” of the time.
Rather than emulating its system of production, von der Leyen seems to be using the Bauhaus model to champion the need for a cross-disciplinary approach to tackling the climate emergency, said Welch Guerra.
The school was not just concerned about “how to produce chairs and houses,” he said. “It was an ideology” that allowed artists to work across disciplines and develop diverse skills.
“[Von der Leyen] has understood it better than most, it wasn’t just an institution that developed a new style, the core of the historic Bauhaus is that they offered ways to adapt their day-by-day life to the potentials of the industrialization of that time,” he said.
If the highest rungs of EU politics today laud the school as an example of how to approach the challenges facing modern society, it’s an open question whether such free-wheeling, interdisciplinary collaboration will work in practice — particularly given the EU’s penchant for paperwork, annual reports and regular audits.
The historic Bauhaus school, after all, did not sit alongside politics easily. Despite his reliance on public funds, Gropius complained as early as 1920 of his desire to “decisively break away from politics” at Bauhaus.
In its short life-span — it only existed for 14 years — the institution often ruffled feathers and was forced to close three times after coming into the crosshairs of local politicians. It left Weimar for the bespoke building in Dessau in 1925, before being forced to move to Berlin where it was eventually stamped out by the rise of the Nazis in 1933.
Although the Bauhaus teaching staff was international, there may also be pushback to a perception that von der Leyen wants to impose a German invention on the EU as a whole. “This is the Europeanization of a German development model,” said Welch Guerra.
Democrat Jon Ossoff pursued the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ahead of the April primary in Georgia’s House special election, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday.
In the month leading up to contest, Ossoff participated in candidate interviews with the Chamber, but the group ultimately dubbed him too far left to win its endorsement.
“It’s as though he was auditioning for ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ ” the group’s political director, Rob Engstrom, told the Examiner. He said it was clear that Ossoff aligned too closely with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and progressive firebrand Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersThe Hill’s 12:30 Report: Milley apologizes for church photo-op Harris grapples with defund the police movement amid veep talk Biden courts younger voters — who have been a weakness MORE (I-Vt.) for the Chamber’s liking.
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The revelation could hurt Ossoff among the progressive activists and operatives that helped boost his congressional bid.
The Chamber typically endorses pro-business Republican candidates and, on occasion, moderate Democrats.
Ossoff came in first place in last month’s primary, but fell short of the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright. He will face the second-place finisher, Republican Karen Handel, in a runoff next month. Handel was endorsed by the Chamber.
Retail giant Walmart enlisted the help of a private military contractor and the FBI to spy on workers pushing for a $15 hourly wage and organizing Black Friday protests in 2012 and 2013, newly released documents (pdf) reveal.
“We are fighting for all workers to be paid a fair wage and enough hours to put food on the table and provide for our families,” said Mary Pat Tifft, a Wisconsin Walmart employee of 27 years. “To think that Walmart found us such a threat that they would hire a defense contractor and engage the FBI is a mind-blowing abuse of power.”
A document made public Tuesday by worker organization OUR Walmart reveals company testimony to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in January stating that Walmart had enlisted the help of arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force to monitor workers who were organizing for higher wages and the right to unionize. OUR Walmart workers said they were illegally fired and disciplined for taking part in the “Ride for Respect” strike during Walmart’s shareholder meeting in June of 2013.
But the surveillance had long been in progress. Walmart executives mobilized the so-called “Delta” emergency response team in 2012 when they first got wind of plans for a nationwide Black Friday worker strike. As Bloomberg explained in an investigative piece published Tuesday, “the stakes were enormous.” In addition to the NLRB testimony, the new reporting states, “The details of Walmart’s efforts during the first year it confronted OUR Walmart are described in more than 1,000 pages of e-mails, reports, playbooks, charts, and graphs.”
“Any attempt to organize its 1 million hourly workers at its more than 4,000 stores in the U.S. was an existential danger,” Bloomberg‘s Susan Berfield wrote. “Operating free of unions was as essential to Walmart’s business as its rock-bottom prices.”
Berfield reports:
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The FBI came on the scene next, after the company heard about plans for the Ride for Respect demonstration, which brought a caravan of striking workers to Bentonville for the shareholder meeting, during which 14,000 Walmart managers, investors, and hand-picked associates joined the founding Walton family for a week of events, including an Elton John performance.
Berfield continues:
OUR Walmart brought the case after Walmart allegedly retaliated against Ride for Respect strikers by disciplining 70 participants and firing almost 20 of them. Walmart said it was simply enforcing its attendance policy.
Tifft, of the group’s Wisconsin chapter, said elected officials “should launch an official investigation and hold [Walmart] accountable. Instead of wasting their giant profits on every deceptive tactic under the sun to track low-wage workers going hungry, they should pay us what we earn and treat us with respect.”
As the nationwide movement for a $15 federal minimum wage claims more and more victories, workers are not backing down from their plans for this year’s protests.
“This Black Friday, we stand united in telling Walmart—enough is enough!” Tifft said.
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