Community Currency Magazine

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist" – Kenneth Boulding

"Gross National Product measures everything, except that which makes life worthwhile." – Robert F. Kennedy

Growing the economy is not only a good thing, but the only thing. This message barrages us daily from the media, Wall Street, and politicians. But wait a minute. Can economic growth continue indefinitely? Doesn’t our biosphere have limited resources? What happens when we hit the downward slope of the earth’s ability to supply for our needs and economic growth is no longer physically possible? Is our attention even on the right area – does endless economic growth really matter to our happiness, our quality of life?

Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources, a book written by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill, addresses these questions and more. The book kicks off with some sobering numbers:

• 7 billion people on earth, with 2.7 billion scraping by on less than $2 per day.
• 394 parts per million of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, threatening to destabilize the global climate.
• $15 trillion of public debt in the United States, an unfathomable sum of money to be paid back by the next generation.
• 2 percent of adults owning more than half of all household wealth in the world.
• 400 ocean zones devoid of life, with the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico estimated to cover almost as much area as the U.S. state of New Jersey.

These numbers highlight the growing shadow looming over the current obsession over economic growth throughout the world. The authors lay out how our current economic approach, which they dub the ‘economy of more,’ is damaging the environment, society, and the economy itself. Their main message highlights the alternative of shifting from an economy of more to an economy of ‘enough.’

The authors point to the need for paying attention to earth’s ecological limits, better indicators of economic progress, and more equitably distributing wealth (which they show results in a more vibrant economy and improves quality of life). They suggest numerous practical actions to move toward an economy of enough, aka a ‘steady state economy.’

The authors define a steady state economy:

It’s an economy in which material and energy use are kept within ecological limits, and in which the goal of increasing GDP is replaced by the goal of improving quality of life.

After an introduction and overview, the central portion of the book contains chapters looking at specific issues with the current economic system, such as resource use, population, unemployment, debt and the monetary system, and consumer behavior. For each of these topics, the authors ask and then answer three straightforward questions:

• What are we doing?
• What could we do instead?
• Where do we go from here?

On the topic of providing for our well-being, the heart of economics, the authors summarize work by The New Economics Foundation identifying five ways to improve well-being:

• Connect – Build relationships with the people around you
• Be active – Pursue a physical activity you enjoy
• Take notice – Be curious, be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling, live in the moment
• Keep learning – Try something new, set a challenge you will enjoy achieving
• Give – Express gratitude and help others

Beyond the obvious pre-requisite of having enough to provide for basic needs, these actions do not depend on increasing one’s wealth. The economy of enough builds on this wisdom, with the goal of maximizing long-term well-being in place of short-term profits.

This is an important book. A book with such a lofty goal as changing the current fixation on economic growth might appear to be tilting at windmills, Don Quixote style. On the contrary, the authors take a down-to-earth approach as they matter-of-factly acknowledge the real-world challenges facing changing our current economic approach and lay out common sense steps needed to create change.

The authors articulate a clear alternative to the fixation on economic growth in the face of mounting evidence that it is unsustainable. At the same time, their solution also addresses the current issue of the spoils of economic activity increasingly falling into the hands of those who least need it, reducing the current economy’s social sustainability. 

Enough is Enough details why Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is poor measure of economic vitality. As Robert Kennedy pointed out, much of what matters is not measured by this often cited economic indicator. The authors point to alternative measures being used by policy makers in countries including the UK, such as the Happy Planet Indicator or HPI. The HPI as of 2005 showed Costa Rica as the country in the number 1 position while the United States was in 114th position (out of 143 countries). Beyond having enough, increasing wealth is not a prescription for happiness.

This book maps out this critical topic in an engaging and approachable way. I found each chapter thought provoking. I came away wanting to act, to be part of the solution.  While filled with facts, data, and pithy arguments, given the topic, the book also contains something unexpected, namely optimism and hope.

Additional Resources

• More about Enough is Enough:  http://steadystate.org/discover/enough-is-enough/
• Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy:  http://steadystate.org/
• New Economics Foundation: http://www.neweconomics.org
• Happy Planet Index:  http://www.happyplanetindex.org/about/

 

 

This blog post originally appeared at Sojourners.

This week's viral video is a must-see. The six-minute "Wealth Inequality in America," released last Friday, presents the shocking, true size of the wealth gap in the country.

In a series of animated infographics, the video lends a visual punch to numbers that are hard to wrap one’s head around. The top 1 percent of Americans hold 50 percent of all investments in stocks and bonds, for example—while 80 percent of Americans share a paltry 7 percent of the nation’s wealth.

But most interesting are the gaps between where Americans think we are and where we really we are when it comes to wealth. A full 92 percent of Americans agree on what a healthy, ideal wealth distribution curve would look like—one that is far more equitable than what we think is the case. (“That is telling, admittedly,” says the narrator. “The fact that most Americans know that the system is already skewed unfairly.")

But this perceived gap between ideal and reality is pocket change compared with the true state of inequality—an ugly curve in which the poorest and middle class are a barely indistinguishable line while the top 1 percent is, quite literally, off the charts.

What's encouraging is how united Americans are on how wealth should look in our country. But this video is proving to be a real wake-up call to how far we are from that goal. Take a few moments to watch the sobering video below. If you've seen it, it bears watching again and sharing.

Catherine Woodiwiss is associate web editor at Sojourners, where this blog post originally appeared.

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This article originally appeared in CSMonitor.com and is republished here with permission.

Women of the Reliance Waist Company, many wearing a corsage, pose for a group photo with a flower bouquets including ribbons that read "Good Luck" and "Your Friends." Photo courtesy of the Kheel Center, Cornell University.

After more than 100 years, International Women’s Day draws millions to commemorate the advancements made in human rights and to discuss the challenges women continue to face in politics, education, employment, and other areas of daily life.

However, International Women’s Day originally commemorated the working rights protests led by female garment workers. Many seem to forget the holiday’s ties to the working rights movement in the United States and the Socialist Party.

Striking garment workers rally in Union Square holding banners in Yiddish and English, 1913. Photo courtesy of the Kheel Center, Cornell University.

The origins of the holiday can be traced back to March 8, 1857, when garment workers in New York City staged a protest against inhumane working conditions and low wages, according to the United Nations. The police attacked the protesters and dispersed them, but the movement continued and led to the creation of the first women’s labor union.

Fast forward to March 8, 1908: 15,000 women marched in New York City for shorter work hours, better pay, voting rights, and an end to child labor. The slogan “Bread and Roses” emerged, with bread symbolizing economic security and roses for better living standards.

Many of those who protested for working rights were young immigrants from Europe who came to the United States seeking better opportunities, says Carol Rosenblatt of the Coalition of Labor Union Women.

“Workers in this country also died in their efforts to advance workers’ rights, but they weren’t fearful in the same way that they were in some of the countries that they came from,” says Ms. Rosenblatt, executive director of the coalition. “They had a much different expectation than when they got here. They were exploited.”

That May 1908, the Socialist Party of America declared that the last Sunday in February would be National Women’s Day. The first National Women’s Day was celebrated on Feb. 28, 1909, in the United States.

International Women’s Day (then International Working Women’s Day) was introduced during the International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, Denmark. Clara Zetkin, a German socialist, suggested a holiday honoring the strike of garment workers in the U.S. The proposal received unanimous approval from the 100 women from 17 countries.

The proposal did not give a fixed date of observance, but in the first years International Women’s Day was observed on different days in March. In 1911, Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland supported the holiday on March 19, with more than a million men and women rallying.

Shortly after, however, women gathered in light of a tragedy. The Triangle Waist Company building in New York City caught fire in March 25, killing 146 young immigrant workers.

The incident, which drew attention to the inhuman working conditions for industrial workers, prompted the Women’s Trade Union League and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union to stage demonstrations. One protest, a silent funeral march, drew more than 100,000 people.

The incident led to the creation of the Factory Investigating Commission, which included Francis Perkins, who would become the first female secretary of labor, and labor union activists.

The commission's findings led to several laws in New York that mandated safety standards, minimum wage, unemployment assistance, and support for workers when they grow old. These laws paved the way for President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal legislation.

“It brought to light the way in which people were working and the horrific situations that people were enduring,” Rosenblatt says. “That was just one of many fires.”

While there have been advancements, Rosenblatt says, women continue to fight against poor working conditions and lower wages around the world.

“There are fires in Bangladesh today in factories that are owned by American countries,” she says. “It has not gone resolved.”

African-American women picket for unionization. Photo courtesy of the Kheel Center, Cornell University.

Members of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) of New York pose with a banner calling for the 8-hour day. Photo courtesy of the Kheel Center, Cornell University.

Employees of Jacobs Bros. on strike for better wages. Photo courtesy of the Kheel Center, Cornell University.

This article originally appeared in CSMonitor.com and is republished here with permission.

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Here are some astounding facts about inequality, clearly presented and easy to understand, but very disturbing.

Thanks to the New Economics Institute for sending it along.

Armando Robles, left, and Melvin Macklin at their union offices. The two have been fighting to keep their factory open for the past four years. Photo by Amanda Rivkin.

Four years ago, as the recession took hold and layoffs around the country were approaching 500,000 a month, a group of workers in Chicago saved a factory and inspired a nation. Fired by their boss, they occupied instead of leaving. Fired by a second boss, they occupied and formed a worker’s cooperative. Now they are worker-owners of a load of equipment and they’re setting up a factory in a new location.

All they want to do is to get back to making and selling windows. It shouldn’t be this hard to keep good jobs in Chicago, but “A cooperative can be a way of surviving, of moving forward,” says Armando Robles, one of the workers.

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Robles was one of 250 workers fired in December 2008 without notice or severance by Republic Windows and Doors when the company announced it was closing its Chicago factory. The company said that it could no longer operate because it had lost its line of credit with Bank of America. The irony of the situation was clear. Bank of America had received billions in government bailouts to keep the economy working, and yet the Republic workers were being laid off without their entitled payments and benefits. Supported by their union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Robles and his fellow workers voted to resist. They occupied the plant for six days, winning back pay, severance, and time for a new company to take ownership. Generating thousands of articles and news reports about their fight, they encouraged a downcast nation, even an incoming U.S. president.

At a press conference during the factory occupation, then President-elect Barack Obama declared: “When it comes to the situation here in Chicago, with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned … I think they are absolutely right.”

The public relations potential, combined with the prospect of stimulus spending and a green economy boom, spurred Serious Energy of California to take over the former Republic plant in February 2009. Among the investors in the new business was Mesirow Financial, a Chicago-based firm, with close ties to (among others), then White House Chief of Staff (soon to be Chicago Mayor) Rahm Emanuel. With $15 million from Mesirow alone, Serious looked forward to landing substantial federal and city contracts.

Two years later, those contracts were yet to materialize. The ballyhooed green economy? Chicago’s grand green retrofitting scheme? They were nowhere in sight, and city and state spending was essentially on ice. By the end of 2009, only 20 of the Republic workers had been hired back. In February 2012, Serious announced it, too, was closing the Chicago factory and selling off the machines.

This time, Robles et al. only needed to occupy for a matter of hours before management agreed to a deal. Serious agreed to give the workers the first option to buy the plant’s equipment and 90 days to come up with a bid.

“It’s not just about profits,” he says—it’s about sustaining communities, keeping jobs in places where people need them.

“Republic walked away from our jobs. Serious walked away from our jobs, but we are not walking away from our jobs,” said Melvin Macklin, who had worked at the plant for more than a decade. In the time between the first layoff and the second, the workers and their families became aware of other options. As it happens, after appearing together with Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis on GRITtv, Robles and United Electrical field organizer Leah Fried sat down with The Working World, a nonprofit that has helped start and maintain worker cooperatives in Argentina and other parts of Latin America.

With help from The Working World and advice from colleagues in the co-op movement in the United States and abroad, on May 30, 2012, Robles, Macklin and 22 colleagues founded New Era Windows, LLC, a worker-run cooperative incorporated in Illinois to manufacture what they promise will be “quality, affordable windows.”

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Despite the initial agreement, it was not until last August, many months and some intense struggle later, that Serious finally agreed to let New Era buy the factory equipment. The struggle was partly political—Serious had to be pressured to keep its pledge to the workers—but it was largely financial. The new worker-owners decided that they would earn equal wages and have equal votes in decision-making. They also agreed to each contribute a fee of $1,000 to “buy in.” At 58, Macklin borrowed some of his buy-in from a nephew, but he says that the stretch to raise the money was worth it.

“It’s not just about profits,” he says—it’s about sustaining communities, keeping jobs in places where people need them. “There will be no big, fat-cat salaries, no CEOs, CFOs and COOs to pay, so our bottom line will be easier. We already know how to make the best windows. … We don’t know for sure it’ll be successful, but we didn’t know the occupation would be successful—I thought I was going to jail. Unless we step out and try, we’ll never know.”

The workers took the leap, but investors have been less inclined to follow. In spite of preparing a business plan and reaching out to social impact investors, the co-op has thus far been unable to attract venture capital. Even with the collateral of the equipment, the workers have been unable to win any loans. The $500,000 they were able to raise for the purchase came from a single source, The Working World.

“It’s awesome that they’ve done it—this is as grassroots as it gets,” says Brendan Martin, founder and director of The Working World. “But to reverse the rules of capital, you need capital. It’s not enough for workers to realize they have opportunity; resources also have to come to them.”

“There should be governmental help to keep factories open and allow the workers to try to keep their jobs,” says Robles. “When there is no government help, at least there should be social help, community help, anything. The loss to a community is overwhelming when a whole factory closes.”

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Why support the co-ops in your community? The benefits might be further-reaching than you think.

President Obama knew as much four years ago, at that Chicago press conference. The Chicago workers’ experience was reflective of a national situation, he said.
“When you have a financial system that is shaky, credit contracts. Businesses large and small start cutting back on their plants and equipment and their workforces. That’s why it’s so important for us to maintain a strong financial system. But it’s also important for us to make sure that the plans and programs that we design aren’t just targeted at maintaining the solvency of banks, but they are designed to get money out the doors and to help people on Main Street.”

You’d think that helping a minority-run green business in a high-unemployment community would be a smart way to help those celebrated “people on Main Street,” but so far, no money has come out of those doors. Absent a rational industrial policy from the government, and a smart new stimulus package, the New Era experiment is in the hands of the market. For almost a year, the workers have hung on, living off their severance, unemployment, and sweat. Their new factory’s almost set up; they hope to start selling early this year, and they’re looking for customers.

More information at newerawindows.com

Laura Flanders wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Laura is a former host of Air America, and founder and host of GRITtv. She is the author of Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, and Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians. She writes regularly for The Nation and the Guardian and appears as a regular guest on MSNBC.

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Jules Brookbank is one of the farmers for Our Harvest, the urban Cincinnati food-hub enterprise. Our Harvest provides food for a CSA business, plus three restaurants and three retail locations. Photo by Phil Didion.

“Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollow out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants,” said United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard in 2009. “We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

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Gerard was announcing a formal partnership between his 1.2-million-member union and Mondragon, a cluster of cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain.

Mondragon employs 83,000 workers in 256 companies. About half of those companies are cooperatives, and about a third of Mondragon’s employees are co-op members with an ownership stake in their workplace. Mondragon companies do everything from manufacturing industrial machine parts to making pressure cookers and home appliances to running a bank and a chain of supermarkets. With billions of euros in annual sales, Mondragon is the largest industrial conglomerate in the Basque region and the fifth-largest in Spain.

The cooperatives use workers’ cash investments as part of the capital needed to finance new projects, and worker-owner co-op members get to vote on strategy, management, and business planning. The highest-paid managers’ salaries are capped at six to eight times what the lowest-paid workers make—as opposed to the United States, where CEOs now make 380 times more than the average worker.

Building union co-ops

As manufacturing in the United States continues in free fall, the USW is working to bring the Mondragon cooperative model to the Rust Belt. It aims to use employee-run businesses to create new, middle-class jobs to replace union work that has gone overseas.

A March 2012 report from the USW, Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC), lays out a template for how “union co-ops” can function. “A union co-op is a unionized worker-owned cooperative in which worker-owners all own an equal share of the business and have an equal vote in overseeing the business,” the report states.

"While it may not rebuild labor's ranks ... this model might do something even more important: give working people a way to become true stewards of the economy."

But how do union co-ops differ from traditional worker-owned co-ops? The report explains that the key difference is that workers in a union co-op can appoint a management team (from within their own ranks or from outside the co-op) and then bargain collectively with management. The resulting collective bargaining agreements can set wage rates for all the co-op’s jobs, choose health care and other benefit packages, decide how workers will earn time off, and determine a process for grievances and arbitration of workplace disputes.

In addition to producing the union co-op template, the USW has worked to get pilot cooperatives started in the United States. The union has carefully examined the Evergreen Cooperatives, which were started in Cleveland in 2009 with a blend of foundation money, public funds, and private investment capital. Drawing from Mondragon’s principles of shared prosperity for workers and democratic governance, Evergreen launched a commercial laundry that now cleans more than four million pounds of laundry per year and employs 30 people. It also has plans for a solar installers’ cooperative and a greenhouse that grows high-end salad greens and herbs for the Cleveland Clinic, as well as universities and restaurants. The example was an important one for the USW’s pilot projects, suggesting a blueprint to keep jobs local, tie new businesses to existing city institutions, and give workers a voice in company operations.

OEOC Director Bill McIntyre worked with the Cleveland Foundation on crafting the organizational framework for the Evergreen Cooperatives. At a March 2012 press event at United Steelworkers headquarters, he observed that employee-owners more often kept their jobs during the recent economic meltdown. “Employee-owned companies,” he said, “have more stable, loyal, and experienced work forces, which translates into real cost savings, productivity, and quality advantages.”

Like what you’re reading? YES! is nonprofit and relies on reader support.
Click here to chip in $5 or more to help us keep the inspiration coming.

Reviving a Pittsburgh laundry

A group of unions, including the USW, is helping to launch the Pittsburgh Clean and Green Laundry Cooperative, a new industrial laundry. Several years ago, a local laundry closed, leaving more than 100 people without work. Together with the USW, the workers began exploring the idea of creating a cooperative to take over the business. The union has now completed a feasibility study for the business and is lining up commitments from clients such as local hospitals and clinics. A full laundry plant is scheduled to be up and running soon, thanks in part to the support of the Steel Valley Authority (SVA)—Pennsylvania’s publicly funded initiative for saving and creating industrial jobs—and other local foundations.

“Right now, several of the larger hospitals are sending their laundry out pretty far to get it done, so [going local] makes sense cost-wise, and it makes sense green-wise,” says Rob Witherell, the USW’s cooperative organizer and strategist.

“The intent is that the folks who worked at the previous laundry would be the first to join as worker-owners,” Witherell adds.

Under the union-cooperative model, the laundry’s employees would be able to join the union of their choice, and the jobs offered at the plant would provide a living wage, benefits, and a collective bargaining agreement. As worker-owners, the employees would also gain equity in the business.

“The way it works in Cleveland is the folks working at the laundry—if they’re to become owners—have their initial ownership investment financed by the company,” explains Witherell. “Fifty cents an hour is deducted from their wages for a period of three years, until they have met the requirements for ownership.”

Worker-owners vote on decisions about the management of the company. And, as in Mondragon, a share of profits is added to the ownership accounts, so that long-term workers can retire or leave the company having accrued a significant stake. “In Cleveland, they’ve done the math, and they’ve figured out that in eight years—if they meet their business targets, which they have so far—those folks will each have $65,000 in their ownership accounts,” Witherell says.

For the SVA, the model is one it hopes to spread further: It has announced a goal of establishing a technical assistance center and a revolving loan fund to help worker groups that want to use the Mondragon model.

Cooperative harvest in Cincinnati

In the past year, the USW has supported work to create the Cincinnati Union Cooperative Initiative (CUCI). CUCI has two projects in the pipeline: a railway manufacturing co-op and a cooperative for retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. A third project, already in operation, pairs commitment to food sustainability with a worker-ownership model in the Our Harvest cooperative.

Our Harvest is a “food hub” that will allow institutions in the metropolitan region—such as universities, hospitals, and hotels—to buy produce that is grown, harvested, and packaged by worker-owners. Currently, says CUCI President Kristen Barker, the nascent project has an incubator farm for training farmers and food production workers, with two apprentice farmers, a mentor farmer, and three part-time support staff.

The apprentices, who are cardholding members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), are learning farming and production methods from the mentor farmer and are running a community-supported agriculture (CSA) business from the incubator farm in the heart of Cincinnati. The CSA currently serves 60 residential customers, plus three restaurants and three retail locations.

Our Harvest grows its food on a 30-acre farm in an urban neighborhood. “It’s amazing that that exists,” says Barker.  “We’re interested in being on bus lines,” says Barker, pointing out that the co-op considers making jobs accessible by public transit to be part of a sustainable, fair approach to job creation.

In order to serve the large institutions Our Harvest hopes to make the mainstay of its operation, the farm has to expand. “We need to get to 1,000 acres’ worth of production,” Barker says. “To get up to 1,000 requires a ton of skill, and a lot of land.”

CUCI isn’t going it alone in the effort to expand Our Harvest. The Ohio State Cooperative Development Center is doing a study of how Our Harvest can scale up to the 1,000-acre mark. Efforts are under way to house an expanded apprenticeship program at a local community college. And Mondragon is working closely with CUCI to firm up Our Harvest’s structures and locate additional financing.

Co-op strengths and limitations

The “union co-op” model imports some of Mondragon’s structural innovations to the American economy: most importantly, it gives workers a say in the direction of the business as well as in their own pay and working conditions. It remains to be seen exactly how workers’ voices will be heard through the union co-ops’ collective bargaining processes, but it will likely have some of the flavor of worker empowerment already in effect at Mondragon.

Michael Peck, the North American delegate for Mondragon, describes the type of decisions employees make within Mondragon’s worker-owner structure: “They vote to lower their salary, they vote to raise their salary, they vote to make sacrifices, they vote to reward themselves if the situation calls,” he says. “They are totally involved, and it’s that kind of participation that produces a successful company that is attuned not only to the marketplace but to itself.”

For the U.S. labor movement, this point is a critical one. A cooperative model places union members firmly in the role of being innovators. It allows the labor movement not only to promote a positive vision of members realizing their best selves in the workplace, but also to provide the skills that will enable people to do that. Therefore, while it may not rebuild labor’s ranks with significant numbers of new union members, this model might do something even more important: Give working people a way to become true stewards of the economy.

The Economy:
Under New Ownership
How cooperatives are leading the way to empowered workers and healthy communities.

But union co-ops don’t address some difficult issues. For instance, they do not directly address the forces of global competition that have been undermining the U.S. manufacturing base. In particular, by adopting NAFTA-model “free trade” agreements, the United States has encouraged corporations to seek out competitive advantage in places with the lowest wages and fewest environmental regulations. At best, co-ops such as the Evergreen co-ops in Cleveland work around this problem by limiting themselves to making goods or providing services that cannot be offshored, like growing heirloom salad greens for local consumption.

When asked about how the model union co-ops might take on the offshoring issue, Peck acknowledged the difficulties, but he also expressed hope. “Now there’s a renewed interest in manufacturing as labor wages rise in developing countries,” he says. Moreover, he believes the recent economic crisis has also expanded public receptivity: “Even in the outer regions of the Midwest, where I spend a lot of time, people know that they’ve been victimized,” Peck says.

“Most people don’t want to be victimized again and they are interested in trying new models.”
“At Mondragon, we have a saying: ‘This is not paradise and we are not angels.’ I think that’s important, because there’s a tendency to gush up Mondragon as this perfect ideal in the sky, when it’s not perfect and it’s not in the sky. It’s in factories. it’s in valleys, it’s in making things. But our story has a happier ending because people feel engaged in the process and they see the equality of opportunity, which is missing in more vertical structures.”

Amy Dean wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Amy is a fellow of The Century Foundation and principal of ABD Ventures, LLC, a consulting firm that works to develop new organizing strategies for social change organizations. Dean is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. You can follow her on twitter @amybdean, or she can be reached via amybdean.com.

Interested?

• How Workers Laid Off From a Chicago Factory Took It Over Themselves
  When their boss tried to fire them, the workers of Republic Windows and Doors occupied the factory. Now they own it as a cooperative.
• The Cooperative Way to a Stronger Economy
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This timely myth-shattering video is spreading across the web, using powerful infographics to make the case that not only is wealth distributed unevenly, but that it is much, much worse than we think. Just in time for the sequestration...Also, check out this film on Netflix about the Koch Brothers, multi-billionaires that pull all kinds of political strings to avoid taxes and grow their already extreme wealth. 

Spc. Monte Walker, a dental lab technician, trims a dental model. Photo by Herald Post.

The sequester, a set of massive budget cuts required by the ongoing debt ceiling deal, will slash billions from Medicare, education, and other programs that benefit our society’s neediest if it goes through. That's bad news if you care about those people. But there's also something to like about it: the largest share of the cuts would come from the military.

What would it look like if we created a national program to train laid-off employees of the military for work in other industries?

Many of us have been calling for such cuts for decades, and we should celebrate the possibility of finally getting what we’ve been asking for—even if it comes as the result of Republican demands for austerity. But we should also stand with those who will lose their jobs as a result of defense-budget cuts.

One of the best ways to do that is to demand that those who are laid off receive training that prepares them for future employment. What would it look like if we created a national program to train laid-off employees of the military and its contractors for work in other industries? Such a project would require us do more than offer vague promises about a comeback in Detroit, and offer a plan based around an industry that’s truly positioned to grow.

The good news is many who work for the military and its contractors have advanced technical skills. By transitioning them into another kind of work, we could stake out a place for ourselves in areas where we’re falling behind, like sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and public transportation.

What's more, we could also avoid some of pitfalls of the past.

How deindustrialization helped create modern poverty

History shows that, without effective retraining, workers often remain unemployed or underemployed for a long time when their sectors take a hit.

Sometimes the effects of layoffs are felt for generations, as in the case of deindustrialization. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the number of employees in manufacturing rose steadily, bringing union jobs and middle-class prosperity to places like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. Unlike jobs in most other sectors, these positions were open to workers diverse in race, education, and class. One in four African-Americans had a manufacturing job in 1979. By 2008, that number was down to one in 10, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research .

1979 was also the year with the most manufacturing jobs overall: about 23 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number has declined ever since, dropping to about 14 million in 2012. The decline starts much earlier, however, if you look at manufacturing jobs as a percentage of total employment, in which case the peak came in 1953. Again, it’s downhill after that—although recent growth among smaller manufacturers is a bright spot.

The roughly 9 million jobs lost in this sector played a major role in the creation of modern poverty. Sociologist William Julius Wilson has written that deindustrialization was a key factor in the impoverishment of blacks in northern cities. The National Coalition for the Homeless lists among the leading causes of homelessness “eroding work opportunities,” such as deindustrialization. Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, who worked for decades among drug dealers and heroin addicts on the streets of San Francisco and New York City, has described the trade in illegal drugs as a sort of DIY employment program for deindustrialization’s urban victims.

What could a smoother transition look like?

Perhaps we could have spared ourselves some of this suffering if our government—which actively encouraged deindustrialization through its so-called “free trade” policies—had taken steps to help manufacturing workers get into other kinds of work, such as the building and repairing of infrastructure, or the creation of public transportation.

Let’s not pretend that people laid off from the military will easily transition into other kinds of employment without  help.

Any sector of the economy that had a need for medium-skilled workers and was predicted to grow instead of shrink could have been considered. Perhaps, in the course of seeking projects big enough to provide so many jobs, the political will could have been found for long-needed projects such as a high-speed passenger train system.

The benefit to the economy and happiness of our society could have been significant. Millions of families would have spared the trauma and disruption of unemployment. Whole cities and regions could have been spared at least a portion of their long decline. Without a class of semi-permanent unemployed people concentrated in cities, many of our most serious social problems—including homelessness, addiction, and the enormous prison population—would likely be less severe.

This history doesn’t mean we should call any less strongly for cuts to the military budget. As Miriam Pemberton of Foreign Policy in Focus has pointed out, using very conservative numbers, we spend as much on defense as the next 14 countries put together. This benefits weapons manufacturers, takes money away from education and health care, and often results in innocent people being hurt and killed.

We’d all be better off if we could begin transitioning a portion of those who depend on the military for their income into fields like renewable energy, public transportation, and education, where we desperately need to make strides.

On the other hand, let’s not pretend that people laid off from the military will easily transition into other kinds of employment without help. There are a number of fields that must grow as climate change continues to accelerate. With proper training, former employees of the military and its contractors could have their choice of work, in fields that would make the country more prosperous, peaceful, and competitive.

What we need to do now is open the door and invite them in.

James Trimarco is web editor at YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Follow him on Twitter at @JamesTrimarco.

Interested?

• The Real Reason the Military is Going Green
  Big Oil is a big risk for national security. Can our military—the world's No. 1 oil guzzler—change the politics of climate change?
• 5 Ways the Space Program Helps Us Fight Climate Change
  From tracking glaciers to predicting crop failure to figuring out how to store solar energy in molten salt, NASA has produced some of our best tools in the fight against climate change.
• Military Resistance a Strong Brew
  Near the gates of Fort Lewis, anti-war veterans serve up support and solidarity (along with double-tall lattes) to their friends in uniform.

Spc. Monte Walker, a dental lab technician, trims a dental model. Photo by Herald Post.

The sequester, a set of massive budget cuts required by the ongoing debt ceiling deal, will slash billions from Medicare, education, and other programs that benefit our society’s neediest if it goes through. That's bad news if you care about those people. But there's also something to like about it: the largest share of the cuts would come from the military.

What would it look like if we created a national program to train laid-off employees of the military for work in other industries?

Many of us have been calling for such cuts for decades, and we should celebrate the possibility of finally getting what we’ve been asking for—even if it comes as the result of Republican demands for austerity. But we should also stand with those who will lose their jobs as a result of defense-budget cuts.

One of the best ways to do that is to demand that those who are laid off receive training that prepares them for future employment. What would it look like if we created a national program to train laid-off employees of the military and its contractors for work in other industries? Such a project would require us do more than offer vague promises about a comeback in Detroit, and offer a plan based around an industry that’s truly positioned to grow.

The good news is many who work for the military and its contractors have advanced technical skills. By transitioning them into another kind of work, we could stake out a place for ourselves in areas where we’re falling behind, like sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and public transportation.

What's more, we could also avoid some of pitfalls of the past.

How deindustrialization helped create modern poverty

History shows that, without effective retraining, workers often remain unemployed or underemployed for a long time when their sectors take a hit.

Sometimes the effects of layoffs are felt for generations, as in the case of deindustrialization. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the number of employees in manufacturing rose steadily, bringing union jobs and middle-class prosperity to places like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. Unlike jobs in most other sectors, these positions were open to workers diverse in race, education, and class. One in four African-Americans had a manufacturing job in 1979. By 2008, that number was down to one in 10, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research .

1979 was also the year with the most manufacturing jobs overall: about 23 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number has declined ever since, dropping to about 14 million in 2012. The decline starts much earlier, however, if you look at manufacturing jobs as a percentage of total employment, in which case the peak came in 1953. Again, it’s downhill after that—although recent growth among smaller manufacturers is a bright spot.

The roughly 9 million jobs lost in this sector played a major role in the creation of modern poverty. Sociologist William Julius Wilson has written that deindustrialization was a key factor in the impoverishment of blacks in northern cities. The National Coalition for the Homeless lists among the leading causes of homelessness “eroding work opportunities,” such as deindustrialization. Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, who worked for decades among drug dealers and heroin addicts on the streets of San Francisco and New York City, has described the trade in illegal drugs as a sort of DIY employment program for deindustrialization’s urban victims.

What could a smoother transition look like?

Perhaps we could have spared ourselves some of this suffering if our government—which actively encouraged deindustrialization through its so-called “free trade” policies—had taken steps to help manufacturing workers get into other kinds of work, such as the building and repairing of infrastructure, or the creation of public transportation.

Let’s not pretend that people laid off from the military will easily transition into other kinds of employment without  help.

Any sector of the economy that had a need for medium-skilled workers and was predicted to grow instead of shrink could have been considered. Perhaps, in the course of seeking projects big enough to provide so many jobs, the political will could have been found for long-needed projects such as a high-speed passenger train system.

The benefit to the economy and happiness of our society could have been significant. Millions of families would have spared the trauma and disruption of unemployment. Whole cities and regions could have been spared at least a portion of their long decline. Without a class of semi-permanent unemployed people concentrated in cities, many of our most serious social problems—including homelessness, addiction, and the enormous prison population—would likely be less severe.

This history doesn’t mean we should call any less strongly for cuts to the military budget. As Miriam Pemberton of Foreign Policy in Focus has pointed out, using very conservative numbers, we spend as much on defense as the next 14 countries put together. This benefits weapons manufacturers, takes money away from education and health care, and often results in innocent people being hurt and killed.

We’d all be better off if we could begin transitioning a portion of those who depend on the military for their income into fields like renewable energy, public transportation, and education, where we desperately need to make strides.

On the other hand, let’s not pretend that people laid off from the military will easily transition into other kinds of employment without help. There are a number of fields that must grow as climate change continues to accelerate. With proper training, former employees of the military and its contractors could have their choice of work, in fields that would make the country more prosperous, peaceful, and competitive.

What we need to do now is open the door and invite them in.

James Trimarco is web editor at YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Follow him on Twitter at @JamesTrimarco.

Interested?

• The Real Reason the Military is Going Green
  Big Oil is a big risk for national security. Can our military—the world's No. 1 oil guzzler—change the politics of climate change?
• 5 Ways the Space Program Helps Us Fight Climate Change
  From tracking glaciers to predicting crop failure to figuring out how to store solar energy in molten salt, NASA has produced some of our best tools in the fight against climate change.
• Military Resistance a Strong Brew
  Near the gates of Fort Lewis, anti-war veterans serve up support and solidarity (along with double-tall lattes) to their friends in uniform.

Behind the Kitchen Door by Saru Jayaraman.

You are celebrating your birthday at your favorite restaurant and you’ve just ordered a tasty, locally grown organic meal.  You savor the food, while feeling good that you are contributing to a better world.  What could be better?

Well, for starters: the conditions of the people serving and busing your table.

Most don’t make a living wage.  Indeed, most of your servers work for the same minimum wage they’ve gotten for 22 years: $2.13 an hour.  That’s right: no increase for a generation.  Therefore, most workers have no choice but to work if they’re sick because nine out of ten don’t receive paid sick leave.  Yes, if you are reading this now because you’re sick at home, you may well have caught your disease from a sick restaurant employee who had no choice but to work.

There is a new chilling-yet-ultimately-hopeful book that tells the story of the millions who toil to serve us in restaurants: Behind the Kitchen Door.   It is hopeful because its dynamo author, Saru Jayaraman, and dozens of courageous restaurant workers created a group that is fighting for their rights: the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC).

The book opens on September 11, 2001, when 73 workers were killed as the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center crashed to earth. Another 250 men and women who were employed by Windows on the World were suddenly without jobs.

ROC was birthed by Saru and several of the former Windows workers.  ROC’s other co-director, Fekkak Mamdouh, is a former waiter with a sparkle in his eye.  Fekkah was a union leader of the Windows workers. The Windows owner promised his former workers who survived 9-11 that he would hire them back, but failed to do so when he opened a new restaurant uptown.  After a creative protest by the former workers, the owner recanted and offered most of the Windows workers jobs.  A New York Times story gave publicity to the victory and countless other restaurant workers came calling at ROC’s door for help.

The demand for ROC’s services is almost endless since there are more than 10 million restaurant workers in the United States, and since this work embraces 7 of the 11 poorest paid job categories in the nation.  So with help from allies, workers began to organize to help one another.  Within a few years, ROC was spreading to other cities.  Today, there are 26 chapters in 23 states, with over 10,000 members.

Their goals are eminently winnable: increase the minimum wage overall, and increase the  minimum wage for workers who get tips.  President Obama finally endorsed an increase in the minimum wage in his State of the Union address.  Two great champions of workers’ rights, Congressman George Miller and Senator Tom Harkin, followed suit with a joint effort to raise the minimum wage to $10.10/hour, up from its current level of $7.25.  The Miller and Harkin bill would raise the tipped workers’ minimum wage to 70 percent of the overall minimum wage. In a separate bill, Congresswoman Donna Edwards, herself a former restaurant worker, has introduced a WAGES Act that would raise the minimum tipped wage.

ROC is also pressing for restaurants to grant their workers paid sick leave.  Indeed, ROC has helped win legislation for paid sick leave in several cities. They’re working against wage theft and sexual harassment on the job—both all too common in this sector. ROC is also in the middle of the fight for comprehensive immigration reform that has a real chance of being passed into law by the U.S. Congress this year.

Restaurant workers in the United States are part of a much larger chain of tens of millions of workers across the globe who plant, harvest, process, cook, and serve the food that we eat.  But most of the workers along this chain are invisible to us, the final consumers.

The invisible people start with those who grow and pick the fruits and vegetables on typically large farms.  Groups like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee have won contracts in Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina for workers harvesting cucumbers and tomatoes.  Unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers work to bring justice to the meat and other processing plants.

Care About Your Food? Then Care About Your Farmworkers Too
It’s organic. It’s local. But did the workers who picked it have health insurance?

Up and down the food chain, the Slow Food movement has advanced notions of “just food” and admonishes eaters to “vote with their forks” in helping advance healthy food and just work conditions. ROC also works with restaurants like Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., that are embracing higher wages and paid sick leave, and ROC regularly updates a diners’ guide to help us all make smart choices on where we eat, and how we can help their struggle.  It even gives tips on what to say to restaurant managers as you leave a particularly nice meal. ROC also encourages you to visit The Welcome Table for more creative ideas on how you can help.

Beyond the food chain, ROC is part of a larger United Workers Congress that is linking their fight to groups like Jobs with Justice and the National Domestic Workers Alliance that are working with nannies, caregivers, taxi drivers, and others who are denied basic worker rights.

We owe Saru and Fekkah and ROC members a debt of gratitude for opening the kitchen door for the rest of us, and giving us an opportunity to build solidarity with those who make our lives more joyful.

John Cavanagh and Robin Broad wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

Robin is a Professor of International Development at American University in Washington, D.C. and has worked as an international economist in the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Congress. John is director of the Institute for Policy Studies, and is co-chair (with David Korten) of the New Economy Working Group. They are co-authors of three books and numerous articles on the global economy, and have been traveling the country and the world for their project Local Dreams: Finding Rootedness in the Age of Vulnerability.

Interested?

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Compiled by Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

There are two fundamentally different but related aspects of the “money problem” that urgently need to be addressed. One is exchange problem, the other is the finance problem. Recent history has made it clear that in both realms, existing structures and institutions are serious flawed.

The exchange problem stems from the monopolization and misallocation of credit by the banking cartel and the perverse and improper issuance of political currencies (dollars, euros, pounds, yen, etc.). Solutions to the exchange problem are intended to provide liquidity, i.e., a means of payment, wherever it is needed so that markets can continue to function, so that producers can continue to sell and consumers can continue to buy despite the shortage or abusive issuance of conventional money.

The finance problem is the shortage of investment capital to small and medium sized and locally-owned business. That shortage stems from bank investment policies and preferences and government regulations that favor the channeling of everyone’s savings into corporate and government securities. Solutions to the finance problem seek to enable savers to directly allocate their savings to enterprises and projects that enhance the resilience and sustainability of their communities, provide real security, and contribute to the common good.

Decentralization, relocalization, and disintermediation are the emerging trends leading to a new economic paradigm. “Crowdfunding” is raising investment capital from large numbers of small investors. This may be in the form of donations, loans, or equity shares.

This is needed today because,

1. People (justifiably) do not trust banks and Wall Street,
2. People are looking for better returns than can be had from banks and the stock market,
3. People are looking for ways to protect their savings from inflation,
4. People are looking for ways to assure their access to basic necessities through direct ownership of enterprises that produce them.
5. People are seeking security by making their local community economies more resilient and sustainable.

Unfortunately, there are legal obstacles that currently limit those possibilities. The Jobs Act that was passed into law in April of 2012 is intended to remove some of those obstacles, but the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has yet to act on its mandate to come up with new regulations that relax those restrictions.

____________________________________________________

Among the leading organizations in the field, and one of the best sources of information about funding options, is Cutting Edge Capital. Their mission is “to develop tools that will make it easier and more affordable for businesses and nonprofits to do legally-compliant community capital raising.” Their website is http://www.cuttingedgecapital.com. /

A very useful article from their website, authored by Nathan Hyun, is titled, The Direct Public Offering – The Original Securities-Based Crowdfunding Model. Here is the concluding paragraph.

Ultimately, the new crowdfunding exemption (when it becomes legal) will provide companies with another option for accessing securities-based capital from the crowd and it could prove even more exciting for those wishing to build platforms and tools to offer issuers. In the meantime, the original crowdfunding model, the DPO, continues to provide companies with an effective way to conduct a self-underwritten and self-administered public securities offering. If you are a small or medium sized business, startup or nonprofit and are looking to immediately raise capital from the crowd through a public securities offering, a DPO is presently your only option and may be the best option even when the new crowdfunding law goes into effect.

Several informational resources related to crowdfunding are listed below.

_____________________________________________________

What is Crowdfunding and JOB’s Act?

http://www.rysalisbury.com/announcements/what-is-crowdfunding-and-jobs-act

This site provides a thorough overview of the present regulatory situation. It specifically states that, “Crowdfunding, or to be more specific, ‘equity-based crowdfunding’ is not yet legal.”

_____________________________________________________

Crowdfunding Predictions for 2013

2012 was quite a year for the crowdfunding industry. In April, President Obama signed the JOBS Act into law, which will open up equity-based crowdfunding for unaccredited investors. In May, the Pebble E-Paper Watch set a crowdfunding record and gained national media headlines, raising over $10 million on donation-based crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Research firm Massolution estimates the crowdfunding industry (equity + donation + lending +reward crowdfunding) will grow from $1.5 billion in 2011 to $2.8 billion in 2012.

Complete article at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancaldbeck/2012/12/11/crowdfunding-predictions-for-2013/

_____________________________________________________

4 Signs A Company Is NOT A Good Candidate For Equity Crowdfunding

1. The company is a tech company.

2. The company will need multiple rounds of financing.

3. The company is built on Intellectual Property, not brand.

4. The company is difficult to understand.

Read the entire article here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancaldbeck/2012/10/16/4-signs-a-company-is-not-a-good-candidate-for-equity-crowdfunding/

_____________________________________________________

http://www.kicktraq.com/

Why 84% of Kickstarter’s top projects shipped late

http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/18/technology/innovation/kickstarter-ship-delay/

http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/18/technology/innovation/kickstarter-ship-delay/

____________________________________________________

More About Legal Issues

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

The SEC updated its home page (http://www.sec.gov/), with info re: JOBS act (http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/jobs-act.shtml)

with a specific reminder

“On April 5, 2012, the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act was signed into law. The Act requires the Commission to adopt rules to implement a new exemption that will allow crowdfunding. Until then, we are reminding issuers that any offers or sales of securities purporting to rely on the crowdfunding exemption would be unlawful under the federal securities laws.”

http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/jobsact/crowdfundingexemption.htm

_____________________________________________________

Selected sites

Indiegogo

http://www.indiegogo.com/

Kickstarter

http://www.kickstarter.com/

Propel Arizona

http://www.propelarizona.com/

Propel Arizona is on the front page of the Arizona Republic business section on February 14, 2013. They did a good job of explaining what crowdfunding is, too.

Online version:  http://www.azcentral.com/business/arizonaeconomy/articles/20130213arizona-crowdfunding-propel-arizona.html

Gofundme

http://www.gofundme.com/crowdfunding-websites/

http://www.gofundme.com/

____________________________________________________

Other related articles

SEC uses JOBS Act to set up new roadblocks to crowdfunding

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/31/sec-uses-jobs-act-to-set-up-new-roadblocks-to-crowdfunding/#xOwOvdrWaKqW3Ysi.99

‘Rich Man’s Crowd Funding’

http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2013/01/15/rich-mans-crowd-funding/

This article is copyright Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

Mallory White of Equal Exchange near Boston tests coffee roast level. Photos by Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young, Shift Change.

Shift Change is a timely documentary about the growing cooperative movement. In the last two years, Truthout has posted many articles on the efforts to achieve economic democracy through worker ownership. Shift Change offers an energizing look at the workings of the giant cooperative model, Mondragon, in Basque, Spain. The film also covers strong U.S.-based worker-owned enterprises that prove the investor Wall Street model of business is not necessary to a successful company.

You can order Shift Change from Bullfrog Films by clicking here.

Mark Karlin: You and your documentary partner, Melissa Young, have completed more than 20 documentaries covering progressive issues, like the threat to unions, the dangers of biotechnology ill-applied, international grassroots environmental activism, and more. What, at this time, brought you to the topic of cooperatives as featured in Shift Change?

Mark Dworkin: In our documentary work together we look at political and social issues not only to rehash what is wrong, but also to offer realistic ideas about what might be done about it. In 2002 we were in Argentina at the height of their economic crisis, and in hundreds of workplaces which had closed, workers took over the company, went back to work, and made a go of it. These examples made quite an impression on us, and we featured their stories in two films: Argentina—Hope in Hard Times and Argentina Turning Around. In 2010 at the U.S. Social Forum, a friend suggested it was time for a new film about Mondragon—and that we ought to make it, since our Argentina films show we understand the potential for worker co-ops, and we have a lot of experience filming in Spanish-speaking countries. He was able to help us find start-up money, and we went for it. We quickly realized we should include the stories of several co-ops in the U.S., so our audience would not get the mistaken idea that worker co-ops cannot succeed here.

Mark Karlin: A good chunk of Shift Change explores the mother of all cooperatives, Mondragon, in Basque Spain. Can you explain the history and current structure of Mondragon, as well as its size?

Mark Dworkin: The Mondragon cooperatives began in the difficult years following the Spanish Civil War. Spain had a dictator who had a grudge against Basque country, because the Basques had opposed his violent rise to power. Left to themselves to rebuild from the war and create a viable economic future, people in Basque country were willing to try something new. Inspired by a visionary priest, they started a technical school that emphasized Christian principles of cooperation. Five graduates of that school who went on to get engineering degrees, set up the first industrial cooperative, soon followed by others, always with an eye to the future development of their region. Now, more than a half-century later, there are 85,000 workers in 120 independent cooperatives, working together for the common good. They do $25 billion worth of business a year. They have their own bank and one of Spain's largest supermarket chains. They make appliances, machine tools, computer equipment, and compete successfully in the global economy.

Mark Karlin: Spain is one of the southern European Community countries struggling with unemployment. How does Mondragon strategically deal with a global economic downturn in terms of unemployment at the cooperative?

Making washing machines at Fagor Home Appliances, part of the Mondragon network of businesses in Spain. Photo by Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young, Shift Change.

Mark Dworkin: One of the challenges faced by all cooperative business is that they have to survive in the larger economic system, over which they have little control. Nonetheless, cooperatives in Mondragon and in the U.S. are faring better in the current crisis than other, similar sized businesses. When sales and profits are down, they don't just close the doors. People take a hard look and try to figure out what they can do to make things better. Generally some of the co-ops are doing better than others, depending on the industry in which they operate. So each year Mondragon co-ops that are profitable pay into a "rainy day fund," and co-ops that are going through hard times are able to withdraw funds to help them out. In co-ops where business is slow, the members can often find temporary work in co-ops that are doing better. And since workers own and manage the company, they may agree to reduce their pay on a temporary basis until business picks up again. That way nobody has to lose their job.

Mark Karlin: Tell us a bit about the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland. How would Evergreen play out as a model for other cities?

Evergreen Cooperative Laundry worker owners fold and sort. Photos by Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young, Shift Change.

Mark Dworkin: The Evergreen Cooperatives take much of their inspiration from Mondragon. They are a wonderful example of business, labor, local government and civic foundations working together to re-develop their region. Rather than offer large sums of government and foundation money to private companies to move to Cleveland—only to have them move somewhere else a few years later - they decided to use those funds to start new businesses, based in the inner city, which are owned and managed by their employees. And they made strategic partnerships with major local institutions, such as Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic to buy the products and services that these cooperative businesses would offer. Many other cities are sending delegations to Cleveland to study the Evergreen model with an eye to adopting the idea—though in each case the best products and services will depend on the needs of each city and the resources it can leverage. Local anchor institution partners would depend on local conditions, but the idea of business, labor, community, and government working together for the common good can take hold anywhere.

Mark Karlin: The United Steel Workers (USW) launched a relationship with Mondragon not too long ago. How is that working out? Has anything come of it at this point? Does the USW plan to challenge the traditional capitalist management and profit model?

Mark Dworkin: The USW/Mondragon collaboration has a number of pilot ventures just getting off the ground in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And other unions are interested too. It is a relatively new idea for organized labor to begin building businesses, and they have a lot of people watching, so they are taking care to make their first ventures a shining success. Unlike in the Mondragon Cooperatives, which are not unionized, the worker owners of these new union co-ops will be union members. And while the companies will be professionally managed, the managers will be under democratic supervision by the workers, where the union helps represent the needs and desires of the rank and file. Like Mondragon, these companies will emphasize not just short-term profit but also long-term job creation and sustainability.

Mark Karlin: Cynics argue that American workers have been conditioned to the managerial profit-making system and are resistant to the cooperative concept. How do your respond to that perception?

When we go to work, most people in the U.S. have to check their democracy at the door

Mark Dworkin: I agree that we learn from an early age to navigate hierarchical social structures, and we have lots of practice competing, though little practice cooperating. So we have a lot to learn in order to make cooperatives a success. But I think many people are willing to make the effort. We have participatory instincts that are stifled in the dominant economy. I remember one friend who lit up when I told him that in worker cooperatives, people are encouraged to put forward their ideas about how to make the company better. That's sure different, he said; everywhere I have ever worked you're best off if you keep your head down and your mouth shut. So I wouldn't say that workers are resistant to cooperation, but rather our cooperative instincts are suppressed and trained out of us. To help overcome this, all of the co-ops we visited place a high priority on initial training and ongoing leadership development of their members.

Mark Karlin: Truthout has been excerpting Gar Alperovitz's book, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy . How are cooperatives representative of economic models of democracy?

Mark Dworkin: Gar Alperovitz and The Democracy Collaborative that he helped to found are key designers of the Evergreen Cooperatives, and I have enormous respect for Gar's thinking and his work. One thing that the Democracy Collaborative talks about is how we are proud to live in a democracy, yet when we go to work, most people in the U.S. have to check their democracy at the door. Cooperative companies are run democratically in terms of their day-to-day operations, and economic democracy in their home region is enhanced, because strategic decisions with long-term consequences for the region are made democratically by people who live and work there, and share a commitment to future sustainability.

Mark Karlin: Do you see evidence that the cooperative movement is gaining momentum in the United States?

Mark Dworkin: Cooperatives are taking off, especially in the last few years when economic conditions have been desperate and more people have been willing to think outside of the box. But it doesn't mean they will all succeed. Such change doesn't happen overnight. New cooperatives like other new businesses need a sound business strategy and plan, and they need the commitment and capital to keep going for the first few years as the business gets off the ground. But with the enthusiasm we have seen, we are optimistic. We've even heard reports that after viewing Shift Change people decided to try to form new co-ops or convert existing businesses to cooperatives.

The Cooperative Way to a Stronger Economy
Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. They come in many forms, and are more common than you might imagine.

Mark Karlin: How does democracy in the workplace, through worker ownership, have an impact on political democracy?

Mark Dworkin: Millions of people have become disenchanted with our political democracy because they don't see how to get involved constructively and it is so hard to get things done. But when given the experience of running a business democratically, people develop their ideas and abilities and feel energized. We've heard numerous stories of co-op worker/owners gaining confidence in their thinking and becoming more involved in social movements and civic affairs. Worker cooperatives are living laboratories of democracy, and democracy is contagious—it cannot help but spill over from the job to life outside of work.

Mark Karlin: You and Melissa Young also completed a documentary, We Are Not Ghosts, on the community-based effort to revitalize Detroit. Do you see hope for the development of cooperatives in a city such as Detroit, left in ruins by the flight of manufacturing jobs?

Mark Dworkin: The grassroots efforts we profile in Detroit involve a lot of community-based cooperation. For the most part it has not yet taken a business form, although Ghosts does visit a very successful bakery that has helped revitalize a run-down neighborhood and a small bicycle repair shop that is a worker co-op. Detroiters are rethinking what a post-industrial city should be like, grounding their efforts in neighborhoods and addressing immediate needs—such as growing food in empty lots, creating spoken word and visual art, organizing neighborhood efforts to reduce violence. So in We Are Not Ghosts we were more interested in the content of what is happening in Detroit—in spite of reports from the major media that focus on shuttered factories, abandoned houses and white flight—rather than its organizational form: non-profit, small business or co-op business. Having said that, the spirit of cooperation is strong.

People remaining in Detroit love their city and are committed to working hard and helping it to survive. As Detroit spoken-word poet Jessica Care Moore says in the film, "Somebody's got to tell them. We are not ghosts! We are in this city, and we are alive!"

Mark Dworkin and his partner Melissa Young founded Moving Images. They have produced and directed more than 20 progressive social documentaries. Many of these programs have aired across North America on PBS, and they are widely distributed to schools, libraries, and community organizations.

Interested?

• The Cooperative Way to a Stronger Economy
  How cooperatives are leading the way to empowered workers and healthy communities.
• Just the Facts: What's So Good About Co-ops?
  Why support the co-ops in your community? The benefits might be further-reaching than you think.

• The Economy Under New Ownership
  How cooperatives are leading the way to empowered workers and healthy communities.

Lunch and dinner with Julian Assange, in prison

By John Keane, University of Sydney

Everybody warned this would be no ordinary invitation, and they were right. Three hundred metres from Knightsbridge underground station, just a stone’s throw from fashion-conscious Harrods, I suddenly encounter a wall of police. I try to remember my instructions. Look straight ahead. Avoid eye contact. If asked my name, reply with a question. Ask who authorised them to ask. Climb the stone steps. Act purposefully. Appear to know exactly where you’re heading. I don’t.

Through a set of double doors, I’m confronted by more police officers, this time armed, with meaner faces. “Good afternoon”, I say politely, as I edge towards the receptionist. “I’ve an appointment at the Ecuador embassy. Am I at the correct address?” “Ring the brass bell”, grunts the bored-looking man squatting at his desk. A few minutes later, after some confusion about whether or not my name’s on the appointments list, I’m ushered inside. I’m greeted by the personal assistant of the most wanted man in the world. “Julian is taking a call,” says the well-spoken and debonair young man in black-rimmed glasses. “I’m terribly sorry. Please do have a seat. Would you like some tea, or coffee, or polonium, perhaps?” There’s a smile, but it’s pretty faint. I know I’ve reached my destination: a prison with wit and purpose.

The deadpan irony sets the tone of the lunch and dinner to come. The silver-haired “high-tech terrorist” (Joe Biden’s description) appears quietly, dressed in crumpled slacks, a V-necked pullover, socks. He’s relaxed, and welcoming. The quarters are cramped. We shuffle down a corridor into his office, where we occupy a desk covered in laptops and cables and scraps of paper. It’s black coffee for him and tea for me. I offer gifts that I’m told he’ll like. Popular delicacies from down under: a couple of honeycomb Violet Crumbles, chocolate biscuit Tim Tams, a bottle of Dead Arm shiraz from my native South Australia. I know he likes to read. Lying on his desk is a biography of Martin Luther, the man who harnessed the printing press to split the Church. To add to his collection, I hand my pale-skinned host a small book I’ve mockingly wrapped in black tissue paper with red ribbon, tied in a bow. The noir et rouge and dead arm pranks aren’t lost on him. Nor is the significance of the book: José Saramago’s The Tale of the Unknown Island. Inside its front cover, I’ve scribbled a few words: ‘For Julian Assange, who knows about journeys because there aren’t alternatives.’

I’d been told he might be heavy weather. Fame is a terrible burden, and understandably the famous must find ways of dealing with sycophants, detractors and intruders. People said he’d circle at first, avoid questions, proffer shyness, or perhaps even radiate bored arrogance. It isn’t at all like that. Calm, witty, clear-headed throughout, he’s in a talkative mood. But there’s no small talk.

I tackle the obvious by asking him about life inside his embassy prison. “The issue is not airlessness and lack of sunshine. If anything gets to me it’s the visual monotony of it all.” He explains how we human beings have need of motion, and that our sensory apparatus, when properly “calibrated”, imparts mental and bodily feelings of being in our own self-filmed movie. Physical confinement is sensory deprivation. Sameness drags prisoners down. I tell how the Czech champion of living the truth Václav Havel, when serving a 40-month prison spell, used to find respite from monotony by doing such things as smoking a cigarette in front of a mirror. “Bradley Manning did something similar,” says Assange. “The prison authorities claimed his repeated staring in the mirror was the mark of a disturbed and dangerous character. Despite his protestations that there was nothing else to do, he was put into solitary confinement, caged, naked and stripped of his glasses.”

US serviceman Bradley Manning faces decades in prison after allegedly leaking classified documents to Wikileaks. EPA/BradleyManning.Org

Life in the Ecuador embassy is nothing like this. It’s a civilised cell. After eight months, Assange tells me, the embassy staff remain unswervingly supportive, friendly and professionally helpful. They get what’s at stake. When delivering messages, they knock politely on his office door, as they did more than a few times during our time together. Yet despite feeling safe, Assange feels the pinch of confinement. He says the “de-calibration” (he uses a term borrowed from physics) that comes with “spatial confinement” is a curse. That’s why he listens to classical music, especially Rachmaninov. He has boxing lessons (gloves are on his study shelf) and works out several times a week (“just to get the room moving around”) with a wiry ex-SAS whistleblower. The need for variety is why he welcomes visitors and why, judging from the long and animated conversation to come, he’s desperately passionate about ideas.

Assange begins to enjoy the moment. Nibbling a chocolate biscuit and sipping coffee, he springs a surprise. “Truth is I love a good fight. Many people are counting on me to be strong. I want my freedom, of course, but confinement gives me time to think. I’m focussed and purposeful.” It sounds implausible. Entrapment wounds; it’s painful. Psychic defences are needed to ward off the unbearable. But striking is his utter defiance. “Never, ever become someone’s victim is a golden rule,” he says. In graphic detail, he then sketches his ten days in solitary confinement, in the basement of Wandsworth Prison, in south-west London, in late 2010. “I had expected to be completely out of my depth. But I felt no fear. I was tremendously enthusiastic about the challenge to come. I learned to adapt on my feet.” He means what he says.

I’m keen to talk about courage and its political significance. We do so for well over an hour. Lunch arrives: soup and a vegetable wrap from the local Marks and Spencer. His boxing mate appears. Assange says “it will be a while” and politely asks him to wait in the adjoining room. I remind Assange that he’s holed up in the right-wing Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, home to one of the safest Tory seats in Britain. So, just for fun, I play devil’s advocate by repeating the well-known remark of Winston Churchill that success is never final, failure is never fatal, and that what really counts in life is courage, the ability of people to carry on, despite everything. Assange lights up. “That’s undoubtedly true.” He’s never written or spoken at length about courage, but our time together convinces me he’s thought deeply and in sophisticated ways about the subject. He’s been forced to.

We discuss the detention without trial and torture of Bradley Manning. Assange mentions how the authorities are “picking off people all around me” (he’s referring to the ongoing FBI investigation and arrests of WikiLeaks activists). There’s no maudlin wobble. He understands the traps of “obsessive self-preoccupation” and speaks of the vital importance of cultivating a strong personal sense of “higher duty” to carry on. Courage is for him something that’s more important than fear because it involves putting fear in its place. I quote Aristotle at him: courage is the primary virtue because it makes all other virtues possible. “Yes, and that’s what’s worrying about present-day trends. We’re losing our civic courage.”

So where does courage come from, I ask? What are its taproots? Some people evidently draw breath from spiritual or religious sources, I say. He frowns. “My case is quite different. It’s hardship that makes or breaks us. True courage is when you manage to hold things together, even though most people expect you to fall to pieces.” The words ooze resilience. They could easily be his personal anthem, the proverb engraved on his Knightsbridge prison walls. He goes on to explain that although courage may or may not be a quality within human genes, a good measure of it is always learned. Courage is cultivated. It’s infectious. “Women on average have more of it than men,” he says. We discuss examples: on our list are Raging Grannies, Pussy Riot and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. “These women show men what courage is. Treated as outsiders, women have learned the hard way how to deal with structural power. They’re consequently much more adaptable than men. The world of men is structured force.”

The phrase catches me by surprise, but it captures in the most concise way exactly what the prisoner sitting across the table has done, in style, with great courage: he’s confronted structured force head-on. Julian Assange could be described as the Tom Paine of the early 21st century. Drawing strength from distress, disgusted by the hypocrisy of governments, willing to take on the mighty, he’s reminded the world of a universal political truth: arbitrary power thrives on secrets. We run through how WikiLeaks perfected the art of publicly challenging secretive state power. This “intelligence agency of the people” (as Assange calls his organisation) did more than harness to the full the defining features of the unfinished communications revolution of our time: the easy-access multi-media integration and low-cost copying of information that is then instantly whizzed around the world through digital networks. WikiLeaks did something much gutsier. It took on the mightiest power on earth. It managed to master the clever arts of “cryptographic anonymity”, military-grade encryption designed to protect both its sources and itself as a global publisher. For the first time, on a global scale, WikiLeaks created a custom-made mailbox that enabled disgruntled muckrakers within any organisation to deposit and store classified data in a camouflaged cloud of servers. Assange and his supporters then pushed that bullet-proofed information (video footage of an American helicopter gunship crew cursing and firing on unarmed civilians and journalists, for instance) into public circulation, as an act of radical transparency and “truth”.

We’re at the several hours mark, but everybody around me remains gracious. Nobody looks at watches; in fact, there’s not a clock to be seen. The debonair assistant pops in and out of the office, sometimes squatting at our table, tapping out messages on his laptop, fielding phone calls, several times handing his mobile to Assange. “It’s the latest crisis,” he whispers during the first of them. “We handle on average at least four or five a day.” He looks undaunted. This one’s just to do with the FBI investigation.

Julian Assange says “visual monotony” is the most troubling part of his confinement in the Ecuador embassy in London. EPA/Karel Prinsloo

When Assange comes off the phone, I change topics. I ask him about his pre-Christmas speech from the embassy balcony, when he predicted that in the next Australian federal parliament an “elected senator” would replace an “unelected senator” (he was referring to Foreign Minister Bob Carr, appointed through the casual vacancy rule). Now that the federal election date (September 14th) has been announced, is he still seriously intending to stand as a candidate?

Our conversation grows intense. For several years, Assange has been serious about entering formal politics. A new WikiLeaks Party is soon to be launched. He’s sure it will easily attract the minimum of 500 paid-up members required by law. The composition of its 10-member national council is decided. There’s already a draft election manifesto. The party will field candidates for the Senate, probably in several states. And, yes, Assange is certain to be among them, probably as a candidate in Victoria, where (conveniently) three Labor senators face re-election.

Assange bounces through the probable scenarios. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa will be re-elected, for another four years. He’ll stand firm in his personal and political support for Assange. This will ramp up pressure on the Swedish authorities, whose case against him is “falling apart”, with the two women plaintiffs looking for a way to extricate themselves from the protracted messy drama. “The Swedish government should drop the case. But that requires them to make their own thorough investigation of how and why their system failed.” The man’s not for turning. He’s certainly no intention of apologising for things he hasn’t said, or done. If he wins a seat in the Senate, he says, the US Department of Justice won’t want to spark an international diplomatic row. The planet’s biggest military empire will back down. It will drop its grand jury espionage investigation. The Cameron government will follow suit, says Assange, otherwise “the political costs of the current standoff will be higher still”. So the obvious question: what are the chances of that happening? Can bytes and ballots trump bullets? Can dare claim victory in his personal battle for political freedom?

What he has in mind has never before been attempted in Australian federal politics. Eugene Debs ran for the US presidency from prison (in 1920). Sinn Fein MP Bobby Sands was elected to Westminster while on hunger strike (in 1981). Under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi won a general election (in 1990). In defiance of Israeli occupation and prison confinement, Wael Husseini was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council (in 2006). There are plenty of similar examples, so why shouldn’t Julian Assange attempt to do the same, and in style?

By now the boxing mate, kept waiting several hours, has gone home. The young assistant has left for another appointment outside the embassy. Dinner is nowhere in sight. We reach for chocolate biscuits and spend the last hour drilling down into the barriers Assange might well face. We start with nagging questions about his eligibility to stand. He’s characteristically upbeat. The technical objections (raised by Graeme Orr and others) aren’t real, he says. He’s no traitor to his country, and most definitely not under the “acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power” (section 44 of the Australian constitution). Truth is he was let down by a gutless Gillard government and forced into political asylum, under threat of extradition. “I’m safe here inside the embassy walls,” he mocks, “protected by more than a dozen police, including one stationed night and day right outside my bathroom window.”

From the Ecuador embassy to the staid chambers of the Australian Senate – Julian Assange’s journey will be packed with surprises. Australian Senate/Wikimedia

The man of courage clearly relishes the thought of being the first Australian senator catapulted from prison into a debating chamber. I crack a bad joke, telling him that he’d better hurry up, reminding him that the Commonwealth Electoral Act stipulates that people who’ve been sentenced for more than 3 years in prison don’t have the right to vote in federal elections while they’re serving their sentence. His eyes twinkle, before laying into those who insist that the federal electoral laws are against him, that he’s ineligible because candidates must already be registered to vote. “That’s untrue,” he notes. “The Act specifies only that candidates must in principle be qualified to become a voter.” Assange is right, but since he’s not currently on the electoral roll much turns on whether his preferred strategy of registering as an overseas voter will work. Courtesy of legislation pushed through by John Howard, I know from bitter experience, having once lived abroad for more than three years, what it means to lose the right to vote. Assange says his case is different. He’s been overseas for less than three years (he was last in Australia in June 2010) and intends to return home within six years – that’s why he’s just applied to be on the electoral roll in Victoria.

That leaves two final snags. If victorious, some advisors speculate, Assange might need to take oath before the Governor-General. For this to happen he’d have to be set free, naturally, but it could also be done, “for the first time ever, by video link”. Whatever the situation, continued confinement, he says, would breach the rule that he must take up his Senate seat within two months. “In that case, the Senate could vote to evict me. But that would trigger a big political row. Australians probably wouldn’t swallow it. They’ve learned a lesson from the controversial dismissal of Gough Whitlam.”

I’m curious about the kind of political party WikiLeaks will launch. “The party will combine a small, centralised leadership with maximum grass roots involvement and support. By relying on decentralised Wikipedia-style, user-generated structures, it will do without apparatchiks. The party will be incorruptible and ideologically united.” I flinch at his mention of ideological unity. He explains that the party will display iron self-discipline in its support for maximum “inclusiveness”. It will be bound together by unswerving commitment to the core principles of civic courage nourished by “understanding” and “truthfulness” and the “free flow of information”. It will practise in politics what WikiLeaks has done in the field of information. It will be digital, and stay digital. Those who don’t accept its transparency principles will be told to “rack off”. That’s the ideological unity bit.

Assange agrees the WikiLeaks Party must address and respond creatively to the creeping local disaffection with mainstream politicians, parties and parliaments. “I loathe the reactiveness of the Left,” and that’s why, he says, much can be learned from clever new initiatives in other countries. We discuss Beppe Grillo’s 5 Star movement (it could well win up to 15% of the popular vote in Italy’s forthcoming general election). On our list is the Pirate Party in Germany (it practises “liquid democracy” and has representatives in four state parliaments). So is Iceland’s Best Party. It won enough votes to co-run the Reykjavik City Council, partly on the promise that it would not honour any of its promises, that since all other political parties are secretly corrupt it would be openly corrupt. Assange lets out a laugh. “Parties should be fun. They should put the word party back into politics.” The WikiLeaks Party will try to do this, and to learn from initiatives in other democracies. Supported by networks of “friends of WikiLeaks”, it will be seen as “work in progress” designed “to outflank its opponents”.

He and his party supporters are bound to attract hordes of detractors. Tom Paine was cursed by foes; he even suffered the dishonour of being called a “filthy little atheist” by Theodore Roosevelt. Assange is similarly facing an army of spiteful enemies. In Britain and the United States, there are signs they’re now closing in on him with new arguments. He used to be denounced as a “cat torturer”, a “terrorist” and “enemy combatant” and accused of committing “an illegal act” (Julia Gillard). He was attacked as both an “anti-Semite” and a “Mossad agent”. There were murderous calls to “illegally shoot the son of a bitch” (Bob Beckel). These days the language is milder but no less vicious. He’s said to be ‘paranoid’, all ‘alone’ in his gilded prison, abandoned by his supporters, at the British taxpayers’ expense. He and WikiLeaks are guilty of the same “obfuscation and misinformation” (Jemima Khan) they claim to expose. Swedish media and politics are meanwhile crammed with crass epithets: “rapist”, “repugnant swine”, low-life “coward”, “Australian pig” and “pitiful wretch” hooked on sex-without-a-condom.

Auguste Millière’s portrait (1880) of the great English champion of liberty of the press Tom Paine. Auguste Millière/Wikimedia

I can’t tell from our time together whether any of this stuff hurts. It’s clear he’s aware that going into parliamentary politics will involve permanent fire-fighting, but unflappable he sounds. “I’ve had to deal with the FBI, the British press and more than a few rank functionaries. The Australian press are decent by comparison. No doubt the Australian Tax Office will show an interest in our campaign. Old enemies may make an appearance.”

Assange knows that in the age of surveillance and media saturation little remains of the private sphere. I put to him a prediction: the way he dodged questions about the Swedish allegations during a recent video-link appearance before the Oxford Union (“I have answered these questions extensively in the past”) isn’t sustainable, that avoiding the subject when running for the Senate will be blood to the hounds of the press pack. He asks what he should do. I put to him a positive alternative, which is to come clean on his alleged misogyny. “I’m not interested in softening my image by planting attractive women around me, as for instance George W. Bush did. I like women. They’re on balance braver than men, and I’ve worked with many in exposing projects that damage women’s lives. An example is the scandalous practice of UN peacekeepers trading food for sex that we exposed. Our WikiLeaks Party will attract the support of many women.” But what about the charge of misogyny, I ask? Isn’t Julia Gillard’s use of the word to attack the Leader of the Opposition worth widening? The reply is very Julian Assange: “Let’s just say I prefer miso to misogyny.”

There are moments when Assange seems much too serious, nerdish even, yet one thing’s very clear: prison hasn’t ruined his deadpan humour. He’s smart, and he’s shrewd; he’s a fox, not a hedgehog. That’s why he’s counting on lots of public support down under. “When people speak up and stand together it frightens corrupt and undemocratic power”, he says. “True democracy is the resistance of people armed with truth against lies.” I wonder whether he’s right. Australians can be a politically lazy bunch, but we’re also known for our cheeky cheerfulness, our taste for the matter-of-fact, plus our strong dislike of bullshit. We respect hard work and admire courageous achievement. We’re mawkish in the company of Ned Kelly underdogs. And so, if a political fight over his election to the Senate were to break out, strong public support for Assange might suddenly surface.

Time’s up. Not wanting to overstay my welcome, I slip on my coat, prepare to say goodbye, to pass back through the wall of mean-faced police. Assange shakes my hand, twice in fact. Both of us are pretty tired and stuck for words, so I let myself loose by asking him to ponder a wild southern hemisphere fantasy, a hero’s welcome later this year, a rapscallion’s reunion with spring sunshine, fresh ocean air, flowers, banners, tweets, whistles, haunting sounds of didgeridoos. For a few seconds, he smiles, then draws back, looks down, and glances sideways. It’s the reaction of a man who knows in his guts there are no easy solutions in sight. The cards are stacked, piled high against success. He’s trapped. He knows his fate will be decided not by legal niceties, or diplomatic rulebooks, but by politics. That’s why he’s aware that in the great dramas to come, nothing should be ruled out.

The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power lists his odds of winning a Senate seat as seven-to-two. The cautious fortune telling may be significant. Down under, nationwide polls conducted by UMR Research, the company used by the Labor Party, show (during 2012) that a clear majority of Australians think he wouldn’t receive a fair trial if extradited to the United States, and that in any case he and WikiLeaks shouldn’t be prosecuted for releasing leaked diplomatic cables. Green voters (66%) and Labor supporters (45%) are sympathetic to Assange. Significant numbers of Coalition supporters (40%) think the same way. In the most recent UMR poll, Assange tells me, around 27% of voters say they’ll vote for him.

That should be enough to slingshot him from Knightsbridge to Canberra. Set aside the cheap diatribes and what you think of Julian Assange as a person, or whether he’s done this or not achieved that. The fact is that electoral victory for him later this year would be one of those rare political miracles that make life as a citizen worth living. In a country weighed down by sub-standard politicians, sub-standard journalists and sub-standard freedom of information laws, the political triumph would be great. It would breathe badly-needed life into Australian democracy. And, yes, if the miracle happened, from that very moment the fun party down under would begin.

John Keane does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Because open data breeds transparency which leads to innovation: "The Town of Cary (North Carolina) joins other communities throughout the United States and declares Saturday, February 23, 2013, as Open Data Day. At this event, the Town proudly supports a community Hackathon by providing an open data website through a single web portal at http://data.caryNC.gov, which will be available prior to Cary’s Open Data Day Hackathon. This web portal will serve as an open data catalog for the Town’s available data sets. ... Note: Code Across America is multi-day event happening alongside Open Data Day; any municipality or community can join."

Because we could all use a little down time: "The Sabbath Manifesto is a creative project designed to slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world. The National Day of Unplugging is on March 1-2, 2013. Join us in taking the pledge to unplug from technology regularly. Take the pledge at NationalDayofUnplugging.com. We want to know what you will do when you UNPLUG."

Because cities need to repurpose vacant properties: "Aside from the economic whupping of 2008–2009, a major casualty of the recession was space itself. Homeowners and businesses bled square footage, leaving behind a landscape of empty McMansions, vacated big-box stores, and now-famously abandoned shopping malls. ... Existing mall mashups pretty much stick to the public realm—like Cleveland’s indoor gardens and Vanderbilt’s health clinics—but this spring a shuttered shopping center in downtown Providence will be reborn in micro form, with two stories of micro-apartments above ground-floor micro-retail."

One of the micro apartments slated to open in the Providence, Rhode Island, Arcade mall. Photo credit: Evan Granoff. Used courtesy of Arcade Providence.

Because libraries are already open: "Sharing is a fundamental part of the open source philosophy, and the same goes for libraries. Spreading, disseminating, and breaking down barries to gaining knowledge is a core mission of most library systems and their staff. That that end, libraries—which are essentially hubs of knowledge and gathering places for learning and continuing daily education—may choose to implement open source tools and software."

Because less really can be more: "Allstate has joined Progressive Insurance as the second company to offer New Yorkers the chance to save money with usage-based car insurance. Like its cousin, pay-as-you-drive insurance, usage-based insurance rewards people for driving less. On top of that, by constantly monitoring how people drive, it creates incentives based on behaviors that can’t be tracked by traffic tickets or crash reports alone. The New York City Department of Transportation is promoting the concept in its effort to cut down on dangerous driving."

New Yorkers can drive less to save more. Photo credit: Randy Le'Moine. Used under Creative Commons license.

Because, apparently, a shoppable city is a happy city: "The U.S. is a pretty unhappy place compared to Europe, Australia, and South America. That’s according to a survey of 10,000 people in 29 countries from market research company GfK Custom Research. Conducted in 2009, the Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index, claims that San Francisco is the only U.S. city to crack the list of the 10 happiest cities in the world. Who else came out on top, and why?"

Senator Elizabeth Warren asks the embarrassing questions.

The Evolving + Emerging Economies Jam

Join us in transforming our economy to enable a just and regenerative world!
From social entrepreneurship to impact investing, from time banking to new metrics, from community currency to gift economy, visionaries and innovators are rethinking ‘business’, ‘transaction’, and ‘trade’ in powerful ways. They are practically generating new systems of exchange, rooting themselves to place, and expanding their impact — together co-creating an economy where the most valuable commodity is the well-being of the community landscape.
We are calling together a group of 30 diverse visionaries, entrepreneurs, movement builders, organizers, exchange professionals, impact investors, time bankers, community leaders, and other builders fo the new economy. Rarely has there been an opportunity to bring such diversity together to co-learn and unlearn, and potentially synergize new and dynamic solutions to the crises of our times. And, yet, in light of the recent elections, the Occupy movement, the global financial meltdown, and more, it is clear that the time is right to bring these threads together and co-create a collective vision.
Different capital, behavioral change, cultural readiness, social justice, individual bandwidth, scale, balance, sufficiency, self-reliance, community resiliency, inequities, timeliness, transition, exclusion, localization, are among the many themes and conversations we will explore together.
If you’re committed to right livelihood, just exchange, community regeneration, meaningful investing, or doing good through business, and are interested in connecting these diverse dots and furthering the movement, we’d love for you to JAM with us!

MORE DETAILS…
Evolving & Emerging Economies Jam
April 3-7, 2013Philo, CA, USA
Greetings friend!It is our honor to invite you to apply to participate in the first annual Evolving + Emerging Economies Jam! This Jam will connect 30 diverse, engaged and committed new economy movers and shakers for a week of deep listening, self-discovery, systemic inquiry and community building. It will take place from Wednesday, April 3 to Sunday, April 7, 2013, at the River's Bend Retreat Center in Philo, California.
What is the intention of the Jam?The Jam is not a conference, seminar or a typical meeting. Instead, it is a gathering for three different levels of change: the internal (self), the interpersonal (relationships) and the systemic (the whole). On the internal level, it is a place for participants to share and reflect on our life journeys and what makes us who we are today. It is an opportunity to grow in self-knowledge, to ask meaningful questions, to unlearn our fears and blocks, access our hearts, and open our minds to move more boldly in the world. It is a time to recharge and renew and to experience self- and community-care and personal sustainability.
On the interpersonal level, we come together to share our cultures, our stories and our struggles, to deepen in our understanding of each other and of ourselves. The Jam values diversity and seeks to bring together as diverse a group of people as possible. During the week, we hope to discover our commonalities and celebrate our differences. We take an honest, courageous and loving look at the identities that define and often separate us – race, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion, etc., – and seek to have authentic conversations to heal these divides. We know such conversations are rare in our societies, but we believe that the way to move forward with them is to shine a light, slow down, and take time for vulnerability, truth-telling, risk-taking, and deep listening. The Jam provides a unique container, where continuous inquiry and intimacy create the alchemy to have these conversations in a focused, safe and loving way — on levels we don't 'normally' engage in.
On the systemic level, through the Jam, we become clearer about our vision and work in the world. We get a chance to link issues that aren’t commonly linked, to notice crucial intersection points, and get a clearer picture of the whole. We come together to learn from each other: about what is working, about what mistakes we have made, about where we need help. We have a chance to share tools and ideas to support one another. In turn, we hope this helps us to generate a body of collective wisdom for activism in the region and a collective vision for the world we want. We also hope it will enable each participant to feel deepened in their capacity to affect meaningful positive change and carry their dreams forward.
Who is being invited to the Evolving and Emerging New Economies Jam?As mentioned above, we seek to bring together as diverse a group of people as possible. This means we are looking for a range in:

• leadership (from ‘person on the ground’ to ‘director and founder’);
• years of experience (from ‘just starting out’ to ‘been at it for a while’);
• scope and scale (from ‘local’/micro to ‘global’/macro)
• economy work-focus (for example, time banking, impact investing, community currency, worker-ownership, social entrepreneurship, B corps, triple bottom line, gross national happiness, gift economy, sacred economics, etc.);
• identity and world-view (class, ethnicity, race, religion, sexuality, age, etc.)

Who is putting on the Evolving and Emerging New Economies Jam?The Jam is being organized and facilitated by a dynamic team:
Holly Roberson has spent the last decade starting, managing, and supporting social enterprises. In her home state of Missouri, Holly established and grew three social enterprises: Terra Bella Farm, a 160-acre organic demonstration farm; Ragtag Cinema, an independent film house and bar/café; and Uprise Bakery, an organic bakery/gallery. In 2004, Holly left Missouri and moved to New York City to co-convene two multi-year projects involving young leaders and social change. Since joining Ashoka in 2007, Holly has focused on bringing the work of Ashoka, its fellows and the field of social entrepreneurship, to the Bay Area business, tech, philanthropic and venture capital communities.
Dan MacCombie is the co-CEO and co-Founder of Runa, an organic, fair trade tea company that supports 2,000 farming families, employs more than 40 people, and is proving that sustainable, high-impact businesses in the Amazon can support producers and connect consumers to ancient traditions. He has diverse experiences in conservation, public policy, and organizational development/management. He graduated from Brown University in 2008 where he participated actively in local community movements, including leading a state-level legislative initiative and being on the board of two national non-profits. Through his research, studies, and work, Dan has developed a deep and abiding passion for integrative market-based solutions to challenges that cross cultural, ecological, and political boundaries. When he’s not guzzling guayusa and jiving on sustainable livelihoods, Dan enjoys photography, traveling, scuba diving, hiking, and playing guitar.
Shilpa Jain is currently rooting herself in Berkeley, CA, where she serves as the Executive Director of YES!. Prior to taking on this role, Shilpa spent two years working as the Education and Outreach Coordinator of Other Worlds and ten years as a learning activist with Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, based in Udaipur, India. Shilpa has researched, written numerous books and articles, facilitated workshops and hosted gatherings on topics ranging from globalization, creative expressions, ecology, democratic living, innovative learning and unlearning. She has grown and supported many experiments with the gift economy and co-edited a book entitled, “Reclaiming the Gift Culture”. Shilpa also works extensively on building up the currency of relationships and community. She is passionate about dance and music, organic and natural farming, upcycling and zero waste living, asking appreciative questions and being in community. All of her work seeks to uncover ways for people to free themselves from dominating, soul-crushing institutions and to live in greater alignment with their hearts and deepest values, their local communities, and with nature.
Maya Corinne is a homebirthing mom of three, urban homesteading, unschooled Legacy Architect and stylist. She's raised tens of millions and designed values-inspired giving plans for those with a combined net worth over $14 Billion, with an eye towards evolution + resources for social justice, cultural preservation and environmental initiatives. Her passion is breaking, claiming and feminizing strategies used by those with multi-generational financial stability for multi-generational personal and communal sustainability, where the geography is our communities, the currency is our individual self-expression, & and the most important commodity is always the wellbeing of our community landscape. Maya guides A-list celebrities, CEO's (including Fortune 500), grassroots community leaders, and pro athletes in bringing values-based creativity and purpose- driven clarity to their expressions for conscious, creative legacies. She speaks, trains and facilitates events for global conferences, wisdom centers, and donor-training organizations. Maya is the founder of the Moon Storm Sessions, the Guidess Economy community, and Granite Pass Calibration, a collective of world-class healers, doctors and coaches which clear pro-athletes and $100million + execs of patterns that stand in the way of results, velocity and profit. She spoke at TEDx FiDi Women and her eco-fashions have been featured on the Oprah Network. A former LPSC Jam co-facilitator, Maya’s currently organizing the Evolving & Emerging New Economies Jam for Spring of 2013.
Aumatma Binal Shah is a Naturopathic Doctor since 2006 and co-founded Karma Clinic Network in 2008- where healing is based on generosity, trust, and contribution in aiming to create community and health-promoting relationships. Dr.Shah also teaches and facilitates health and healing workshops, detoxification programs, and group health sessions in a variety of settings from professional to corporate to small group settings. Overall, Dr. Aumatma is very interested in the 'emergent' — the place where innovation and evolution of our current systems is happening. She is excited to participate in the bringing together a group of people from diverse arenas to have a deeply engaged conversation about what is possible, what are we creating, and what do we want to see emerge.
Julia Kious Zabell is a public speaker, workshop leader, group facilitator, and private coach at her company re:Invigorate. Julia champions the future of business being a force for good in the world. She teaches her 4xP Approach (People+Planet+Purpose=Prosperity) to thought leaders, change makers and entrepreneurs looking to change the way business is done, regardless of size or industry. Julia's experience as an adventure leader, architectural designer, massage therapist, and business coach for Do-Gooders combine her passions for sustainability, personal development, structure, and strategy and allow her to translate complex ideas into simple actions any business person can take to have a greater impact. Since she takes work and play equally seriously she integrates both through travel, meditation, playing outdoors, reading, and cooking. Though she lives in the re-emerging Cleveland, she can be found and easily reached online and on the road at www.beinvigorated.com or www.doawesomebydoinggod.com
Mitchell Magdovitz Mitch has been working for the past ten years in what is now referred to as collaborative consumption. He started a web-based ridesharing company in 2002 and continued working in transportation innovation through 2009, with a company that developed municipal-scale, public rental systems for light electric vehicles. More recently, he spent two years focused on developing a non-monetized barter system called letSwap. Mitch is currently a business consultant helping startups across a range of industries, from healthcare to real estate and food and beverage.

You are invited!Our team would like to welcome you to apply for the Jam. Feel free to share this info with other young leaders you know in the region. And do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns. We look forward to hearing from you soon!
With best wishes and love,Maya, Aumatma, Julia, Mitch, Shilpa, Dan and Holly
To apply, download the application and email it back to Maya Corinne pinkbuddhas@yahoo.com or apply online here.

 

This infographic is excerpted from How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine.

Interested?

• The Cooperative Way to a Stronger Economy
  Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. They come in many forms, and are more common than you might imagine.
• The Economy: Under New Ownership
  How cooperatives are leading the way to empowered workers and healthy communities.

For more information, visit:
Stronger Together
Credit Union National Association
CUNA News
http://www.ncua.gov/News/Pages/NW20121129CUGrowth3Qtr.aspx
http://www.cuna.org/initiatives/hispanic/hispanic_news.html

Employees at Equal Exchange, the oldest and largest fair-trade coffee company in the nation. It is also a worker-owned cooperative. Photo by Paul Dunn.

Pushing my grocery cart down the aisle, I spot on the fruit counter a dozen plastic bags of bananas labeled “Organic, Equal Exchange.” My heart leaps a little. I’d been thrilled, months earlier, when I found my local grocer carrying bananas—a new product from Equal Exchange—because this employee-owned cooperativeme outside Boston is one of my favorite companies. Its main business remains the fair trade coffee and chocolate the company started with in 1986. Since then, the company has flourished, and its mission remains supporting small farmer co-ops in developing countries and giving power to employees through ownership. It’s as close to an ideal company as I’ve found. And I’m delighted to see their banana business thriving, since I know it was rocky for a time. (Hence the leaping of my heart.)

I happen to know a bit more than the average shopper about Equal Exchange, because I count myself lucky to be one of its few investors who are not worker-owners. Over more than 20 years, it has paid investors a steady and impressive average of 5 percent annually (these days, a coveted return).

Maneuvering my cart toward the dairy case, I search out butter made by Cabot Creamery, and pick up some Cabot cheddar cheese. I choose Cabot because, like Equal Exchange, it’s a cooperative, owned by dairy farmers since 1919.

At the checkout, I hand over my Visa card from Summit Credit Union, a depositor-owned bank in Madison, Wis., where I lived years ago. Credit unions are another type of cooperative, meaning that members like me are partial owners, so Summit doesn’t charge us the usurious penalty rate of 25 percent or more levied by other banks at the merest breath of a late payment. They’re loyal to me, and I’m loyal to them.

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On my way home, I pull up to the drive-through at Beverly Cooperative Bank to make a withdrawal. This bank is yet another kind of cooperative—owned by customers and designed to serve them. Though it’s small—with only $700 million in assets, and just four branches (all of which I could reach on my bike)—its ATM card is recognized everywhere. I’ve used it even in Copenhagen and London.

With this series of transactions on one afternoon, I am weaving my way through a profoundly different and virtually invisible world: the cooperative economy. It’s an economy that aims to serve customers, rather than extract maximum profits from them. It operates through various models, which share the goal of treating suppliers, employees, and investors fairly. The cooperative economy has dwelled alongside the corporate economy for close to two centuries. But it may be an economy whose time has come.

Something is dying in our time. As the nation struggles to recover from unsustainable personal and national debt, stagnant wages, the damages wrought by climate change, and more, a whole way of life is drawing to a close. It began with railroads and steam engines at the dawn of the Industrial Age, and over two centuries has swelled into a corporation-dominated system marked today by vast wealth inequity and bloated carbon emissions. That economy is today proving fundamentally unsustainable. We’re hitting twin limits, ecological and financial. We’re experiencing both ecological and financial overshoot.

If ecological limits are something many of us understand, we’re just beginning to find language to talk about financial limits—that point of diminishing return where the hunt for financial gain actually depletes the tax-and-wage base that sustains us all.

Here’s the problem: The very aim of maximum financial extraction is built into the foundational social architecture of our capitalist economy—that is, the concept of ownership.
If the root of government is sovereignty (the question of who controls the state), the root construct of every economy is property (the question of who controls the infrastructure of wealth creation).

Many of the great social struggles in history have come down to the issue of who will control land, water, and the essentials of life. Ownership has been at the center of the most profound changes in civilization—from ending slavery to patenting the genome of life.

Author Marjorie Kelly: It’s no accident that the deep redesign of our economy isn’t beginning in Washington, D.C. It is rooted in relationships: to the living earth and to one another. Photo by Cameron Karsten.

Throughout the Industrial Age, the global economy has increasingly come to be dominated by a single form of ownership: the publicly traded corporation, where shares are bought and sold in stock markets. The systemic crises we face today are deeply entwined with this design, which forms the foundation of what we might call the extractive economy, intent on maximum physical and financial extraction.

The concept of extractive ownership traces its lineage to Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. The 18th century British legal theorist William Blackstone described ownership as the right to “sole and despotic dominion.” This view—the right to control one’s world in order to extract maximum benefit for oneself—is a core legitimating concept for a civilization in which white, property-owning males have claimed dominion over women, other races, laborers, and the earth itself.
In the 20th century, we were schooled to believe there were essentially two economic systems: capitalism (private ownership) and socialism/communism (public ownership). Yet both tended, in practice, to support the concentration of economic power in the hands of the few.

Emerging in our time—in largely disconnected experiments across the globe—are the seeds of a different kind of economy. It, too, is built on a foundation of ownership, but of a unique type. The cooperative economy is a large piece of it. But this economy doesn’t rely on a monoculture of design, the way capitalism does. It’s as rich in diversity as a rainforest is in its plethora of species—with commons ownership, municipal ownership, employee ownership, and others. You could even include open-source models like Wikipedia, owned by no one and managed collectively.

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These varieties of alternative ownership have yet to be recognized as a single family, in part because they’ve yet to unite under a common name. We might call them generative, for their aim is to generate conditions where our common life can flourish. Generative design isn’t about dominion. It’s about belonging—a sense of belonging to a common whole.

We see this sensibility in a variety of alternatives gaining ground today. New state laws chartering benefit corporations have passed recently in 12 states, and are in the works in 14 more. Benefit corporations—like Patagonia and Seventh Generation—build into their governing documents a commitment to serve not only stockholders but other stakeholders, including employees, the community, and the environment.

Also spreading are social enterprises, which serve a social mission while still functioning as businesses (many of them owned by nonprofits). Employee-owned firms are gaining ground in Spain, Poland, France, Denmark, and Sweden. Still another model is the mission-controlled corporation, exemplified by foundation-owned companies such as Novo Nordisk and Ikea in northern Europe. While publicly traded, these companies safeguard their social purpose by keeping board control in mission-oriented hands.

Get a copy of Marjorie Kelly's Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution when you become a dedicated friend of YES!

If there are more kinds of generative ownership than most of us realize, the scale of activity is also larger than we might suppose—particularly in the cooperative economy. In the United States, more than 130 million people are members of a co-op or credit union. More Americans hold membership in a co-op than hold shares in the stock market. Worldwide, cooperatives have close to a billion members. Among the 300 largest cooperative and mutually owned companies worldwide, total revenues approach $2 trillion. If these enterprises were a single nation, its economy would be the 9th largest on earth.

Often, these entities are profit making, but they’re not profit maximizing. Alongside more traditional nonprofit and government models, they add a category of private ownership for the common good. Their growth across the globe represents a largely unheralded revolution.

What unites generative designs are the living purposes at their core, and the beneficial outcomes they tend to generate. More research remains to be done, but there is evidence that these models create broad benefits and remain resilient in crisis. We’ve seen this, for example, in the success of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, which remained strong in the 2008 crisis, even as other banks foundered; this led more than a dozen states to pursue similar models. We’ve seen it in the behavior of credit unions, which tended not to create toxic mortgages, and required few bailouts.

We’ve seen it in the fact that workers at firms with employee stock ownership plans enjoy more than double the defined-benefit retirement assets of comparable employees at other firms. And we’ve seen it in the fact that the Basque region of Spain—home to the massive Mondragon cooperative—has seen substantially lower unemployment than the country as a whole.

Together, these various models might one day form the foundation for a generative economy, where the intent is to meet human needs and create conditions in which life can thrive. Generative ownership aims to do what the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker have always done: make a living by serving the community. The profit-maximizing corporation is the real detour in the evolution of ownership, and it’s a relatively recent detour at that.

The resilience of generative design is a key reason that people have often turned to these models in times of crisis. When the Industrial Revolution was forcing many skilled workers into poverty in the 1840s, weavers and artisans banded together to form the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the first modern, consumer-owned cooperative, selling food to members who couldn’t otherwise afford it.

During the Great Depression in the United States, the Federal Credit Union Act—ensuring that credit would be available to people of meager means—was intended to help stabilize an imbalanced financial system. Today, credit union assets total more than $700 billion. In the recent financial crisis, their loan delinquency rates were half those of traditional banks. Since the crisis, credit unions have added more than 1.5 million members. In Argentina in 2001, when a financial meltdown created thousands of bankruptcies and saw many business owners flee, workers—with government support—took over more than 200 firms and ran these empresas recuperadas themselves, and they’re still running them.

Last year, with financial and ecological crises mounting worldwide, the U.N. named 2012 the Year of the Cooperative, and cooperative activity, is advancing around the globe. Cooperatives were largely sidelined during the rise of the industrial age. But current trends indicate that conditions may be ripe for a surge in cooperative enterprises. As people lose faith in the stock market, feel mounting anger at banks, and distrust high-earning CEOs, there’s growing distaste for the business-as-usual Wall Street model. Meanwhile, the Internet has enabled the expansion of informal cooperation on an unprecedented scale—with the Creative Commons, for example, now encompassing more than 450,000 works. As the speculative, mass-production economy hits limits, cooperatives may be uniquely suited to a post-growth world, for they are active in sectors related to fundamental needs (agriculture, insurance, food, finance, and electricity comprise the top five co-op sectors).

If many of us fail to recognize an emerging ownership shift as a sign of progress, it may be because it arises from an unexpected place—not from government action, or protests in the streets, but from within the structure of our economy itself. Not from the leadership of a charismatic individual, but from the longing in many hearts, the genius of many minds, the effort of many hands to build what we know, instinctively, that we need.

This goes much deeper than legal or financial engineering. It’s about a shift in the cultural values that underpin social institutions. History has seen such shifts before—in the values that underlay the monarchy, racism, and sexism. What’s weakening today is a different kind of systemic bias. It’s capital bias: capital-ism—the belief system that maximizing capital matters more than anything else.

Just the Facts: What's So Good About Co-ops?
Why support the co-ops in your community? The benefits might be further-reaching than you think.

The cooperative economy—and the broader family of generative ownership models—is helping to reawaken an ancient wisdom about living together in community, something largely lost in the spread of capitalism. Economic historian Karl Polanyi describes this in his 1944 work, The Great Transformation, tracing the crises of capitalism to the fact that it “disembedded” economic activity from community. Throughout history, he noted, economic activity had been part of a larger social order that included religion, government, families, and the natural world. The Industrial Revolution upended this. It turned labor and land into commodities to be “bought and sold, used and destroyed, as if they were simply merchandise,” Polanyi wrote. But these were fictitious commodities. They were none other than human beings and the earth itself.

Generative design decommodifies land and labor, putting them again under the control of the community.

It’s no accident that the deep redesign of our economy isn’t beginning in Washington, D.C. It is rooted in relationships: to the living earth and to one another. The generative economy finds fertile soil for its growth within the human heart. The ownership revolution is part of the “metaphysical reconstruction” that E.F. Schumacher said would be needed to transform our economy. When economic relations are designed in a generative way, they’re no longer about sole and despotic dominion. Economic activity is no longer about squeezing every penny from something we imagine that we own. It’s about being interwoven with the world around us. It’s about a shift from dominion to community.

Marjorie Kelly wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Marjorie is a fellow with the Tellus Institute and is director of ownership strategy with Cutting Edge Capital consulting firm. She is author of the new book, Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution. She was co-founder and for 20 years president of Ethics magazine.

Interested?

• The Cooperative Way
  

  Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. They come in many forms, and are more common than you might imagine.

• Gar Alperovitz on the Cooperative Economy: "I'll Bet My Life On It"
  Gar Alperovitz was in Seattle for the annual meeting of the National Cooperative Business Association and spoke at Town Hall Seattle immediately following a live screening of the first presidential debate. YES! Magazine’s executive editor Sarah van Gelder introduced him.
• Why Won't The Wall Street Journal Cover the Cooperative Economy?
  Cooperative businesses are proliferating quickly, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the Wall Street Journal.

Andrew Dwyer and Shawn Seebach are in their first year at Equal Exchange, where they are learning the business of coffee as well as how to work in a cooperative. Photo by Paul Dunn.

Our little group of a dozen families was running out of time. After meeting every weekend for three years to plan our hoped-for cohousing community, and after investing much of our savings to acquire a few acres of land, it looked as though our dream would fail. We couldn’t find a bank that would finance a cooperative.

Visit the table of contents for the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine, How Cooperatives are Driving the New Economy.

It was our local credit union that saved us. “You’re owned by your members? What’s
so odd about that? We’re owned by our members,” the president of the Kitsap Credit Union mused.

With that financing, we were able to build 30 affordable homes and a common house, and to make space available for gardens, an orchard, a playfield, and a tiny urban forest. In 1992, we moved into Winslow Cohousing, the first member-developed cohousing community in the United States.

Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. The good news is that co-ops come in many forms and are more common than you might imagine. They are owned by workers, residents, consumers, farmers, craftspeople, the community, or any combination. What they have in common is that they circulate the benefits back to their member-owners, and these benefits ripple out to the broader community. As Marjorie Kelly explains, cooperative forms of ownership allow the well-being of people, the planet, and future generations to take priority over profits for shareholders and executives.

This is an exciting moment for cooperatives. A growing disillusionment with big banks and corporations is sparking interest in economic alternatives, and new opportunities are opening up:

• The United Steelworkers and other unions are exploring worker-ownership as a means to assure stable, living-wage jobs that can’t be outsourced to low-wage regions.

• Communities seeking alternatives to profit-driven corporate health insurance are forming health care co-ops.

• Hundreds of thousands of people who “moved their money” from Wall Street banks to local banks and credit unions now have a say in how their money is used.

• Consumers are turning to co-ops like Equal Exchange for ethically produced goods, and Equal Exchange, in turn, supports co-ops made up of farmers and producers in some of the world’s poorest regions.

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These cooperatives can be powerful forces for change. Vancity, Canada’s largest credit union, targets its investments to local enter- prises that have positive impacts. It divested its holdings in Enbridge due to concerns about the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. And it adopted a living wage policy that applies to its own employees and to service providers.

Cooperative structures can strengthen an economy. For example, Italy’s Emilia Romagna region, where about a third of the economy is cooperative and has far less inequality. Most people there can find living wage jobs, and quality of life is high.

Last year, Winslow Cohousing celebrated its 20th year, and the grown sons and daughters of the early members returned to share what it meant to them to grow up in a community, surrounded by love and support.

My hope? That many more children have the opportunity to grow up in cooperative spaces; that more adults get the respect and empowerment that comes from working in cooperatives and buying from co-ops; and that over time, diverse forms of democratic ownership displace predatory capitalism as the foundation for our economy.

Like what you’re reading? YES! is nonprofit and relies on reader support.
Click here to chip in $5 or more to help us keep the inspiration coming.

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is executive editor of YES!

• The Economy Under New Ownership
  How cooperatives are leading the way to empowered workers and healthy communities.
• Just the Facts: What's So Good About Co-ops?
  Why support the co-ops in your community? The benefits might be further-reaching than you think.
• Why Canada's Indigenous Uprising Is About All of Us
  When a new law paved the way for tar sands pipelines and other fossil fuel development on native lands, four women swore to be “idle no more.” The idea took off.

Luis Nieves (right) helps Michael Raleigh (left) secure floorboards in Raleigh's front porch. Raleigh is renovating a house on Buffalo's East Side that he purchased from the city for $1 through the Urban Homestead program. Photo by Mark Boyer.

Massachusetts Avenue Park was not a place you'd want to take your kids. Before, the small neighborhood park in the heart of Buffalo's West Side was little more than vacant land with a small playground and a crumbling basketball court. “It was a real mess,” says Terry Richard, a neighborhood resident who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and later moved to Buffalo by way of Brooklyn. “So we figured … why don’t we just take this on as a task to really force the city’s hand to take care of their problem,” she adds, standing next to the park’s new playground with a bright smile.

Buffalo is located where the waters of Lake Erie feed into the swift currents of the Niagara River. It was established as a major grain shipping and storage center in the late 19th century, but as shipping routes changed and heavy industry packed up and left the Great Lakes region, Buffalo's population rapidly declined. In 1950, Buffalo's population was about 580,000, but by the 2010 census it had fallen to about 260,000.

Terry Richard, a PUSH Buffalo board member, stands in front of the new playground at Massachusetts Avenue Park. Richard was instrumental in the effort to redevelop the neighborhood park. Photo by Mark Boyer.

It isn't just the population that's been shrinking though: Employment numbers are down, and like other Rust Belt cities, Buffalo has struggled to support its infrastructure with a shrinking tax base. The rebirth of Massachusetts Avenue Park echoes many other stories taking shape throughout the city. Instead of waiting for the city to make things better, residents like Richard are taking matters into their own hands.

Richard is a board member for People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH), a grassroots organization based in Buffalo that seeks to provide affordable, environmentally friendly housing and job training.

In early June PUSH celebrated the opening of Phase 1 of the small but pleasant new Massachusetts Avenue Park, which resulted from about two years of petitioning City Hall to fund the project. The park is just one piece of PUSH's broader plan to create a Green Development Zone within the West Side—a 25-block area where the group is developing sustainable, affordable housing and creating new career pathways for neighborhood residents.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Like many Buffalo neighborhoods, the West Side is full of vacant properties, and PUSH co-founders Aaron Bartley and Eric Walker wanted to know why. When they launched the organization in 2005, their first order of business was to conduct a survey of Buffalo's West Side, which meant going door-to-door in the community for about six months.

Eric Walker, co-founder of PUSH, promotes the mission of creating strong neighborhoods with hiring opportunities and community resources. Photo courtesy of TEDxBuffalo.

With a bit of digging, they discovered that a sub-agency of the New York State Housing Finance Agency was in control of nearly 1,500 tax-delinquent properties in the city—about 200 of which were on the West Side—that were being left to rot. In 2003, the state of New York's Municipal Bond Bank Agency bought the delinquent tax liens for those homes, which were then bundled and sold as bonds to investment bank Bear Stearns.

But there was one major problem: According to a report published in Artvoice, Buffalo's main alternative weekly, the assessed value of the properties was much higher than they were actually worth. In effect, the state was using vacant houses in Buffalo to speculate on Wall Street.

Meanwhile, nothing was happening with the houses; the state was neither maintaining them nor selling them. "There just was absolutely no due diligence done as part of the transaction," Bartley said. "If there had been, they would've seen that bond was fraudulent."

The value of bonds was based on revenue that was supposed to have been generated by the houses, through either selling them or collecting unpaid taxes. But the state made little effort to sell or collect taxes on the properties. Why? Because doing so would reveal the true value of the properties, according to Bartley, and the house of cards would come crumbling down. "The reason they didn't do that is that would've shown the lie to the deal, because they would have sold for $0, and it would have indicated that it was worthless," Bartley explained.

PUSH renovation in Buffalo's Green Development Zone. Photo by Whitney Arlene Crispell / PUSH Buffalo.

When Bartley and Walker made the discovery, they tried to bring it to the attention of state officials through standard channels, but when that failed they launched a direct action campaign. Using a big stencil, they painted an image of then-Gov. Pataki's face on more than 200 houses across the city. Eliot Spitzer was campaigning for governor at the time, and he took an interest in the issue. When Spitzer took office, his administration unwound the bond, gave the houses back to the city of Buffalo, and created a small housing rehab fund. The houses were turned back into the city's inventory, and when PUSH or one of its partner organizations wants to redevelop one, they ask to have it transferred.

The Green Zone

Two years later, PUSH invited hundreds of residents to a neighborhood planning congress to draft a development plan for the largely blighted 25-block area on the West Side that would later become the Green Development Zone (GDZ). The plan went far beyond energy-efficient affordable housing to include the creation of employment pathways and promoting economic stability within the zone.

"Sustainability" in the context of PUSH's agenda means reducing the neighborhood's environmental impact, but also strengthening the local economy and creating green jobs.

On the surface, the GDZ still looks similar to other Buffalo neighborhoods: The streets are lined with 100-year-old two- and three-story houses, and in the summer, they teem with people. Old ladies sit and talk on first-floor balconies, while kids weave in and out of slow-moving traffic on bicycles. But this small neighborhood is in the midst of a pretty radical transformation.

"Sustainability" in the context of PUSH's agenda means reducing the neighborhood's environmental impact, but also strengthening the local economy and creating green jobs in the building rehabilitation and weatherization industries. PUSH was instrumental in getting the Green Jobs - Green New York legislation passed, which seeks to create 35,000 jobs while providing green upgrades and retrofits for 1 million homes across the state. PUSH recently established PUSH Green to implement the GJGNY program in the Buffalo area, functioning as an independent outreach contractor in the region. For the work, PUSH has established what it calls a "Community Jobs Pipeline," a network of contractors who agree to provide job training, pay living wages, and hire local workers from target populations.

Energy-efficient—and Affordable Too

In September, PUSH held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for three gut-rehab buildings with a total of 11 affordable housing units, bringing the total number of residential units PUSH completed in the GDZ to 19.

Green buildings enjoy lower operating costs, but they're more common in luxury real estate portfolios than in the inner city.

But the organization has much bigger ambitions. In December, PUSH announced plans to build nine new-construction buildings and to renovate seven existing properties, adding a total of 46 more energy-efficient, affordable units to the neighborhood. "We're very strategic in our development work, so we've taken a small section of the West Side, and we're really trying to concentrate our development," explained PUSH Development Director Britney McClain. "We don't want to contribute to the scattershot development work that is also common in the city of Buffalo."

Ensuring that the homes it produces are energy-efficient is an important component of PUSH's work, because heating and energy costs account for a large percentage of living expenses in Buffalo. "A lot of the houses in this city are over 100 years old and poorly insulated, so to have an apartment at an affordable rate but also that is totally energy-efficient, through the new windows and insulation, the utilities bills will be drastically reduced," McClain told me.

PUSH in action. Photo by Whitney Arlene Crispell / PUSH Buffalo.

Green buildings enjoy lower operating costs, but they're more common in luxury real estate portfolios than in the inner city. That's a perception that PUSH is looking to change.

In 2011, PUSH completed a net-zero energy house—a home that produces as much energy as it uses. The project was launched to showcase renewable energy technologies and to help give low-income residents paid job training. In the process, the builders found another innovative use for vacant lots: They dug a deep trench in the adjacent lot to provide geothermal heating and cooling for the house. On all of the buildings, PUSH reuses existing materials where possible, upgrades the windows and insulation, and installs Energy Star-rated metal roofs that help to passively cool the buildings.

Extreme Neighborhood Makeover

Back at the PUSH headquarters I met co-founder Eric Walker, who I instantly recognized even though we had never met. Walker guest-starred on an episode of ABC's reality TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that aired in 2010. In a typical episode of the show, a handful of hyperactive celebrities and local volunteers target a distressed home that is owned by a family undergoing illness, disaster, or some other hardship, and they quickly fix it up for the family in need. Instead of just fixing up one house, though, PUSH and some 4,500 volunteers teamed up with the show's producers to fix up several surrounding properties in the neighborhood as well.

Think Small: A New Model for Housing
Why go back to the way things were when we can create housing that embraces the best of tradition and the best of new thinking?

Extreme Makeover brought the West Side some positive national exposure, but Walker still has mixed feelings about the show. Neighborhood improvement can either come from external forces or it can come from within, and the forces of change portrayed in the show weren't entirely homegrown. "In organizing, we talk about three kinds of power: power over, power for, and power with," explains Walker. The TV show gave PUSH an opportunity to inspire, but the tools of change were in the hands of the ABC producers and the celebrity hosts—not members of the community. "It was one step removed from the power we're trying to build," Walker says.

The TV cameras packed up and left, but the transformational power remains in the neighborhood. It is evident in the carefully restored Victorians that line Massachusetts Avenue; in the raised beds the community has acquired through PUSH; and in the fact that parents now take their children to the once-dangerous park they fought for and won themselves.

Check out Eric Walker's talk at TEDx Buffalo.

Mark Andrew Boyer wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Mark is a photographer and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared in GOOD, Inhabitat, and Mindful Metropolis.

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