Archive for the 'Frances' Category

What do Frances Moore Lappe, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, and Willie Nelson all have in common?

admin September 19th, 2008

They’ll all be together on one stage at this year’s sold-out FarmAid at the Comcast Center in Mansfield, MA, at 11 am, this Saturday. The group will be assembled for a pre-show press event to put into context the show, its goals, and the implications of local and sustainable farming for our economy, our health, and our democracy. If you don’t have tickets, you can watch the show live in HD on DIRECTV’s The 101 Network. FarmAid.org will also feature a free live webcast of the entire concert starting at 4pm.

NEW Frances Moore Lappe profile on VoA

admin August 29th, 2008

A new profile on Frances has been posted on Voice of America. The piece, titled “American Activist Promotes Democracy Worldwide,” can be read — or downloaded as an audio file — here.

See below for other recent VoA coverage of Frances and her work.

“Getting a Grip” now in Korean

admin August 29th, 2008

From KBS Culture News:

Frances Moore Lappe, social change activist and winner of the 1987 Right Livelihood Award (referred to as the “alternate Nobel Prize”), tells the story of a “living” democracy that could change the world in her book, “Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad.”

Lappe states that a system of elected governments and market economies is a “Thin Democracy,” or a democracy that is incompetent. [Read the rest here.]

   
   

How can we end world hunger? Frances Moore Lappe explains in this issue of The Progressive.

admin July 21st, 2008

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In her latest piece, “A Shortage of Democracy, Not Food”, Frances revisits her Diet for a Small Planet’s days and the revelation that the root of world hunger is not a lack of food but a lack of democracy. “Because no human being chooses hunger, hunger is proof that a person has been denied a voice in meeting survival needs. And, since a say in one’s future is the very essence of democracy, the existence of hunger belies democracy.”

Read the article here.

Getting a Grip: “A little book with a big call to action.”

admin July 11th, 2008

An excerpt from a new review of Getting a Grip:

Lappé tackles the shortcomings of our current political and economic framework and gives us hope for the future by proposing a new lens through which to see and act in our world. Simple and effective graphics capture the book’s big ideas, and key themes are highlighted with poignant quotes. [...] Getting a Grip is ultimately about reclaiming democracy, and it provides paths for each of us to find our parts in it.”


The review comes from The Orton Family Foundation, an operating foundation that seeks to help communities in the Northeast and Rocky Mountain West to identify, articulate, enrich, and protect their “heart and soul.”

Read the review learn more about the OFF here.

How can we Get a Grip? Listen to Frances talk about a few of her ideas

admin June 24th, 2008

KUOW 94.9 FM recently put up a podcast of Frances giving a talk at the Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle) where she explained the power of ideas asking, for example, why there could be hunger in our world of plenty. Frances boils down her ideas clearly and engagingly, always with the desire to share and learn. Listen to her talk about the ideas behind Getting a Grip here:

http://kuow.org/program.php?id=15165

“Getting a Grip” is the Gold/Best in Small Press Nautilus Award Winner!

admin June 17th, 2008

It’s been quite a month for Frances. If you’ve been following this blog, then you know she won the James Beard Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year Award, and has a done a good deal of high-profile and wonderful indy press. In addition, her latest book, Getting a Grip, has been named the winner of the Gold/”Best in Small Press” Nautilus Award this year.

Frances shares the honor with some fine company. You’ll find a list of the other honorees here.

And to see more of the recent coverage of Frances, Getting a Grip, and her ongoing work  as an author, food and world-hunger expert, and “Living Democracy” advocate, just scroll down — and keep coming back.

Getting a Grip on “Supercapitalism.” Part seven.

admin June 10th, 2008

When Frances Moore Lappé has a question about something she does her research, reaches out, and asks away.

Recently she did just that, writing directly to Robert B. Reich, in response to her read of his 2007 book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Reich wrote back at length, clearly glad to engage in the back-and-forth. Below is the seventh installment of their correspondence. Keep checking back for future installments and please: share your thoughts by leaving a comment!

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7. FML: On a deeper level, I am troubled that you believe it possible and desirable for human beings to carve ourselves up in order to act from opposing values as we show up in our varied roles. You argue that employees of corporations have no choice but to seek immediate return and that as consumers all we can do is seek the best deal for ourselves—to hell with the laborer or the environment. I feel that it is in part this false assumption about our nature—that we can act daily from opposing sensibilities and values and remain sane—that has led to the epidemic of depression. Companies that make it part of their explicit mission to do the right thing have an easier time finding strong employees because most people do not want to live double or triple lives!

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RR: To explain is not to justify. Research shows that consumers prefer products that are the “best deals” in terms of cost and quality; they will not pay more for “socially responsible” products.* I wish that were not the case. I wish investors cared as much about the environment or social justice as they do about high returns. And so on. Again, my argument is not at all a justification. It seeks to explain why we are at this point in history. The good news is that we also have civic values — we are also citizens, in the sense that we care about the quality of our lives together. That we don’t express these values in our purchases and investments doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They are most easily and readily expressed through collective action — through democratic deliberation. But here, again, the central problem is the withering of our democratic institutions.

* Post-script note from Frances:
Fair trade and other ethical shopping and investing is, at 29 billion pounds a year, bigger than alcohol sales.

Getting a Grip on “Supercapitalism.” Part six.

admin June 9th, 2008

When Frances Moore Lappé has a question about something she does her research, reaches out, and asks away.

Recently she did just that, writing directly to Robert B. Reich, in response to her read of his 2007 book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Reich wrote back at length, clearly glad to engage in the back-and-forth. Below is the sixth installment of their correspondence. Keep checking back for future installments and please: share your thoughts by leaving a comment!

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6. FML: You state that “the purpose of capitalism is to get great deals for consumers and investors.” (224) Why do you exclude from the purpose of our economic system the interests of earners and producers and the maintenance of the “natural capital” on which the entire economy depends? Surely, an economic system must be judged, minimally, on how it serves humanity in all these roles as well as how it protects the source of much of our wealth—the natural resources used in production. Your limiting the purpose of capitalism to only two goals contributes to the limited thinking at the root of our planetary crisis.

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RR: I limit the purpose of capitalism to getting great deals for consumers and investors in order to give appropriate place to the purpose of democracy. Capitalism alone cannot and will not serve our broader needs.

If we want to protect our atmosphere from global warming, for example, we have to look to democracy; if we want decent health care, we need to legislate it; if we want human rights, we must demand it through law.

Capitalism does not and will not deliver these unless our democracy forces it to, through rules of the game that prohibit or encourage certain types of economic activities. When we demand “corporate social responsibility,” for example, we distract ourselves from the harder and more important job of changing politics so that corporations must respond to our civic values. They will not be, and cannot be, socially responsible. They are not even people.

Getting a Grip on “Supercapitalism.” Part five.

admin June 5th, 2008

When Frances Moore Lappé has a question about something she does her research, reaches out, and asks away.

Recently she did just that, writing directly to Robert B. Reich, in response to her read of his 2007 book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Reich wrote back at length, clearly glad to engage in the back-and-forth. Below is the fifth installment of their correspondence. Keep checking back for future installments and please: share your thoughts by leaving a comment!

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5. FML: Throughout your book, you repeat that as consumers we now have more choice. Actually, we have less choice in many ways. In food, roughly ten corporations bring us about half the 30,000 items in a typical supermarket. Yet the choice relatively few consumers now have is healthy food, produced fairly, at affordable prices. Tens of millions of Americans live in poor neighborhoods where virtually no fresh food is to be found. Certainly choice means capacity to choose safety: Yet with untested chemicals used in most of our processed food and cosmetics and household cleaning agents etc., we do not have that choice. Last week The New York Times reported that 80 percent of ingredients in our pharmaceuticals are imported, with virtually no safety testing. Choice means little without information on which to base our selections. Yet, while 40 or more countries require labeling of food containing genetically modified organisms, such labeling has been blocked by industry here.

Certainly in all our other many roles, Americans feel choices shrinking: farmers lose the choice of staying in business. Young people lose the choice of going to college without being burdened in debt for decades. Almost 50 million feel they have no choice of affordable health insurance. And more.

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RR: I don’t claim (heavens!) that the choices we make are well-informed as to safety, health, or social consequences. Quite the contrary. In chapter three, for example, I show how our choices in food may satisfy us superficially but have terrible consequences for our health. Informed choice depends on adequate labeling, safety inspections, health care, and many other “social” choices we’re unable to make because our private consumer choices trump those important social decisions.

As to the choice of a farmer staying in business or a young person attending college without debt or someone getting affordable health insurance — the question has to be “relative to what?” In the earlier period, a much smaller percentage of our population attended college than now; fewer had any choice of health coverage (and the insurance they did have offered less in terms of drugs and tests, for good or ill); and, given the changing structure of the economy, certain occupations inevitably will become obsolete or so productive that relatively few people are needed in them (the advent of electric lights reduced the choices of candle makers staying in business). None of this is to suggest that American society is now fair or just. I only mean to suggest that, economically speaking — from the standpoint of consumers — we have more choices today.

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