Smiling All the Way to (and from) the Bank

Published August 10, 2011 on the earthbongo blog: http://blog.earthbongo.com/2011/08/smiling-all-the-way-to-and-from-the-bank/

Sharon Fillingim’s puppy knows all about the benefits of local banking. On walks down Seattle’s Queen Anne Avenue, the puppy eagerly tugs on the leash when Sharon passes HomeStreet Bank, hoping for one of the treats stashed there.

A trip to this small community bank is a treat for customers, too. The name says it all: HomeStreet is a welcoming hub for many residents of the Queen Anne neighborhood. Instead of rushing through their transactions and leaving, they linger to chat over coffee. On Fridays, they can munch on one of the scrumptious cookies a customer bakes herself. According to branch manager Hossein Soleymani, she has never asked for reimbursement.

Hossein has been with HomeStreet for over a decade. “Small banks have more opportunities to help the community,” he says. “It’s not just a good idea to do—it’s something you must do as a neighbor.” He and other employees have put in numerous hours volunteering for local charities, including Queen Anne Helpline, which provides a variety of social services to neighbors in need. Hossein says the bank’s growth stems not from spending money on advertising, but from building community trust through word of mouth. “Our customers bring customers,” he says.

The cornerstone of this trust is customer service that goes the extra mile. Sharon owns the charming Le Reve bakery just down the street from the bank. When I tell her Hossein sent me, her face brightens. “He was just here today for lunch!” she exclaims. Since she opened her business account at HomeStreet, she has gotten to know him and the tellers, who have typically held their jobs for many years. If Sharon and her staff run out of change, they deliver it, a time-saving favor she can’t imagine many banks doing. It’s all part of the personal atmosphere that often distinguishes local banks from their huge Wall Street counterparts. “What impressed me most is that they greet each customer by name,” she says. “It makes you feel special.”

Ronda Miller says the same thing about her local bank, Umpqua. She’s the proud holder of the key to the second safety deposit box at its brand-new Queen Anne branch, which  opened its doors July 20th. For many years, she did her banking at Washington Mutual. But when WaMu was acquired by JPMorgan Chase amid the 2008 financial collapse, things began to change. “Whenever I walked in the door,” she says, “I felt pressured to buy something.” These high-pressure, often deceptive sales tactics were so bad that in June, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) fined the bank $27 million. Employees might approach Ronda more than once, delivering the same pitch without recognizing her face or recalling their previous encounter. While the impersonal service was off-putting, it wasn’t until Ronda had a problem with her credit card that she decided enough was enough. The bank gave her the run-around, passing her from one person to the next without resolving the issue. Ready for a change, she closed her account and opened a new one at Umpqua, where she says, “I’ve never felt like I was being sold a product.”

Ronda had read good things about Umpqua in a newspaper article about its Green Street lending program. Through the program, Umpqua offers homeowners affordable loans to make energy-saving improvements and install solar panels. The bank is part of a program called Solarize Seattle, a project of the nonprofit organization Northwest SEED. Its partners include the local solar company Sunergy Systems and Sustainable Queen Anne, a grassroots group promoting economic and environmental sustainability.

While other banks may have a business plan, Umpqua has a manifesto. In it, the bank says it’s “equal parts checking account and knitting club, commercial loan and local music store, IRA and Internet café.” Supporting the local economy is an obvious Umpqua priority. All the goodies customers enjoy, from daily coffee to free massages on special occasions, come from local businesses. To say hello, the new branch hand-delivered plants to the front porches of each of its new neighbors.

At Umpqua, Ronda receives all the same services she did at her Wall Street bank, but instead of fees and aggressive sales, she enjoys a personal atmosphere that puts a smile on her face. “When you go into Umpqua,” she says, “you talk to one person, not three. You walk up, and they help you with everything.”

Isn’t that the way it always should be? Recently, I heard about a campaign called Move Your Money, a large-scale movement to “invest in Main Street, not Wall Street” by switching to a local bank or credit union. I decided to do the same and moved my money to the Washington State Employees Credit Union. I’ve never looked back. Here’s how you can join me, Sharon, Ronda, and millions of other people in finding a bank that really knows how to make change: http://earthbongo.com/project/243/move-your-money-to-a-local-bank.

The Real Class War (Review of Winner-Take-All Politics)

Reviewed: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Simon & Schuster, 340 pp., $17.46

Published May 25, 2011 in Toward Freedom: http://towardfreedom.com/americas/2405-the-real-class-war

When then-Senator Barack Obama called for reforms to "spread the wealth around," opponents labeled him a class warrior intent on stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. What they didn't mention, and what too few Americans realize, is that precisely the opposite pattern has unfolded over the past forty years. Winner-Take-All Politics details this dramatic redistribution of wealth and shows how it is no natural outcome of economic forces. It is the result of political decisions. Increasingly dependent upon campaign funds from well-organized special interests, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have legislated in favor of the extremely rich at the expense of everyone else.

Hacker and Pierson back up their assertions with striking data. For example, the share of the nation's income raked in by the top 1 percent shot up from 9 percent in 1974 to 23.5 percent in 2007. The figures are even more remarkable at the very upper echelons: the top 0.1 percent has seen a fourfold increase in their share of the pie, from 2.7 percent to 12.3. Meanwhile, wages for the poor and middle class have stagnated and failed to keep up with the rising cost of living.

Experts often pin the growth of economic inequality on the shift to a knowledge-based economy, which has produced a large gap between the educated and uneducated. But Hacker and Pierson point out that extreme income disparity exists even among the highly educated. Further, the same level of disparity is not found in other developed nations. Clearly, an additional force is at work.

That force, according to Hacker and Pierson, is American government and politics. Since the 1970s, the tax code has become progressively less progressive. Not only have the super-wealthy enjoyed large tax cuts, but they have benefited from loopholes such as the capital gains tax. Since capital gains like investment income are only taxed 15 percent, private equity and hedge fund managers end up paying "a dramatically lower rate than their secretaries." Often, policy decisions go quietly unnoticed in the form of "drift": the government simply fails to respond to changing economic realities. The minimum wage is never updated to keep up with inflation. Legislation fails to address skyrocketing executive pay, which now approaches 300 times the earnings of average workers.

So why, if our democracy is based on the principle of "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," have our policies so consistently favored the few? The answer lies in organization. In the past, unions provided a voice for the interests of working Americans. Yet while union representation has sharply declined (from 30% in 1960 to 13% in 2000), lobbyists representing corporate and financial interests have proliferated in the corridors of Washington. Unlike the fragmented and politically uninformed electorate, these special interest groups have banded together and pooled their vast resources to exert powerful political pressure. Hacker and Pierson describe the revolving door between Congress and K Street. Take Max Baucus, the Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who packed his office with pharmaceutical lobbyists. Or take John Breaux, former Democratic senator from Louisiana. After repeatedly undercutting progressive initiatives, Breaux made the smooth transition from elected official to lavishly paid consultant at a lobbying firm.

Despite the media spectacle that surrounds presidential elections, the growth of inequality has little to do with which party occupies the White House. In fact, it was under Carter that the dynamics of "winner-take-all" began to rapidly accelerate. Hacker and Pierson turn our attention from the presidential "horse race" toward the far more significant "politics of organized combat" that has consumed both parties. They describe a GOP that became incrementally more radicalized over the past four decades, most dramatically under the leadership of House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. While the GOP shifted further to the right--a shift that would recur with the emergence of the Tea Party--the Democratic Party was forced by the fundraising arms race to become more business-friendly. In turn, business interests were keen to court Democratic leaders who could stall or water down reforms.

Meaningful reform is made even harder by the structural flaws of a system predisposed toward gridlock. Since states have equal representation in the Senate, conservative small states hold disproportionate sway over less numerous but far more populous states. The increasingly ubiquitous use of the filibuster poses another roadblock, making it easy for the minority party to--with the help of a few bought-off colleagues across the aisle--stymie legislation. Such obstructionist tactics always benefit the minority party that employs them, convincing the public that the majority party is inept and that Washington is broken. During Obama's presidency, this has given congressional Republicans an incentive to block any reform-minded legislation rather than engage in bipartisan compromise.

If the problem is organization, Hacker and Pierson conclude, then organization is the solution. And it will have to be sustained. "Political reformers will need to mobilize for the long haul," the authors write, "appreciating that it is not electoral competitions alone that are decisive, but also the creation of organized capacity to…turn electoral victories into substantive and sustainable triumphs."

The Triple Bottom Line: Green-Collar Jobs

Published in What's Working, the Winter 2010 issue of WIN Magazine. (An earlier version of this article appeared in Learn as You Go, the Fall 2009 issue of YES! Magazine.)
http://www.warresisters.org/node/940

Over the past few decades, the decline of industry has meant lower wages and uncertain employment for a growing number of U.S. workers. Yet communities across the country are being revived by a growing job market in clean energy and energy efficiency. These green-collar jobs offer simultaneous solutions to several of the nation’s most pressing issues: economic wellbeing, environmental sustainability, and peace.

According to a 2009 report by the American Solar Energy Society, American green-collar jobs totaled more than 9 million in 2007, and 37 million can be created by 2030, if policymakers support renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives at the state and federal level. “We must build a 21st-century workforce in America to compete in the new clean energy economy. This means training a new generation of workers to fill a wide range of skilled jobs in the rapidly growing green sector,” says Phil Angelides, Chairman of the Apollo Alliance, a coalition formed in 2001 to push for a clean energy revolution.

Climate change legislation such as the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, introduced in the Senate by John Kerry (DMA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA), promises to expand the clean energy industry by capping carbon emissions and boosting job training programs. Every dollar spent on clean energy creates nearly four times as many jobs as a dollar invested in oil and gas, Kerry pointed out in an op-ed promoting the bill.

Pathways out of Poverty

Because green-collar job training is affordable—usually requiring an associate’s degree at most—and because these jobs typically offer good living wages, they represent a way out of poverty and into the middle class. For example, an experienced journeyman trained to retrofit houses stands to make up to $50 an hour. “If a job improves the environment but doesn’t provide a family-supporting wage or a career ladder to move low-income workers into higher-skilled occupations, it is not a green-collar job,” says Apollo Alliance spokesman Sam Haswell.

The creation of green-collar jobs is having a positive impact on communities plagued by violence and economic despair. “By increasing green jobs training opportunities for young people in low-income areas,” says Haswell, “we can create pathways out of poverty and help end the cycle of violence that afflicts many of America’s poorest communities.”

In Santa Fe, where the high school graduation rate languishes below 50 percent, a group called ¡Youthworks! collaborated with city officials and local businesses to create the Green Collar Jobs Apprenticeship Program in 2008. The program offers youth valuable training, academic skill building, and job counseling, while helping to change their image in the community.

“There’s a lot of racism and discrimination and bad perceptions of young people in Santa Fe,” says Tobe Bott-Lyons, educational coordinator at ¡Youthworks!. “And now you see these tattooed kids that people are generally used to being scared of restoring the river and building a house, and they’re retrofitting homes and installing solar panels.”

Lauren Herrera’s life turned upside-down when her six-yearold son died last year. She started getting into trouble, which culminated in drug-related felony charges that caused her to lose her job as a dental assistant. Scarce jobs and a criminal record made it hard to find work, until ¡Youthworks! gave her an opportunity to turn her life around and play a positive role in her community. Now she weatherizes homes for low-income families with the newly launched Energy RX crew. “They’re ecstatic when they find out it’s free,” she says. “It’s very rewarding.”

Fostering Peace

Since green-collar jobs offer alternatives to youth whose limited career options may have once pushed them toward military service, some peace organizations view them as a counterweight to the “poverty draft.” The American Friends Service Committee notes on its website that the Pentagon devoted $4 billion to recruitment among low-income and minority youth in 2003. The organization has highlighted green jobs in the career guides it makes available to youth who are considering military service.

As the green economy develops, it is likely to help ease conflicts over resources and climate change-driven social upheaval. “Transitioning to homegrown renewable fuels will reduce our dependence on unstable, war-torn regimes to meet our own growing demand for oil, which will in turn increase U.S. energy security and also help curb climate change,” asserts Haswell.

Few understand this equation more personally than the veterans who have seen first-hand the harmful effects of oil dependency. They are raising their voices through organizations such as Operation Free, a veterans group fighting for climate change legislation and green jobs. Main State Rep. and Operation Free Campaign Coordinator Alex Cornell du Houx says he began thinking about the need for clean energy while deployed with the Marines in Fallujah in 2006. He and other veterans recently toured 22 states telling their stories and highlighting the importance of green energy as a national security issue. In December, Operation Free members joined representatives of 170 countries at the international climate conference in Copenhagen.

Veterans have another reason to take the initiative in developing the green economy: They have suffered disproportionately during the current recession. The jobless rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans aged 20–24 reached 15 percent in February, compared with a 13.8 percent jobless rate for non-veterans in the same age group. After finding that their military training has fewer applications in the civilian job search than they had expected, many veterans end up reenlisting. As a result, they often experience the strain of additional combat tours.

Veterans Green Jobs, a part of the Operation Free coalition, trains veterans in home weatherization and helps place them in energy-efficiency jobs in Colorado. One of its programs, called Home Energy Audit Training (HEAT), offers veterans a monthly stipend while they conduct training in the field. “Not only does it get veterans employed,” says Cornell du Houx, “but it gives them skills and training for a job that can’t be exported.”

Participating in the green economy provides veterans with more than a job, however. “All veterans come home with some form of PTSD,” says Cornell du Houx. As they cope with the psychological scars of war and struggle to readapt to civilian life, these jobs also provide a source of healing and a new sense of mission.

Job Training

Throughout the country, community college programs in alternative energy have been flooded with recently unemployed workers and those simply seeking valuable new skills. In Michigan, which suffers the nation’s highest unemployment rate (12 percent), the transition to a green economy promises to revive communities that have been devastated by job losses in the auto industry. Michigan’s Green Jobs Initiative is one of the programs made possible by the $500 million in federal stimulus funds allocated for green workforce development. The funding allows workers to receive up to $10,000 to enroll in the new training programs.

The alternative energy degree program at Lansing Community College, one of the first of its kind, has seen enrollment grow from 42 students in 2005 to 252 in 2008. Starting in the fall, the college will be offering new certificates in solar, geothermal, wind turbines, and energy efficiency. The college has also partnered with the National Alternative Fuels Training Consortium (NAFTC) to develop an alternative energy curriculum for other colleges and universities nationwide.

At the same time, there’s a return to the apprenticeship model of learning by doing and a growing acknowledgement that valuable education happens outside the classroom.

In Bellingham, Wash., which National Public Radio’s Marketplace recently declared “the epicenter of a new economic model,” the Opportunity Council’s Building Performance Center is teaming up with Bellingham Technical College to provide green workforce development. “We feel like this training has to take place on the job and in the field,” says the center’s director John Davies. “The training has to include hands-on learning along with the learning that takes place in the classroom.”

The center is one of 26 agencies participating in a state-run project that sends trainers to teach home audits and energy retrofits in communities across Washington, including those that are not served by established training programs. Led by experienced peer technicians, these sessions are customized to meet the specific needs of Washington agencies that provide low-income weatherization services.

Sound Alliance, in Pierce County, Wash., matches women, people of color, youth, and members of other traditionally disadvantaged groups with openings in green-collar apprenticeship programs. Like other Industrial Areas Foundation organizations, the alliance empowers people to create change and become grassroots leaders. One leader, Steve Gelb, emphasizes the need to train workers in deep retrofitting, which involves not only simple weatherization, but replacing furnaces and water heaters. “We do that for two reasons; it saves more energy, and it also creates higher-skilled jobs.”

The need for green workforce development has produced unprecedented collaboration among labor and environmental organizations, government agencies, schools, and businesses. Steve Gelb says that this collaboration has turned the historical divide between labor and environmental concerns on its head. “We call it the ‘triple bottom line,’” he says. “We’re reducing carbon, creating jobs, and saving money for people in the homes we’re retrofitting.”