Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin: 'Changing the World'

Medea Benjamin an agent for progress,
tries to improve how people work and live together, she says. Since 1988, she has done her work through Global Exchange, (http://globalexchange.org/) a nonprofit
international social justice agency she
co-founded. In 2000, she run for the U.S.
Senate on the Green Party ticket. (http://www.cagreens.org/)
Now she's doing it by touting public
takeover of San Francisco's power utilities.
(http://www.powertothepeople.org).

Medea Benjamin become a progressive movement's
shining hope for a voice in mainstream politics, a Tom Hayden for the new millenium.
She has two master's degrees and field experience that would make some career diplomats envious.
A viable political candidate? Maybe not last year, she allows, but now, on a far smaller scale -- you bet.

"I am who I am. I'm a person who loves to change the world and have a good time," Benjamin says. "I'm serious about my work but also I feel you've got to enjoy life."

HER ACTIVISM BLOOMED in the late '60s, as racial tensions ran high at her Freeport (N.Y.) High School and Vietnam raged bloodily on. School officials growled about the peace-themed
yearbook she had edited. A college semester bored her, so she left to wander Europe, Africa and Latin America, doing odd jobs -- picking grapes, teaching English -- to pay her way.

"My whole fascination was going to a place I'd never been before, where I didn't know anyone or speak the language, and see how long it took me to figure it all out," she says. When she felt at home somewhere, she left.

She was indulging her delight in "always doing many things at once," an impulse that rules her life still. "It just gave life so much more depth. I felt so much more a part of the universe, a global citizen."

Her experiences over the next dozen years could fill a book, but in brief:
• She parlayed her travel experience into an instant undergraduate degree, earned a master's in public health nutrition and went to Guatemala, where she saw hunger caused not by poor nutrition
but by unfair distribution of wealth, often due to U.S. companies, she concluded.
• She earned a master's in economics before working for the United Nations and other agencies for five years in Africa. She said she felt shame as U.S. interests thwarted social progress: "It made me all the more determined to work on the right side."
• Then she lived -- illegally under U.S. policy -- in Cuba for four years, until Fidel Castro's government deported her for objecting to its market policies.
"It destroyed my whole sense of identity -- I thought I was a revolutionary. But I realized my sense of revolution was very different," she says. To her, it not only was about meeting everyone's needs but giving everyone a voice, too, she said.
In retrospect, she's glad she was forced back home.

"It took me a long, long time to realize the work I needed to do was here in the U.S.," she said. "But in Africa, I had kids die in my arms of hunger, and that's something I'll never forget. I remember it every day and it's what keeps me going."

SHE WORKED SIX years for the San Francisco nonprofit Food First on foreign policy and agricultural issues -- writing books, organizing conferences and such. She liked the
research-oriented job but yearned for action.

So in 1988, she, husband Kevin Danaher, and Kirsten Moller created Global Exchange to promote "bottom-up globalization"
-- human rights, fair trade and socially responsible investment
-- rather than corporate-focused globalization which victimizes workers and the environment. Global Exchange, with 50 paid staffers and a $5 million annual budget supported by member donations and its own revenues, has its fingers in many pies.
It runs human rights campaigns and offers "reality tours"
-- educating people about global problems and solutions
-- in more than a dozen nations. It stages protests and challenges corporations one-on-one by documenting and publicizing labor abuses. It runs fair-trade campaigns ensuring Latin American banana and coffee workers are paid and treated
well, and it has international crafts stores in Berkeley and San Francisco that pay artisans fairly for their work. And it's involved in immigration policy. And it's pushing for public power utilities in California.

"It's mostly about changing the world," Benjamin says without a hint of irony, adding it's not as hard as it seems to keep seeing the forest for all those trees. "It's about connecting the dots, always trying to understand the interconnections between the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the radio we turn on in the morning, the car we drive."

Benjamin points to a vase of flowers on Global Exchange's conference table -- are they from a pesticide-laden Colombian hothouse where workers toil for cents per day, or from a staffer's backyard? "I want to know." (It was the backyard.) She grins.
"It's very hard for my kids to buy me presents."

Gap Inc. and Starbucks -- blasted by Benjamin and Global Exchange for unjust labor conditions overseas and unfair trade practices, respectively -- won't talk about her, nor will the California Public Utilities Commission, where Benjamin is now a vocal fixture at meetings.

A GREEN FOR YEARS, Benjamin at first had no desire to run for the U.S. Senate. Yet the party sweet-talked her, saying it needed a well-known progressive to fill its ballot slot for party-building purposes.

So Benjamin traversed California on modest campaign funds preaching a social justice platform. But news media largely ignored her, and when she asked to debate Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the silence was deafening.

"I was never under the illusion I had any chance of winning," she says now, but she expected to be "in the game, taken seriously by the media. That was a huge disappointment. It made me realize just how corrupt and skewed the system is."

Campbell and Benjamin staged joint campaign events; he even appeared in one of her television ads. They agreed on the failure of America's drug war, on some foreign policy and on their anger at Feinstein's stonewalling.

"Medea did well for the political process by being such an energetic campaigner, by advancing her position with integrity and persistence," he says. "She has put her life where her mouth is she has given of herself, and I admire that."

NOW THE ENERGY CRISIS [boils] Benjamin's blood. It's an artificial shortage staged by greedy corporations sucking rate payers dry, she says, and a public power authority -- for which she's campaigning in San Francisco and Brisbane -- would bring lower rates and better service.

Ross Mirkarimi, who ran Ralph Nader's California campaign last year, runs the MUD creation campaign. Mugging for the camera while campaigning "is absolutely sexy and fun," he says, but it takes a special person to do the job once the cameras are gone: "When the rubber needs to meet the road and you have to do administrative work that's where the real test comes in." Benjamin would pass that test, he said.

San Francisco pollster/pundit David Binder admires Benjamin's blitz upon the political status quo but questions her long-term electability. "When someone comes in from the left the way she has, more than her herself being elected to office, I think she
shifts the debate and sets the stage for others to follow in her footsteps in later years," he says.

Professor Cain says Benjamin's current path leads away from significant office. "That doesn't mean that she can't carve out a career as a conscience
of the left, sort of like Jesse Jackson. But once you do that, that's where you stay -- you don't find a position at the table of power."

"Why would I want to sit at that table?" she replies.
"I want to sit at the table with the environmentalist, the person who's out in the fields picking our food for $6 an hour, the homeless guy who doesn't have a place to sleep. That's my table."
--S.F. (The Argus, Nov. 4)

For more information on her nonprofit international social justice agency visit:
http://globalexchange.org/

The Green Party
http://www.cagreens.org/

Power to the People Campaign
http://www.powertothepeople.org