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Trust is the Only Currency

How to Barter, Give, and Get Stuff

from Shareable.net
By Janelle Orsi
08.31.10

There are things we do for money and things we do for free. And then there is everything in between. In that between-space, there is a growing and exciting world of barter, work exchange, gift circles, mutual aid societies, time banks, local currencies, and other modes of transacting that don’t use regular money. These transactions form a huge component of the “sharing economy,” the “third economy,” the “sustainable economy,” or whatever you may call this “new economy.”

I thought it would be a fun and important project to sort out the tax, business, and labor law implications of these “in between” transactions. However, when I got knee deep into the research, I found that things got rather soupy.

Explaining legal concepts in an interesting and vivid way can be a challenge, which is why I’ve chosen to construct this article around a more familiar concept: soup. There are a couple ways of making soup that fit clearly into defined legal frameworks:

* Soup for Money: If I were to own a gourmet soup restaurant, the tax, business, and labor law questions are fairly straightforward. The income I make would be taxable and sales tax would apply (in most states). I would be subject to health and safety laws, permitting requirements, and other business regulations. The people who help out in my kitchen would be legally considered employees, and I would be obligated to pay them minimum wage, obtain workers compensation insurance, pay payroll taxes, and so on.

* Soup for Me: On the other hand, when I make a pot of soup at home for myself and my partner, neither I nor my partner pay tax on it. (The value of the soup we create ourselves is what’s called “imputed income,” but the IRS doesn’t ask us to pay tax on it.) I don’t need special business permits, and when my partner helps chop veggies, she does not become my employee.

But once we go beyond these straightforward examples, making soup is definitely not cut and dry. I should warn that having a vast body of laws and regulations doesn’t mean that we actually know how to interpret them. Courts wrestle with the meaning of laws on a case-by-case basis, and that’s where we learn how to interpret laws. When things end up in court, it’s generally because there’s a lot of value at stake, like in a car accident lawsuit or major tax evasion case.

Truth is, the IRS doesn’t very often bring people to court over tax owed on a free guitar lesson received in exchange for babysitting. Definitely not often enough for us to have much case law to go on, or to know how to interpret the rules. The rules more or less say that barter is taxed and gifts are not. (For details, see Treas. Reg. § 1.61-1; IRS Publication 525; and 26 USCS § 102.) But in an informal economy, there are infinite ways to give and receive, and the line between barter and gifting could be unclear.

Furthermore, it’s hard to know how far the taxing of barter income actually extends. The IRS rule on barter, as written, appears to tax any good or service you receive in exchange for any other good or service. In practice, however, it’s probably not such a blanket rule. The IRS doesn’t seem to concern itself with one-time, casual, non-commercial exchanges of goods or property. Administratively, it would be a hassle both for taxpayers and the IRS to report the plums I gave my neighbor in exchange for his figs. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say at what point a barter arrangement has become sufficiently formal, commercial, or regular to be something that you should report.

There are also gray areas in designating what, exactly, is a business and what is an employee. As the informal economy begins to flourish, we may be surprised to sometimes find ourselves, unintentionally, operating a business, or, unintentionally, employing someone.

Sound confusing? Perhaps some examples and an extended metaphor will help. Let’s look at how all these rules play out using other scenarios in which I make soup:

* Soup Parties: What if I started throwing a fabulous monthly soup party for my friends? It’s all for fun and for free, although my friends sometimes show their appreciation by inviting me over for dinner, or by bringing dessert to my party. For the most part, these activities fall under the category of “gift,” and there will be few legal issues to worry about. I haven’t become a restaurant and the dessert my friend brings probably won’t be taxable to me as “income.” (However, even while this seems like an unregulated realm, I’ve been surprised to learn that in some cities there are laws that limit how many people you are allowed to feed for free.)

* Gift Economy Soup: Now what if I start having weekly soup parties and my friends start doing things for free too? As the spirit of giving and generosity grow, friends might offer free massage, gardening, computer help, handy work, or other favors. Other friends hold weekly salad nights, curry nights, or cook-out nights, and I get free dinners every day of the week! In this circle of giving, no one is obligated to give or receive anything, and no one is officially keeping track of who gives what and how it should be valued. What are the legal implications here? Since the giving occurs among friends and comes from a place of generosity, shouldn’t it be tax free? And because there are no contractual expectations of compensation and because people aren’t bargaining for things at a market prices, these activities aren’t commercial, are they? I would say that’s probably right, but it’s hard to answer these questions with complete certainty. Slight variations in the above scenario could cause it to look more like example #3 (Barter Soup) or #6 (Soup Enterprises), which probably are taxed and regulated as businesses.

* Barter Soup: Now what if my accountant offers to prepare my taxes in exchange for coming to five of my famous soup nights? Deal! But what does it mean legally? This example differs from the above Gift Economy example, because now we have a direct exchange that we’ve bargained for, and we have a binding verbal contract for barter. As discussed above, it’s not clear to me that all barter is taxed, but this arrangement is something the IRS would want us to report. Another question to ask here is: am I now accidentally operating a soup business? Since I have a binding and bargained for agreement to receive valuable services as “payment” for my soup, I’ve essentially sold soup to my accountant. Regulation of business comes from all kinds of agencies – health departments, planning departments, state tax boards, and so on. In the eyes of some agencies, selling soup even one time is not acceptable. Since the law varies from place to place, and from agency to agency, the main thing to remember is: be careful and do your research before you accidentally find yourself in business.

* Time Bank Soup: To continue expanding on the soup scenarios, my next project could be going to the homes of elderly and disabled to help with cooking. Because they and I are part of a local time bank similar to the Japanese Furaei Kippu (“Caring Relationship Tickets”) system, for each hour that I spend helping out, I am credited a “time dollar” through an online accounting system. Later on, I could redeem each “time dollar” for an hour of someone else’s time. In three rulings, the IRS has given some vague indication that they aren’t interested in taxing exchange of services like this. They give at least two reasons: 1) The exchanges are informal, meaning that I get no contractual right to have my favor returned. 2) The exchanges are non-commercial, meaning that they aren’t bargained for at market rates; whether I spend an hour cooking soup or an hour providing legal advice, my hour is valued at the same rate, and all transactions are an-hour-for-an-hour. Those tax rulings are not supposed to be relied on as precedent, and there is disagreement about how they should be interpreted. Still, they provide some of our only clues about what the IRS views as being outside the realm of taxation.

* Soup for Hire: Next, my landlord, who lives downstairs from me, learns of my superb soup and asks me to become a personal chef for her family, in exchange for allowing me to live rent free. I begin cooking two meals a day for her family, and at her pleading, learn to make things other than soup. The value of my free rent should be reported as income on my tax returns, and the value of my cooking services should be reported on her tax returns as rental income. It’s quite possible that I should now be classified as her employee, since I work for her regularly and take some direction from her about what to cook. Knowing whether a household worker is an employee or an independent contractor is critical. If you misclassify a household worker, you can end up with heavy fines. (Then, when you run for public office, you can end up with “nannygate.”)

* Soup Enterprises: Moving on with my soup scenario, now my soup has become so popular that I make multiple pots of soup every day, invite people over to share it, or put it in mason jars for people to pick up on my door step. No one ever pays me U.S. dollars for my soup, but I have been able to use soup to “pay” for most of what I need. I now get “free” health care, bike repair, fresh produce, and many other necessities and perks in exchange for soup. Even with no money changing hands, chances are that I’ve suddenly found myself in the soup business, and should pay tax on the value of most of what I receive in return. I will need a business license and various food-related permits. Also, as crazy as it sounds, when my friends come over to hang out in my kitchen and help me chop veggies, the law says I should be paying them minimum wage.

* Soup Bucks: Finally, I can take my soup operation one step further and start creating soup gift certificates. If I “buy” things with soup, it might be more convenient to give people a certificate that they can redeem for soup when they need it or which they could give to someone else. In fact, the U.S. Dollar came about in a similar way, except that it was backed by gold, not soup. If my “Soup Bucks” start circulating within my local community, they essentially become a local currency. Each certificate has value not only because it can be exchanged for soup, but because it can be exchanged with anyone who is willing to accept it. The success of Soup Bucks as a currency will be based on the community’s trust in my ability to keep on making soup. Starting your own currency and printing paper money is a legal and legitimate thing to do in all but two states, and with some limitations. But if you plan to back the currency with a guarantee of particular goods or services, then it’s possible that the currency also meets the definition of a gift certificate, which is a form of contract and has various regulations attached.

I Can See Clearly Now the Money’s Gone

Even with all the annoying legal grey areas and hurdles, transacting without regular money is one of the most important things we can do to transform our economies. But why should we even delve into this world beyond money? After all, hasn’t our national currency been a useful and efficient tool for transacting with one another? Yes, in theory.

But, in practice, dollars aren’t always there when we need them, and whole communities suffer from the scarcity of dollars. To begin to understand how our money and banking systems play a role in actually creating scarcity, I’d recommend watching the movie “The Money Fix.”

The scarcity of money could actually be our good fortune if it forces us to see that value remains even when money does not. In reality, we have a wealth of valuable people, skills, goods, time, and potential in our communities. This value is highly unrecognized and underutilized because we’ve all had a lifelong dependence on transacting almost exclusively with our national currency.

Transacting through barter, gifting, time banks, and other creative means will instantly open up potential for strong, localized, and sustainable economies. While you can’t use “Soup Bucks” to shop at Target or Safeway, you may be able to use Soup Bucks to support local crafts people, micro-farmers, small manufacturers, and friends who can help you meet your needs. Rather than struggling to compete with multimillion-dollar companies, a new generation of micro-entrepreneurs will thrive on new kinds of transactions.

The new economy comes hand-in-hand with more connected and supportive communities – neighborhoods where people know each other, circles of acquaintances who actively support each other, and more widespread use of cooperatives as a way to feed, house, and provide for ourselves and others. The new economy not only gives as a means to survive; it gives us a great way to live.

This is the first in a series. Tomorrow, we’ll look more closely at the legal nuts and bolts of the gift economy….

since people were coming and going, we focused on free stuffCredit: Shira Golding

Caveats

This article was an attempt to give readers at least some sense of orientation in relatively unsettled or uncharted legal territories. When legal definitions are unsettled, the best that we can do is 1) gain as much understanding as we can, by reading laws, regulations, tax rulings, and court cases, and 2) based on that information, make good faith and reasonable determinations about how to classify our activities. Sometimes, you may get the answer wrong, which means dealing with the consequences when the IRS, Department of Labor, or other agencies come calling. It’s up to you to decide what risks are worth taking.

Please keep in mind that the information in this article is not legal advice. Legal information is not the same as legal advice, which is tailored to an individual's specific circumstances and relies on the lawyer knowing all the relevant facts.

Acknowledgments

This article was made possible by my recent inspiring and helpful conversations with: Mira Luna, Edgar Cahn, Aumatma Binal Shah, Erin Byers, Nicolas Barry, Jenny Kassan, Mike Leung, Alpha Lo, Arno Hesse, and Guillaume P. Leblau. And the soup mania may have been partially inspired by attending Soup Stone last year.

Sep 1, 2010 6:49:00 PM (1 week ago)

Community Currency Magazine and Main Street Cash Merge

Hi friends of the alternative currency world,

As Mark Herpel, dedicated editor of Main Street Cash (the only major new source for currencies), focuses on healing, leadership of these two major news sources of the currency movement are being merged for more efficiency in publishing and ease for our readers. Matthew Slater will be leading this merger as it morphs into a "collaborative community crowdsourcing project". BACE members will be helping out in this endeavor. If you have articles or updates about your currency project or currency theory, please send to matslats (at) gmail.com so we can keep the movement connected and moving forward together.

Thanks! Mira Luna

Aug 31, 2010 9:33:00 PM (1 week ago)

Alternative Economy Theory

If you are new to this blog and alternative economic theory here are a few good articles to start with to gain a background in common currents of thought:

http://trustcurrency.blogspot.com/2010/04/economic-history-in-10-minutes.html
http://trustcurrency.blogspot.com/2009/08/towards-democratic-cooperative-and.html
http://trustcurrency.blogspot.com/2010/05/sacred-economics.html
http://trustcurrency.blogspot.com/2010/03/orland-bishop-oneness-is-abundance.html
http://trustcurrency.blogspot.com/2010/01/other-economies-are-possible-organizing.html
http://trustcurrency.blogspot.com/2009/12/idea-of-local-economy_12.html
http://trustcurrency.blogspot.com/2010/02/on-productivity-socratic-dialogue.html

Aug 31, 2010 9:30:00 PM (1 week ago)

Why We Started Giftflow

by Hans Schoenberg
from Shareable.net

The most emailed NY Times article right now is titled “But Will It Make You Happy?” Questioning our consumer culture, the author interviews a number of wealthy yet unhappy people who found relief in giving away their many possessions. One of the interviewee’s has the last line: “Give away some of your stuff,’ she advises. See how it feels.”

Here in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, there are hundreds of people living within one mile of the coffee shop where we wrote this essay who lack access to some of the most fundamental human needs. At the same time, hundreds more are frustrated with the way consumption has taken over their lives and cluttered their homes. The abundance of stuff that is the result of our consumption driven culture could potentially be used to not only help friends share with friends, but to change entire communities.

Each year, Yale Recycling’s Spring Salvage program gathers the goods students would have otherwise thrown away as they move out of their dorms. The “waste,” worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, is then distributed to local nonprofits. This event demonstrates that the New Haven community already has the resources it needs in the form of excess stuff, but for most of the year those resources sit unused in our houses and dorms. A system only exists to reuse this “waste” once a year and only because Yale can afford to finance it. We saw an opportunity to reimagine how communities can share and work together.

We started GiftFlow to give communities a new set of tools. Here’s how it works: individuals log onto GiftFlow and create a profile where they list everything they have to give away (ranging from a spare jacket to an hour of volunteer time) and everything they need. You give what you can to get what you need. Each transaction is recorded so that individuals can gain a reputation for contributing to their community.

The driving force behind the system is an ethic of indirect reciprocity or circular giving. Lewis Hyde described it best in his book The Gift:

“Circular giving differs from reciprocal giving in several ways. First, when the gift moves in a circle, no one ever receives it from the same person she gives it to...When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.”

Hans first came across accounts of gift economies while studying economic anthropology. Giving without expectation of immediate return, many people in Mali participate in an informal gift economy that includes everything from child care to food from the garden. They see the gift as a string, connecting families, friends and neighbors in a web of mutual support. As a political organizer, Hans believed the idea of a gift economy carried far more potential to create change than mainstream campaigns around distant and often negative political issues.

The ethic of indirect reciprocity can support entire organizations, however, these social structures aren’t always robust. Cris learned this first hand when he helped to create the New Haven Bike Collective. Based around a gift economy of unwanted bicycles and the free time of volunteers, the main drag on the group came from a constant sense of being “free-ridden.” People would take a free bike and give little back to the organization. Cris immediately got involved in Giftflow because he saw how it could provide a platform to account for who supports and who benefits from the Collective.

In the past, gift economies only worked in small social circles because of problems with coordination and reputation. Brandon had been studying how the Internet can change social interactions, and realized that an online social network could support a gift economy. A website could strengthen and formalize what is already happening in communities around the world, making it work well across greater distances, in larger social circles, between individuals as well as institutions.

Our team continues to grow. We are a non-profit and welcome the gifts and contributions of anyone who might be interested. We hope that the online community of GiftFlow creates an offline community of mutual interdependence and support.

Aug 26, 2010 9:33:00 PM (2 weeks ago)

SF Community Congress Economic Plan

COMMUNITY-BASED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Recommendations 2010
Posted on August 13, 2010 by sfcommunitycongress

Guiding principles

1. Economic development policies must contribute to the health and well-being of the city’s neighborhoods and residents, provide decent wages, have a positive impact on the urban environment, and promote alternative ownership models.

2. Local government is a key driver of the local economy, both through infrastructure development and public sector employment.

3. Economic policy must balance “external” market linkages with the powers of local government to create more democratic and accountable development. [don’t understand this one – rephrase?]

4. The city’s existing financial resources should be mobilized to fund economically viable social enterprises.

5. Local government must provide means for shaping economic development, through new forms of participatory governance that encourage representation of constituents typically excluded from decisionmaking.

I. Financing and Promoting Local Development

1. Establish a Municipal Bank of San Francisco by amending the City’s charter, to be incorporated as a federally insured credit union, and funded with an initial investment of [$100 million] of City reserves, with additional increments thereafter, to invest in community-based economic development, such as small businesses, local clean energy, social enterprises and cooperatives, and other projects that provide economic benefits to low income residents of San Francisco.
2. Establish a publicly-owned Municipal Development Corporation (MDC) to undertake large-scale production of goods and services to be sold at competitive rates, such as clean energy (see #3), medical marijuana cultivation, and a city-owned fiber optic network, with surpluses used to invest in community-based economic development.
3. Begin investing in large-scale, renewable clean energy projects funded through a combination of local revenue bonds and funding from a local Municipal Bank, with the goal of entirely supplanting PG&E from the local market, and using surpluses to invest in community-based economic development.

II. Reforming Local Governance

1. Consolidate the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, as well as relevant economic development aspects of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the Department of City Planning, into a Department of Community-based Economic Development, to be overseen by a commission jointly appointed by the Mayor and Supervisors, and charged with insuring the economic development policy is implemented in accordance with the City Charter and the General Plan.
2. Establish Local Community Councils consisting of members from a diverse range of San Francisco neighborhoods and sectors, with official [consultation status] within the new Department of Community-based Economic Development, and with seats on the boards of both the Municipal Bank and the MDC, to ensure that policies address the needs of a broad spectrum of San Francisco residents.

III. Fiscal Reform of Local Government

1. Implement a long-term progressive tax revenue plan, by convening a post-election working group in early 2011, to conduct research into the impacts of taxation schemes on private sector investment, develop recommendations, and guidelines for implementation.
2. Establish a Community Budgeting process in conjunction with progressive taxation, the Municipal Bank and the MDC, with councils from each of San Francisco’s electoral districts, charged with developing initial recommendations to the Board as part of the annual appropriations process, to insure greater participation in the budgeting process.

IV. Labor and Development Standards

1. Require all contractors with the City to implement just cause termination procedures, and require card check neutrality agreements with local non-profits as a condition of receiving City funding to give employees choice in whether they wish to be represented by a union
2. Require all developers to negotiate with the San Francisco Building Trades Council to insure targeted hiring requirements are applied to local construction jobs
3. Require all future approvals of large-scale development projects to adhere to strict local hiring mandates, and require developers to insure that at least 75% of all project-related jobs (including those that are subcontracted) to pay the local living wage, and fees to provide seed money to local work center organizations to conduct oversight of fair hiring and remuneration standards.
4. All employers located in any City-approved major development shall be required to give hiring priority to residents from surrounding neighborhoods, to low income individuals and those earning less then 80% of city medium income, in conjunction with “first source” hiring offices to be administered by the Department of Community-based Economic Development.
5. Enhance the effectiveness of the Community Jobs Program through controlling legislation and examination of existing strengths and weaknesses in implementation of the CJP.
6. Establish a San Francisco Green Jobs Corps to provide paid on-the-job training to those facing barriers to long-term employment in doing energy audits and assessments, assisting low-income home owners and small businesses in obtaining loans and rebates for energy efficiency retrofits, and performing “low-tech” energy retrofits, such as caulking, weather-stripping and insulation. The training program would place people in long-term green jobs in workers cooperatives that would perform the energy retrofits funded by loan and rebate programs.

V. Investing in the Arts, Worker Coops, Small Business, Urban Manufacturing, and the Green Economy

Cultural Economy

1. Consolidate existing arts programs in a new Cultural Economy Department, to commission work by local artists, and sponsor and promote local art, music, and performance festivals; creatie ongoing earned income opportunities for San Francisco artists by seeding their participation in international projects; and identify locations for arts centers and arts industry incubators on public property (like Port land).
2. Consolidate the current 1-2% for art developer fees, to be directed towards community arts activity, providing space support through rent subsidies and other programs that support culturally-based arts industries.
3. Create a municipal cultural works program, similar to the New Deal’s Federal arts, music, and theater programs.

Solidarity Economy & Worker Cooperatives

1. Create a Cooperative Technical Assistance Center, a Cooperative Loan Fund, and a Cooperative Business Incubator site, to support worker cooperatives and other alternative worker-owned, worker-run business endeavors, as well as supporting the development of Community-owned corporations.
2. Implement procurement policies for all city agencies and other public agencies (such as the universities and hospitals), to prioritize procurement from existing and emerging worker cooperatives, other social enterprises, and locally-owned small businesses.

Small Businesses and Urban Manufacturing

1. Develop a comprehensive commercial corridor and “Back Street Business” assistance, retention, and attraction program.
2. Link workforce development and placement (and community college programs) to the employment needs and entrepreneurship potential of San Francisco small businesses, Back Streets enterprises, and emerging green economy and worker coop sectors.
3. Create regulation to ensure that all neighborhood economic development entities and business improvement districts truly represent local residents, workers, and small businesses, not just property owner interests.

Green Economy and Urban Agriculture

1. Mandate public procurement of local, healthy, living-wage foods, and provide subsidy support to programs that sell local healthy foods in low-income neighborhoods, to be funded through new progressive taxes on unhealthy and/or expensive foods.
2. Create urban agriculture zoning designations and begin conversion of surplus city-owned properties for urban agriculture, including portions of the city’s golf courses into farms and orchards, employing San Francisco’s new Green Job Corps workers.
3. Develop an urban agriculture outreach and education program, including workforce development, neighborhood tool libraries and materials depots, and R&D into roof gardens, vertical farming and aquaculture.
4. Commit to the comprehensive seismic and energy retrofit of 100% of San Francisco’s existing multifamily and rental housing units by the year 2020, to be funded through a rotating capital improvement fund created by the pooling of renters’ security deposits.
5. Create a green business incubator with a focus on R&D and manufacturing of appropriate technologies, including recycling and remanufacture businesses.

VI. Institutionalizing an Alternative Economic Development Agenda

1. Establish a new, independent think tank to undertake ongoing research, feasibility and analysis for progressive revenue, governance, and economic development policy.

Aug 23, 2010 9:22:00 PM (2 weeks ago)

A Cooperative Manifesto

By Tim Huet

A Manifesto for a Life-Changing Conclusion

When my colleagues, the editors of this publication, asked me to write a brief piece explaining why I got into cooperative development, I responded that this posed a perhaps insurmountable difficulty: briefly explaining how I arrived at the life-changing conclusion that (trumpets, please) There Is No More Important Social Change Work You Can Do Than Cooperative Development. I mentioned that I'd been thinking of writing an essay arguing that— while chaining oneself to a tree might be sexier; while blockading WTO meetings might seem more “front-line”; while busting-out Starbucks windows might seem more cutting-edge—There Is No More Important Social Change Work You Can Do Than Cooperative Development (hereinafter, TINMISCWYCDTCD). The editors responded with the generous offer of feature space in order to accommodate the TINMISCWYCDTCD argument. So, the editors having called my bluff (giving me enough space/rope to hang myself), here I am pounding out my Cooperative Manifesto.

In the following section, I've laid out six conclusions I reached some dozen years ago (in my mid-twenties) that premised my decision to devote myself to cooperative development. Before launching into those conclusions/premises, I wish to clarify that I don't use the term “cooperative development” in some restrictive sense to mean only starting new cooperatives or expanding/restructuring established ones. For me, anything that a member does to improve her/his cooperative or help it achieve its mission is cooperative development (could be excellent customer service, could be developing personnel systems). I'll argue herein that all such cooperative development work is inherently important social change work.

A Long and Logical Road

Premise 1: Regulation and reform will not keep capitalism from destroying our environment and creating disastrous social cleavages; fundamental change is needed.

I could go on for a quite a while regarding why capitalism inevitably leads to ecological and social ruin -- and there was a time (during my student days) when I did go on at length about the pathology and prognosis. But I came to the conclusion that it was largely a waste of time. Because—

Premise 2: There's no point convincing people of the prevailing system's intrinsic and inevitable failings if you can't offer hope of anything better.

I became very proficient at persuading people regarding the downsides and doom. But that simply led to the question, “What can you offer better?” And, believe me, an exploration of the theoretical promise of anarcho-syndicalism or your-ideal(ist)-prescription-of-choice won't get you very far with most people. Because—

Premise 3: The overwhelming majority of people cannot be convinced with theoretical arguments, but require demonstrative proof.

Moreover—

Premise 4: You can't simply wait for capitalism to collapse (or work to “tear down capitalism”), with the expectation that “after the collapse” people will “get revolutionary consciousness” and be receptive to your arguments about building a truly democratic society and economy.

History indicates clearly that, in the wake of economic collapse, people are more likely to listen to fascist/totalitarian appeals to their fears and hunger than they are to elaborate proposals for building a more democratic economy and society. We cannot simply await the apocalypse, cheering or working for capitalismís collapse; we need to build the democratic future now. We at least need to build a working example of a democratic future economy and society, an inspiring example people can turn to as their eyes are opened wide by capitalismís escalating crises and increasingly frequent crashes. Moreover—

Premise 5: Efforts to tear down the system or protest its injustices do not develop the constructive skills and habits of mind that a democratic economy and society require.

There is plenty about the current regime that inspires and even requires protest. But we get stuck in an oppositional, critical, reactive mentality if all we do is protest. By endeavoring to build working models of economic democracy, we also build the constructive skills and thinking that will be needed to operate the equitable ìpost-capitalistî society we envision.

Moreover—

Premise 6: You cannot achieve true democracy without economic democracy, democracy in the workplace.

You cannot say a society is truly democratic if its adults spend the majority of their waking hours in undemocratic workplaces and do not enjoy control over the basic elements of their lives (no control over their jobs ultimately means no security regarding their homes, healthcare, time, education, etc.). And the undemocratic nature of work for most adults has effects beyond the workplace and outside working hours. Autocratic models of relating in the workplace carryover into the family, larger community, and political realm. Conversely, I believe that members of worker cooperatives learn democratic skills and ways of interacting with each other—and the confidence that comes from taking control over your life—hat benefits their families and larger communities, and can carryover into the political realm.

Indeed, I don't think there is much hope for achieving even limited political democracy (what I refer to as “periodic democracy”) if you don't have the everyday democracy of workplace democracy. It is a dirty secret that no liberal and few progressives wish to acknowledge: an electorate without everyday democratic experience/perspective/skills, and the security that comes from controlling oneís fate, is too easily manipulated by fear-mongers, prejudice-peddlers, and other rightist political operators. And yet so much progressive energy goes towards state, national, and international campaigns when we lack communities/bases of everyday democracy from which to build—when we have failed to build up everyday democracy from the grassroots, community by community.

So, the more obvious meaning of my seventh premise is that “we wont have achieved true democracy until we have workplace democracy”; but the more important meaning, the one that drives my action agenda, is “we need to build cooperatives as bases for a democracy movement.”

The Promise and Importance of Worker Cooperatives for a Broader Democracy Movement

For me, worker cooperatives are not simply businesses; they are democracy demonstration projects, schools for democracy, laboratories for democracy, and organizing bases for democracy. What I mean by worker cooperatives being schools and organizing bases for democracy is perhaps clear from the above sections. But there are a couple of other points I would like to make and expand on.

Democracy demonstration projects: As stated above, it is critical to build working examples of economic democracy that people can see and experience. From that point of view, every worker cooperative is a democracy demonstration project beyond simply being a business. In addition to producing bread, bicycles, etc., we produce hope and inspiration.

As importantly, we can provide an example and experience of community, which people hunger for in our disconnected society. I see the proof and power of this on a regular basis through the cooperative bakeries with which Iím mostly directly associated. Customers come in not simply for the great bread, but also for the sustenance of community. They sense the community at our cooperatives and want to be part of that.

It follows from this that every interaction with the general public is imbued with social change importance and opportunity. Conversely, it is a wasted opportunity (or worse) if we fail to show care or concern, if we fail to serve our communities any better than “wage slaves” under the watch of a boss.

Worker cooperatives have to work for everyone, not just idealists or activists: Earlier I referenced the promise of worker cooperatives to provide activists with “right livelihood,” the opportunity to live out and further their values; however, I feel strongly that worker cooperatives have to be attractive workplaces for people other than avowed activists. If we only build businesses-communities that work for idealists (“Aren't you dedicated enough to work for minimum wage?!), we've hardly proven anything regarding the viability of economic democracy. Personally, I find it most satisfying when we hire people who've never heard or cooperatives and have never been active in their communities. It is one of the greatest pleasures of my work to see such people blossom, to grow in confidence and skills —and then perhaps lend their newly-developed skills to broader community endeavors.

Laboratories for democracy: The sad fact is that humanity has only the most rudimentary knowledge, vocabulary, technology, etc. for how to relate to each other and work together as equals. An important part of our function as cooperators and agents for social change is to be very conscious regarding our experiments in democracy and community. We are developing knowledge (regarding conflict resolution, communication, collective decision-making) very much needed not simply for the effective functioning of democratic workplaces, but for the establishment of relations based on equality and respect throughout society.

Worker cooperatives can generate capital for social causes, but shouldn't give it all away: During the 1970s ferment of U.S. worker cooperative development (I'm referencing such things as the “food conspiracies” that blossomed in the Upper Midwest, Bay Area, etc.), there was a prevalent “hippie ethic”: making money was evil and paying attention to business was “uptight” and “bourgeois”. Some movement maturation and natural selection took place. The cooperatives that survived and thrived were generally ones that realized paying attention to business allowed you to better serving your community, including generating resources for community betterment.

I know that in my region, worker cooperatives have historically been important and generous contributors to (other) social change organizations. This is something to be proud of. However, I do wonder if we have not historically under-estimated the social change value of worker cooperative development by underinvesting in our own movement. It is my hope that worker cooperatives will begin to seriously consider whether contributing to the development of more democratic jobs might be as worthwhile as donating money to charities, the arts, and other social change organizations.

Likewise, valuing our inherent social change role should inform the relationship of worker cooperatives to the larger social justice movements. While social change work is my motivation for being involved with cooperatives, it does not follow that I believe cooperatives should serve, above all, as platforms or purses for political causes. Worker cooperatives do have resources and a great deal of visibility that we can lend to various causes. However, I believe we should do this only in a focused and judicious way (for instance, a grocery cooperative focusing its support in the areas of organics and farm workers rights, or a taxi cooperative focusing its efforts on transportation policy). We need to be cautious not to tear ourselves apart or alienate our customer bases by involving ourselves in every hot-button-issue-of-the-day; to do this would waste our social capital, since by forwarding the worker cooperative movement we may contribute more to the social change movement in the long-run. This does not mean that I think worker cooperatives should stand apart from other social change movements, as I will explain in the concluding section.

As Important, Not More Important—

And Not Sufficient

I'm aware that my opening claim of TINMISCWYCDTCD would strike some activists in other social change movements as a bit grandiose and perhaps even offensive (“How can he put that on the same level as the urgent frontline work we're doing?!). I'm hoping that this essay might reach and provoke such activists to see cooperatives as an integral to any movement for justice, peace, and sustainability. That you're not accomplishing much to save the environment if you don't address the economic engine that drives consumption and belches out pollution. That, if you want peace and democracy overseas, you should care fiercely about establishing economic as well as political democracy domestically; that developing locally-rooted sustainable economic democracy is critical to countering the forces of global expansionism and military adventure.

Yet, I do not claim that cooperative development is more important than all other forms of social change work. There are various forms of social change work that are just as important, and need to be carried out simultaneously if not in conjunction. I don't think cooperative development in itself will ever solve all the world's problems. Nor do I think worker cooperatives can or should stand apart from other social change movements; for instance, we need to battle the many injustices (racism, sexism, etc.) that pervade our society and will not be barred from our doors by any declaration that “we're all equal here at our cooperative”. In particular, I think worker cooperators need to think of ourselves and act as part of the larger labor movement, not leaving behind other workers because “we got ours”.

And I can fully understand someone dedicating herself or himself to another form of social change work and never having anything to do with cooperatives. Those who seek to be agents of social change should choose the area(s) in which they can best contribute and find the most fulfillment. For myself, I have found cooperative development to be very fulfilling as well as meaningful, and I hope to convince many others to join in.

Tim Huet helps to establish and develop bakery cooperatives through the Association of Arizmendi Cooperatives, which he co-founded in Northern California. Until recently, he was also a member of Rainbow Grocery Cooperative, where he served in various management capacities. Tim serves other worker cooperatives as an organizational consultant and attorney. He also is a Board Director for the U.S. Conference of Democratic Workplaces. His writing on cooperatives and self-management has been published in Dollars & Sense, Grassroots Economic Organizing, Peace Review, and The Stanford Law & Policy Review.

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Aug 20, 2010 10:02:00 PM (3 weeks ago)

The Bay Area needs to act like a city-state

A good argument for regaining local economic control through city or regional banks and currencies, as well as economic planning institutions.

From SFGate.com
Paul Saffo
Sunday, July 11, 2010

It is July and once again California has no budget. The Legislature is gridlocked and the governor is wrestling with state Controller John Chiang in a reprise of his annual minimum-wage stunt. In short, Sacramento is fiddling its tired old tune while California's economy crumbles.

It is clear that Sacramento can't solve California's problems. It is also clear that California's voters are unwilling to force real change, preferring merely to add to the state's thicket of ruinous, gridlock-inducing initiatives. Meanwhile, the mess in Sacramento is threatening the Bay Area's economic future.

That is why the Bay Area needs to start thinking like a city-state. In an age when nations have become so large that their citizens no longer identify with distant governments, city-states are political units large enough to have a global economic impact but small enough for even the most casual citizen to understand the relationships that make their city-state work. Politicians are local and thus more inclined to pragmatism and constructive action. Businesses understand that their fortunes are tied to the success of the local community. This balance between effect and size and the tendency toward social cohesion make contemporary city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong bright spots in an uncertain global economy.

The Bay Area has all the qualities of a successful city-state. Consider geography: The Bay Area isn't an island like Singapore but, like Hong Kong, it is defined by a central bay and bordered by mountains. There are no "Welcome to the Bay Area" signs on our highways, yet we all know where we leave the rest of California and enter the Bay Area.

Successful city-states have outsize economies compared to their neighbors'. If the Bay Area were to secede from California, it would instantly become the world's 25th largest economy, ahead of Austria, Taiwan, Greece and Denmark.

City-states have global business reputations. Singapore is synonymous with pragmatic corruption-free business; Hong Kong is famous for its trading savvy. The Bay Area is the global model for innovation and entrepreneurship, a fact underscored by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's recent pilgrimage to Silicon Valley in search of new ideas. The Bay Area has launched industries from personal computing and digital media to biotech, and is home to more fast-growing companies than anywhere else in the United States.

City-states have distinct identities. The Bay Area is at once diverse and socially cohesive, with a strong sense of self-identity. Residents may joke about the Bay to Breakers or the latest resolution passed by the People's Republic of Berkeley, but they are also quick to explain to outsiders why the Bay Area is so special. This cohesion can be the basis of an all-important common ground, missing elsewhere in California as the Bay Area faces up to the coming economic challenges.

City-states have pragmatic governments. Pragmatism grows up from the local level, where decisionmakers witness the consequences of their decisions in their own backyards. Bay Area cities may be in considerable pain, but cities like San Jose started facing up to their problems years before Sacramento got serious, and towns like San Carlos have been proactive in attempts to re-engineer services (the city recently outsourced its police department). The Bay Area might not resemble Singapore with its highly disciplined government ministries, but our local governmental bodies have shown remarkable foresight in creating regional bodies like BART, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Association of Bay Area Governments and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to achieve pragmatic long-term goals. City-states also have awkward relationships with their neighbors. Malaysia still resents Singapore's independence and success, and Hong Kong citizens regularly oppose policies imposed on it by Beijing's central government. The Bay Area hasn't experienced this sort of tension with Sacramento, or other California regions, but it is time to do so. Tension would signal that the Bay Area is finally acting as a single body when it comes to looking out for its vital interests.

As a city-state, the Bay Area needs to remind our representatives in Sacramento that they represent us, not the entire state, much less a political party. Our local politicians also need to make themselves heard directly in Sacramento and Washington as Bay Area voices and not merely as representatives of local cities. And Bay Area business, academic and cultural leaders need to do the same.

This sounds like a recipe for regional selfishness, but it also could be what breaks California's ruinous political gridlock and rescues the Golden State's economy. A sudden outbreak of city-state pragmatism might shock Sacramento out of its ideological deadlock and into a serious exploration of how to effect essential but unpopular solutions - from service cuts and tax increases to a rewriting of our state Constitution.

And if the rest of the state doesn't come to its senses, perhaps the Bay Area should follow Singapore's example in 1965 and threaten to secede. If we stopped tax payments to Sacramento and embargoed the export of iPhones, the rest of California would beg us to return - and on our own terms.

Aug 18, 2010 7:48:00 PM (3 weeks ago)

How Money Separates Us

by Mira Luna

I came to currency work out of a sense of hope for a new economy that builds relationships between people and with nature rather than breaking them. I also come from a place of trauma. I have watched through my activist work people being exploited in sweatshops, people being poisoned to death or disability, and the Earth that I love so much be carelessly destroyed. I have also experienced trauma of exploitation, abuse and alienation in personal relationships as a result of the money paradigm.

In my activist work, I see people destroying each other and the Earth in order to gain a profit or just make a living in poorly designed economy that doesn’t provide enough money for everyone to feel secure. They chase after pieces of paper or numbers in an account in cyberspace believing this is the only way to get their needs met. They obsessively and blindly funnel their energy into systems that doesn't care about their survival at all. Survival in that system requires insensitivity, callousness and often pure luck (being born white, male or with rich parents or simply a good gamble on the stock market). We turn a blind eye to abuse of the Earth and vulnerable people in order play the game and hope that we win. Winning doesn't require merit of good behavior and usually involves someone else losing.

In my personal relationships, I see my friends, family, coworkers and lovers try to maximize their share of the pie. They see me as separate from them, especially when I need help buying medicine, conveniently reconnecting when I seem more well or financially independent (which is really challenging when you have a life-threatening, disabling illness). In several relationships, I’ve had boyfriends reconsider our relationship because I didn’t make enough or they saw the hole of medical debt I’m in and run away scared. I’ve had friends and partners who have lots of money sit by and watch me get ill again as I couldn’t afford the right medicine. I’ve had family members stop contacting me for fear I’ll ask them for money, even if I never had. I’ve also had people close to me steal money from me or not pay me back even when they are able. In other people's relationships, I see separate bank accounts, prenuptial agreements, and bitter divorces, as well as organizations fighting over grants money, businesses firing vulnerable workers, and so on. I struggle all the time as I see my old fears manifest. On my side, I have enough love and compassion to want everyone to be provided for, but sometimes I feel have to protect myself and the little money I have in order to stay alive.

If you don’t trust others to take care of you and so you don’t take care of them, then they will feel the same way. On the other hand, when you take care of others and trust them to take care of you in return, the more they will feel able to trust you to do the same. It's a chain reaction, like the flap of a butterfly's wings or the fall of a domino. The trust I am speaking of requires you to jump out on a limb the same way you do in serious romantic relationship. Yet, I am asking you to do this with almost everyone you meet. There are people who are so far from ready to make the leap that making that leap yourself to meet them may only serve to crush your ability to trust anyone in the future. But I believe most people can, and the more people we can make that leap with together, the more we will have a community of trust that provides much more security than any bank account ever could.

And what if my happiness was bound up in yours? What if we recognized our connection to each other so strongly that we knew we need to trust in order to truly be happy and we knew we needed to take care of each other in order not to feel the others’ suffering so we could feel their joy. I see so many people separated from each other, by money, by fear, by their work and they feel there is no alternative. So they try to create happiness through buying things or going on fancy vacations, and a deep depression lingers just below the surface. Some of these people go to a potluck or the Really Really Free Market or Burning Man and I see them come alive because their needs are being met without worrying about the scarcity of money and therefore not holding a wall between beings that long for connection.

We’ve all had traumas around interpersonal money issues and around the destructive capacity of profit-maximization. Can we get over them? I am not asking you to jump off a cliff with me right now. I am asking you to start making small steps to take care of the people around you and the Earth without fear of money. We don’t need money at all to do work or to get most of things we need if we are creative and have community. I am also advocating that when you do this, you tell people you trust them to take care of you when you need it so that they know there is string attached to your help and you may need to use it some day. Strings are good, they weave together healthy, reciprocal community.

Even as we do this, we need to build measures for collective security, like healthcare and housing. Most healthcare could be provided through alternative and preventive care outside the mainstream healthcare system, but occasionally we need expensive medicines or hospital care. We should have universal, guaranteed healthcare so people can feel more able to let go and trust that they won’t die for lack of money. We also need to make sure everyone has a place to live and food. The fear of not being able to afford rent or mortgage, and therefore being homeless, also drives people to fight over money or take on unethical work. I believe if we can get government or form our own collectives to take care of these basic needs in a more formal and secure manner, we could meet almost all of other needs through more informal, relationship-based collective action and mutual aid, like barter, timebanks, and gifting circles. Collectivity and mutual aid would flourish as energy is freed up and fears about our most basic needs not being met disappear. It would also be helpful to have systematic ways of rewarding people for doing good rather than luck or bad behavior, such as timebanks and local currencies. Without formal measures, we are still all responsible for each others’ care.

We are all connected. As you realize and actualize this, you may notice that you feel happier as you feel walls built by money drop down. You may feel more loved and relaxed. You may feel like you can start planning to quit an unethical job and direct your energy in a better way. You may feel like you can move your investments to sustainable and equitable local projects since you see the value of community and a healthy Earth above money for care and security.

Separation is a painful illusion that nullifies love, love is the source of happiness, and your happiness is tied in a web of connection to the happiness of the world. Take the leap. I am ready to join you.

Aug 16, 2010 6:12:00 PM (3 weeks ago)

An Outline History of Cooperatives in the Bay Area and California

By John Curl

John Curl is author of For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements and Communalism in America. Oakland: PM Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-60486-072-6

COLLECTIVITY IN INDIAN TIMES

For thousands of years the San Francisco Bay Area supported a population of thousands of Ohlones, Miwoks, and Wintuns living in a stable life system based on peaceful collectivity.

The basic societal unit was a tribelet of typically about 250 people. There were about thirty permanent villages scattered around the Bay and into the delta, alongside rivers and creeks. The typical village had about fifteen houses arranged in a circle around a plaza, with a communal sweat lodge. Their houses were dome-shaped, framed with bent willow poles, between about six and twenty feet in diameter, each housing an extended family; the sweat lodges were usually twice as big as the family houses. Besides these main villages, there were other settlements used at different harvest seasons, and families and tribelets moved about throughout the cycle. The bay was also shared with tribelets having their primary villages inland, who made treks here in regular seasons for particular harvests.

Most tribelets spoke different dialects, but all lived in very similar life patterns. Food was readily available, so they lived entirely by hunting and gathering; hunger was entirely unknown. Annual intertwined harvests were connected with rituals and social celebrations oriented toward maintaining balance in the natural world and among people. Among the tribelets there was a complex network of trade, marriage, gift-giving, and ritual feasts. There were occasional conflicts between tribelets or villages, but differences were almost invariably settled with gifts as reparations to wronged parties.

Most hunting and gathering was done by extended families, but periodically they worked in larger communal groups. Communal hunts were invariably followed by great feasts and celebrations. Catches were divided in a ritual manner, with different parts of particular animals going to designated family members, relatives and neighbors.

Each tribelet had an elder man or woman in a chief-like position, but this position held mostly moral authority, and a chief's power varied with the respect commanded by deeds. A new chief was chosen by a consensus of elders, always however from the same family. The chief's main job was to maintain the traditional balances within the village, and tribelet, and with neighboring tribelets. This included seeing to the general welfare of the community. It was considered a great personal shame on the chief if anyone in the tribelet was needy. Cooperation and sharing were virtues, and competitiveness was not. People gained status in the community through generosity. Private property in land was unknown. Families and tribelets had "collecting rights" to particular areas to gather foods, but were expected to be generous to neighbors; should a harvest in one area fail, the unfortunate tribelet or family could traditionally share in the resources of adjoining areas. It was virtually unthinkable to let a neighbor go hungry. The elderly, crippled, sick, and children were well cared for by the village. A person's goods were not handed down in the family after death, but were dispersed or destroyed.

SPANISH and MEXICAN PERIODS

When the Spanish arrived, about 350,000 Native people lived in Alta California, including about 10,000 each of Ohlone, Miwok, and Wintun. The Spanish began their first settlement and mission in San Diego in 1769. San Francisco Mission Dolores was founded in 1776, and the following year the first East Bay mission at Santa Clara. In all, they organized a chain of 21 missions. The missions acquired great wealth by forced Indian labor, the primary economy of the region. Within a short time, the Native peoples' way of life disrupted and destroyed. After a half century of Spanish rule, ended by the Mexican Revolution of 1821, the Native population was reduced by over 2/3rds.

Californio settlers from Mexico, many artisans among them, arrived in groups that were cooperative en route, then dispersed and lived in ranchos or agricultural settlements near the missions. Californios were never very numerous, and their population peaked around 7,000. There was little private land during the Spanish period. The government did not offer community land grants in California, as they did in New Mexico, where the cooperative ejido system was widespread. Instead, they granted land to individuals for cattle ranching. Most of California land was considered usable primarily for ranching, but over 30 acres was needed for each head, so grants were large. During the entire Spanish period, fewer than thirty land grants were issued. Much of the East Bay, including the sites of Oakland and Berkeley, was granted to the Peralta family as Rancho San Antonio, less than a year before the declaration of the Mexican Republic in 1821. When the new Mexican government took over, it accelerated the land grant program, and there were over 1,000 California land grants by 1840.

AMERICAN INVASION and GOLD RUSH

Between 1840-46 about 1,500 US citizens entered California, mostly in overland emigrant parties from the mid-west. These Anglo-American home seekers, beginning in 1841 with Bidwell's Party of 32 emigrant men, women and children from Missouri, were typically cooperative and collective en route in their wagon trains, with elected leaders. Although some settled together after arriving, most disbanded and each family went its own way.

Soon after the American conquest of 1846-48, gold was discovered and people poured into California, thousands in emigrant parties, with San Francisco the dock to prepare for the jump into the gold fields. Over 100 parties of ?Americans? from the mid-west and east flooded in overland in 1849, and large numbers arrived from the east by sea, about 77,000 people in all, exploding the non-Indian population four times, then almost doubling it again the next year. About 20,000 entered from Mexico, Britain, France, Spain, Chile, Peru, Hawaii, China and other countries. The region and the city quickly took on an international character.

At the beginning of the Gold Rush, Yerba Buena?soon to be renamed San Francisco?was still a sleepy port town of 812 people, dealing mostly in cowhides and tallow. Almost overnight the entire fabric of Bay Area and California society changed. By the summer of 1849, San Francisco had become a booming commercial center of 5,000, and by 1850, of 25,000. By 1850 over half the population was engaged in mining. All routes to the mines started at San Francisco, and the gold flowed back through it. The Bay Area suddenly became the hub of the region.

In the mines this situation produced what many early historians described as a unique social spirit. "It is sometimes said," an historian wrote in 1886, "that the miners of 1848 and 1849 had the most interesting and efficient system of cooperation, successful for years, but finally broken down and destroyed by the encroachments of capital. They joined their labor, man to man, in many a company to turn the course of mountain streams and mine the rich gravel beds below. Hundreds of such organizations, most assuredly cooperative, existed during the mining days. . . but by 1856 most of the mining rights and water rights acquired by them had lapsed, or had passed into the hands of capitalists. Some of these simple cooperative groups fulfilled the purpose for which they were organized and then disbanded." (Schinn)

"Every man was a laborer," a later historian added, "whether or not he had previously been a teacher, lawyer, farmer, mechanic, preacher or sailor. Physical labor was honorable. Class lines and class distinctions were forgotten, and a universal spirit of rough democracy prevailed. This wholehearted democratic spirit of the mining days permeated virtually every phase of early California life." (Cross).

California labor historian L. Eaves wrote in 1910, "There were miners' unions in all the camps - meetings where the conditions under which the mines should be worked were freely discussed, and regulations binding upon the community agreed upon. They heartily approved of the prevailing regime of absolute democracy and equality of opportunity, and vigorously opposed all efforts to introduce any class of servile labor."

SQUATTERS

Large numbers also flooded into California looking for land to farm. Most became squatters. Apart from the Spanish and Mexican land grants, most of California was considered public land, and that was where miners and squatters primarily staked claims. There was deep sympathy and solidarity between miners and squatters, for those who failed in the mines commonly turned to farming.

Squatting quickly became widespread throughout rural California. In the westward expanding US in the early 1800s, squatting was sanctioned by the ?preemption? acts, which offered a process by which squatting on unsurveyed land could become a legal homestead. (These laws would be superceded by the Homestead Act of 1862.) The first California legislature in 1850 awarded the right of preemption to anyone settled on and improving up to 160 acres of public land.

In the fall of 1850, after just two years of boom, the economy tanked hard. Squatting quickly became common in urban areas, including San Francisco. Many urban squatters were former miners. Mutual aid played a predominant role in urban squatter settlements.

The squatters claimed that all land should be presumed to be public until legal title should be proven, and in San Francisco a Settlers' Party was formed to protect squatters' rights. In the East Bay the squatter town called Contra Costa was founded in 1850, which would develop into Oakland. There were squatter riots in Sacramento in 1850, put down by two militia companies. In 1856 the State legislature passed another law recognizing squatters' rights, but it was struck down by the state Supreme Court.

By the treaty that ended the war, Mexican land grants were to be respected. This involved over eight million acres of the best land in California, held by about 800 people. Almost none of this land was opened to homesteaders, but instead most of it was taken over intact by Anglo-Americans, often by fraud and swindle. Land speculators had a heyday. Most failed miners found themselves stonewalled out of the farming areas. Thousands of small holdings were snatched out from under settlers by false and forged claims.

The national land question, debated since the founding of the US, was briefly resolved when Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862, partly as an incentive to northern workers during the Civil War. California was seen as a social safety value for workers exploited in eastern cities, and as area of social experimentation. But most of this "free" western land, and the best of it, in California as elsewhere, quickly wound up in the pockets of speculators and the railroads. Over 20 million acres of California were granted to the railroads, which quickly came to dominate the state. Only a small percentage of those who poured into the west ever held onto any land. By 1870 the ownership of California land was firmly established in the pattern we have to this day. In 1871 Henry George wrote, "The land of California is already to a large extent monopolized by a few individuals." Out of a population of 600,000 at that time, sixteen men each controlled over 84 square miles, about 500 owned half the farmable land in the state, and the vast majority were landless.

WORKER COOPERATIVES

Industrial worker cooperatives were common in early San Francisco. The Knights of Labor had a presence, and encouraged worker cooperatives with their vision of a Cooperative Commonwealth and their nationwide chain of almost 200 worker cooperatives.

In 1867 the San Francisco boot and shoemakers staged a general strike in their industry in protest of reductions of prices for piece work. This was connected with the introduction of Chinese labor. The strike failed and many of the workers formed the United Workingmen?s Cooperative Boot and Shoe Manufacturing Company of San Francisco. Two decades later it was still ranked as ?one of the most solid business houses in the city.?

Completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 resulted in layoffs of many workers, causing unemployment, and leading to worker cooperatives. In 1870 there were three cooperative foundries in San Francisco, a cooperative saddle and harness company, and five cooperative boot and shoe factories, some of them organized by the shoemaker labor union known as the Knights of St. Crispin. In 1872 the Pacific United Workingmen?s Furniture Manufacturing Company organized with a capital stock of $50,000.

Historian Clare Horner lists the following worker cooperatives in San Francisco during the early period (with year founded): Carpenters? Eight-Hour Protective Union Co-operative Planing Mill (1867); Journeymen?s Co-operative Boot and Shoe Manufactory (1867); United Workmen?s Boot and Shoe Factory (1868); Metropolitan Boot and Shoemakers? Union (1868); Women?s Co-operative Union (ornamental goods, clothing) (1868); St. Crispin?s Co-operative Boot and Shoe Factory (1869); California Co-operative Boot and Shoe Factory (1869); Miners? Foundry (1869); co-operative tailors (1870); Woman?s Co-operative Printing Union (1870); Golden State Iron Works (1870); Columbia Foundry (1871); co-operative printing shop (1871); co-operative laundry (1877); Co-operative Watch Repairing Co. (1881).

How long many of these worker cooperatives continued is not recorded, but it is likely that most of them succumbed during the wave of repression of the Knights of Labor chain of cooperatives in the years following the Haymarket Massacre of 1886.

All Chinese people entered California as contract labor for one of six companies, but many soon set up independent businesses, particularly laundries, often as cooperatives. The six companies were involved in organizing an extensive and very disciplined system of Chinese-American worker cooperatives in the San Francisco area.

CO-OP STORES & FARMER CO-OPS

Cooperative Union Store opened in San Francisco in 1867, the first cooperative store in California, organized on principles similar to Rochdale. By 1875 there were six consumer co-op stores in the state. But they ?fell victim to the prosperity that followed the panic of 1873, and to the reaction following too rapid a growth.? (Parker)

In 1874 the Italian vegetable farmers of San Francisco organized a very successful cooperative market, the Colombo Market. In 1910 they supplied 95% of all vegetables consumed in the city. All participating farmers sold under a system fixed prices.

In rural areas in the 1870s the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry organized cooperative stores, creameries, agricultural marketing and purchasing associations, and banks in California. In the following decade the Grange faded, but other rural cooperatives continued, particularly in irrigation, road building, farming, telephones, fruit picking and packing, warehouses, supply purchasing and marketing associations.

In 1904 the Cooperative Meat Company of Oakland was organized by the Butchers Union as result of attempt of employers to introduce the ?open shop.? They also opened a sausage factory and operated a branch in East Oakland.

Mutual fire insurance was widespread in California. In 1900 there were mutual companies in six counties; by 1909 in 17.

The Labor Exchange movement of 1889-1906 spread throughout the west, and ran 22 Exchanges in California. Beginning by organizing barter, a number of these Exchanges became Rochdale stores. Dos Palos Rochdale Co (1896) began as an exchange in 1896 and became the first specifically Rochdale store in California, while it continued to market farmer members? produce.

In 1894 the Altrurian Cooperative Councils, based in Oakland, organized the first cooperative store system in the urban Bay Area.

In 1899 representatives of a number of co-op stores in rural California communities came together in Oakland and organized the Pacific Coast Cooperative Union (PCCU). A co-op wholesale?Rochdale Wholesale Co.? opened in 1900 in San Francisco. At that time there were six stores in California. They set out to organize more stores, as they considered these needed to make the wholesale viable. An organizing bureau was formed, and by the end of 1900, there 28 stores in the Rochdale Family. In 1900 the PCCU and the Rochdale Wholesale Co. had the distinction of being the only cooperatives in the US sending delegates to Europe to the congress of the International Cooperative Alliance. In 1905, out of 65 co-op stores in California, 51 were part of the Rochdale group. Historian Ira Cross wrote in 1905: ?In no place is the cooperative movement so strong or so successful as in California.? In 1906, there were 100 stores. But the movement in San Francisco was hurt by the earthquake and fire. They moved the wholesale temporarily to Oakland. The financial panic of 1907 hurt many co-op branches. In 1910 there were about 50 stores in California, including San Jose, most in smaller towns. Of these, 46 were organized together in the Rochdale Family. Each store held stock in the Rochdale Wholesale Co. of San Francisco. They were attacked by other wholesalers, which were trying to force Rochdale into bankruptcy. Many stores were weak, and the wholesale needed a bigger movement to support it. In 1910 they reorganized on new plan. Called the California Rochdale Co., they aggressively organized new branches. Branch managers worked under centralized supervision of the manager of Rochdale Wholesale Co. By 1912 they were a chain of 12 branches. They collapsed in 1913, and all branches closed. Rochdale Wholesale Co. was on verge of collapsing, with less than 30 co-op store as members. However, there were still 100 independent associations in California.

The Pacific Cooperative League (PCL) was formed in 1913 as an organizing & informational organization. They had 30 co-ops members in California at that time. They began with buying clubs as a mail-order scheme attached to Rochdale Co. The first few years they sold only coal, sugar, and groceries. In 1917 they began to organize local stores. Local members formed ?management committees,? but the managers were selected and supervised by the central organization. In 1919 they had 32 branches in California and Arizona. By 1920 they were extended into OR, WA, ID, NV, NM, & TX. They took over the Rochdale wholesale, and joined the International Cooperative Alliance. In 1921 they had 17 stores and a $4 million volume. But they were soon in an internecine war with the Cooperative League (CL) over centralization. CL, founded in 1916 and based in the east, was the primary national cooperative organization in the US. The PCL was also more radically oriented than the CL, and PCL supported the Seattle General Strike of 1919, while CL condemned it. PCL was refused recognition at the 1920 CL National Congress. In the post-war boom of 1923, PCL collapsed, primarily due to overexpansion. But in the Bay Area, the East Bay Pacific Cooperative League continued and resurfaced as a Self-Help cooperative in 1930.

After the economy collapsed in 1929, only 5 co-op stores remained in California.

LAND COLONIZATION

From the early years of the American period, the Bay Area saw waves of urban workers organize cooperatively to form rural colonies in the surrounding region. Many early colonies were planned to be collective only at first. Typically a time period was set up, often ten years during which the land was worked in common and all income from crops, etc., was devoted to paying for it and improving it; afterward the land was divided into individual plots. Many however had an aspect of land development schemes, and many speculators made killings through swindles. "Semi-cooperative schemes are abundant" a 19th century historian wrote, "temporary associations to buy and divide up land, or colonies where each purchaser agrees to certain mutual improvements, are matters of frequent occurrence." (Schinn)

One of the earliest colonies was Anaheim (1858). The site was prepared using Mexican labor; as soon as the workers moved onto it, it was divided, but continued to have many cooperative aspects for some time. There was a long string of colonies in the 1870s and '80s, many involving different immigrant groups: Kingsbury (Swedish), Selma (Danes), Rosendale (English), El Chino, Elizabeth, Citrus. The Italian-Swiss Colony, originating from a San Francisco credit union of immigrant workers, never divided their land, but became a joint-stock company revolving about their vineyard.

An historian wrote in 1935, "The land-colonization project, as a means of solving the farm-labor problem dates from a very early period... Land colonization, on a collective basis, has a definite background in California. Most of the early settlements in the state were based upon group colonization; a large number of the rural communities, which later developed into cities, were settled by groups of settlers . . . For many years the practice was for a promoter to purchase a large tract of land, subdivide it into small acreage lots, endow the subdivision with a euphonious name and then proceed to interest some group in (it) as a community. . .Many cooperative and semi experimental ?new life? colonies were established... It is unquestionably true that land-settlement promoters exploited to the full the social idealism of prospective immigrants who wanted to found new communities in California. Some of these early land colonies were advertised as cooperative or semi-cooperative ventures. In fact, some elements of cooperation were to be found in many of the colony settlements. The older colony settlements were, by and large, successful, but as the state grew the colony idea was appropriated by unscrupulous promoters who worked great havoc with their pretentious swindles." (McWilliams) A state legislature inquiry in 1915 of 32 land colony settlements begun between 1900-15 found swindles connected with almost every one.

But the vast majority of colonists were not swindlers. Many were part of a larger movement for social justice. The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), organized in 1852 in San Francisco with the leadership of Burnette Haskell, J. J. Martin and Frank Roney, tried to renew the old First International (which had disbanded six years earlier). Haskell was a newspaper editor and a leader of the radical wing of the Knights of Labor. Martin would soon be the main organizer of the area's first successful Seamen's Union. Roney had been a leader of the anti-Kearney faction of the Workingmen's Party of California, and along with Haskell, would be one of the central leaders of the Federated Trades Council.

This new IWA met with a fair amount of success over the next several years, which was a time of rising radical worker movements around the country. But during the nation-wide police repression after the Haymarket Massacre of 1886 in Chicago, the IWA dissolved, along with most other radical groups in America. Seventy of the leaders and members, including Haskell and Martin, thereupon formed Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth, "To illustrate and validate the premises on which the labor movement is based." They homesteaded a tract of 600 acres in Tulare county. Rising at their peak to 300 members, by 1890 they had constructed an 18-mile road and a ferry, published a weekly magazine, operated a sawmill, besides building homes, orchards and gardens. They functioned under a system of labor-checks based on the amount of time worked; the checks were convertible for any item at the community-run store. But reactionary forces in the state soon took note and the US Congress quickly passed a bill creating Sequoia National Forest out of Kaweah under the false grounds that their original homesteads filings had been technically deficient. Two years later the Kaweahns were driven from the land by US cavalry and arrested.

The Cooperative Brotherhood of Winters Island, in the Bay near the delta, was begun in 1893 by Erastus Kelsey from the Nationalist Club of Oakland and Kate Nevins, an organizer from the Farmers' Alliance and Populist Party. All three organizations backed cooperativization of the economy; the Alliance organized the largest farmers' cooperative network in the United States, taking up where the National Grange had left off. Winters Island began with 100 members, but probably no more than a third of these ever actually lived there. Their plan for intensive agriculture got underway, yet the entire operation remained dependent on outside members' support. Then the country hurtled into a deep depression and outside money dried up, strangling the colony. The last residents dwindled away about ten years after its founding.

Altruria community came out of the Christian Socialist movement, a powerful influence nationwide at the time; its name came from a utopian novel by Wm. Dean Howells. A Berkeley Unitarian minister, Edward Payne, sparked the idea for the colony in 1894. Cooperative Councils were formed on both sides of the Bay. They bought a plot of land near Santa Rosa and thirty people moved onto it, mostly working families, a majority of them artisans. They used labor-checks for their work and practiced equality of goods. There was an entrance fee. They were supported by a string of clubs as far away as Los Angeles. But they had financial problems. Although they had seven houses and a hotel built by the end of their first year, they had to fold, broke into three smaller groups, which stayed together another year, then the entire project dissipated. Meanwhile, however, the Altrurian Cooperative Councils were also organizing their cooperative store system in Oakland.

Fort Romie community was begun in 1898 by the San Francisco Salvation Army as an attempt to create "a peasant proprietorship in California by settling the unemployed on the land." They bought a tract in the Salinas Valley, near Soledad, close to a sugar beet factory. The tract was cut up into smaller lots of 10-20 acres and distributed to poor families mostly from San Francisco. By 1903 there were 70 colonist families there, raising beets through collective irrigation and using many cooperative techniques. Although the plan never got beyond this first plot, it was widely held to be a very successful demonstration project. The EPIC movement of 1934 would again take up the idea of settling the urban unemployed on the land.

Japanese immigrants formed the cooperative colony of Livingston in 1910. They did so well that state planners began proposing that the government help organize colonies of non-Japanese in the area. The planners also had the racist side motivation of limiting Japanese expansion in the area. With planning from the University of California, Durham and Delhi communities were set up nearby in 1919. But the land chosen was poor and the post-World War I deflation brought both colonies to ruin; both finally disbanded in 1931. Livingston however, flourished until the Japanese internment during World War II.

Job Harriman was manager of the San Francisco Altrurian cooperative store in 1895, ran for Vice President of the United States as Gene Debs' running mate in 1900 on the Socialist Party, then came close to being elected the first Socialist mayor of Los Angeles in 1910. In 1914 Harriman led a large group of cooperators out onto land outside Los Angeles to form Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony. Like Kaweah, it grew out of a failed union activist movement. Much of their support and many of their members came from the Bay Area, although the primary base was in southern California. A year after founding they had 150 members and by 1917, a thousand. They operated a printshop, shoemaker, cannery, laundry, bakery, cabinet shop, brick makers, and other industries. But they were constantly harassed by authorities for their radicalism, were beset with organizational problems (they were overly managerial), and found their water rights taken out from under them by the courts. They bought new land in Louisiana, and many moved there while the California bankruptcy court closed Llano. New Llano grew to a peak of over 300 residents during the Great Depression.

SELF-HELP in the GREAT DEPRESSION
Self-Help Coops sprang up soon after the economic crash of 1929. A survey in December 1934 counted 310 different groups, with over one-half million members, with people involved in 29 states, about two-thirds of them in about 175 groups in California. Several forms of Self-Help were usually distinguished, although most groups practiced them all to varying degrees: exchange among members, exchange of labor for goods or services, and cooperative production for use, trade or sale. Exchange among members was the most widespread, and commonly involved partial payment in cash. It was only in the later stage of the movement that many groups turned to production, and most never did to an appreciable extent. The groups appeared wherever conditions were ripe among the unemployed and underemployed, particularly near farming areas, It was truly a spontaneous mass movement.
Numerically the largest concentration was in Los Angeles county, where about 75,000 people in 107 groups participated in the harvest of fall 1932, Among the earliest in the state were the LA Exchange, started by Bessie Mays, the Compton Relief Association, begun by a group of World War I veterans, and the Unemployed Association of Santa Ana (in Orange county). Since farming areas were easily accessible in the south, most of these groups organized large numbers of people to harvest produce in exchange for a share of the crops. Nearby Orange county was also an area of concentration.
In the San Francisco Bay Area the Self-Help movement reached its most sophisticated level of development. The first Bay Area labor exchange was set up by the Pacific Cooperators League of Oakland in 1930. The summer and fall of 1932 saw the biggest blossoming. By spring 1933 there were 22 Self-Help groups in the East Bay, nine in San Francisco and the Peninsula, one in San Jose.
The Berkeley Unemployed Association, at 2110 Parker Street, had sections that included sewing, quilting and weaving, shoe repair, barber, food canning and conserving, wood yard, kitchen and dining room, commissary, garage, machine shop, woodshop, mattress factory, and painter and carpenter teams. At their height they involved several hundred people and had full medical and dental coverage. A visitor to the wood shop in December 1934 reported them working on office desks and furniture, as well as fruit lugs for the farm exchange section. They later changed their name to the Berkeley Self-Help Cooperative, typical of many groups who considered themselves no longer unemployed.
A few blocks away, on Delaware Street, was the Pacific Cooperative League (PCL), which operated a garage, flour mill, wood yard, store, canning and weaving projects, and ran a newspaper, the Herald of Cooperation, later called the Voice of the Self-Employed. They laid claim to having organized one of the earliest labor exchanges of the Depression, when they traded an Atascadero rancher their harvesting labor for part of his apricot crop in September 1930. The PCL was not a new organization like almost all the rest, but dated back decades, surviving the death of their parent organization and staggering along at a low level until sparked by the Great Depression.
The San Jose Unemployed Relief Council (later called the San Jose Self-Help Co-op) was formed by a group of laid-off cannery workers. They soon had a wood yard, a fruit-and-vegetable drying yard, a store, laundry, farm, soap factory, barbershop, shoe shop, commissary, sewing project and contracted for a wide variety of jobs and services, At their height they were about 1200 strong.
The Peninsula Economic Exchange, in Palo Alto, was organized by a group of unemployed white collar workers, professionals, and bankrupt merchants. With about a hundred member families, they had a store, a farm, a cannery, woodyard, and fishing boat. Unlike most of the other northern groups, they issued scrip, in-house currency, to members for hours worked. "Scrip exchanges" were more common at first in southern California, but were usually plagued with problems.
The most highly developed group in California was the Unemployed Exchange Association (U.X.A.), begun in 1932 in Oakland with the leadership of Carl Rhodehamel, an unemployed electrical engineer. Beyond organizing barter and labor exchange, they began producing articles for trade and sale. They set up a foundry and machine shop, a woodshop, garage, a soap factory, a print shop, a food conserving project, nursery and adult school. They had eighteen trucks that they?d rebuilt from junk. They branched outside of town, and maintained a woodlot in Dixon, ranches near Modesto and Winters, lumber mills near Oroville and in the Santa Cruz mountains. At their peak they were providing 1500 people with farm produce, medical and dental benefits, auto repair, some housing and other services. They called it Reciprocal Economy. They made no distinction in labor value between men and women, skilled and unskilled. At first they functioned entirely by barter; it was all done on the books, without a circulating scrip. Members could write "orders" ? like checks ? against their account to other members for services provided. Eventually they began making trades that involved part payment in cash. All work was credited at one hundred points per hour. Members exchanged points earned for their choice of items in the commissary. Each article brought in was given a point value, which approximated the labor time that went into it, with some adjustment for comparable money value. They offered many services for points, including complete medical and dental, garage, nursery school, and barber. They provided some housing and all of their firewood needs. At their peak they would distribute forty tons of food per week to their members.
Unions and Self-Help groups often worked together. A good number of workers belonged to both a union and a co-op. Some Self-Help co-ops, such as the San Jose Unemployed Relief Council, were staffed by unionists. Others, such as the U.X.A., decided specifically that they would not seek to take over any jobs already being performed by steadily employed labor. This friendship paid off in mutual solidarity during the San Francisco General Strike. The Self-Help co-ops of the Bay Area were able to move about freely bringing supplies to the strikers, while "normal" commerce was blockaded. Both the unemployed and the strikers had fruit and vegetables "at a time when money could not procure them."
While the New Deal famously helped rural America through assisting in organizing co-ops for irrigation, electricity, farming, and other infrastructure, they drew the line at urban worker co-ops, which might challenge the wage system in industries. The New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) of 1935 helped with grants to Self-Help co-ops, then also hurt them by not permitting the sale of products made in the co-ops. The WPA struck a mortal blow by not permitting work in Self-Help co-ops to count as WPA hours. Unemployed people desperately needed a cash income, so many?particularly younger people?flooded out of the Self-Help co-ops for WPA jobs.

EPIC MOVEMENT 1934
In September 1933, while the U.X.A. and the other Self-Help co-ops were on an upswing, Upton Sinclair, novelistic chronicler of American social reality, long a leading member of the California Socialist Party, suddenly changed his registration to Democrat and threw his hat into the ring for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination with a program he called EPIC: End Poverty In California.
With "Production For Use" as its rallying cry, the EPIC plan proposed creating state agencies to take over idle farms and production facilities and turn them over to the unemployed, to ?establish State land colonies whereby the unemployed may become self-sustaining, to acquire factories and production plants whereby the unemployed may produce the basic necessities required for themselves and for the land colonies, and to operate these factories and house and feed and care for the workers..., (to) maintain a distribution system of each other?s products..., thus constituting a complete industrial system, a new and self-sustaining world for those our present system cannot employ.?

EPIC clubs sprang up around the state like grass after rain, ultimately 2000 of them. The EPIC News reached a circulation of 1.5 million. But most of the Democratic Old Guard defected to the Republicans to oppose Sinclair. In the midst of possibly the most vicious and libelous campaign in California history, Sinclair went to Roosevelt for support, and met with him. Sinclair recounts the conversation:

"At the end he told me that he was coming out for production for use. I said, 'If you do that, Mr. President, it will elect me.' 'Well,' he said, 'I am going to do it.'"
FDR indicated he would come out for the plan during a nationwide radio address scheduled for the week before the election, but in the end FDR said nothing about production for use. Sinclair got 37%, the Republican 49%, and a third party candidate the difference.
After the defeat, a large number of EPIC groups planned buying clubs and stores. Over the following year, they succeeded in organizing 210 consumer co-ops in California, with 50,000 members, almost all the groups newly organized. Among the most successful at first were New Day Co-op in Oakland, with 1000 members, and Producers-Consumers Co-op at 668 Haight Street in San Francisco. But these and the great majority of the others soon collapsed.
BERKELEY CO-OP
Consumer Cooperatives of Berkeley (CCB) began as one of these buying clubs formed in 1936, soon joining with a Finnish Co-op that started around the same time. It was destined to become the largest and most successful consumer cooperative in the United States at its height in the 1970s, with 100,000 member families. In 1938, the Berkeley Co-op began its first campaign to promote stronger consumer protection laws and expressed solidarity with the labor movement. By 1957 the Berkeley Co-op had become the second largest urban cooperative in the United States. Further expansion resulted in a pharmacy, an arts and crafts co-op, a co-op book store, and a credit union. But along with expansion came problems. The Co-op News debated the issue, "How do we keep democratic control and participation while we continue to expand?" They had close ties with two other Bay Area cooperatives: the Palo Alto Co-op and Associated Cooperatives (AC), the regional wholesale. Both had been founded at about the same time as CCB, and involved some of the same people. Expansion of co-op stores into new areas was fueled by the wholesale?s perceived need to be larger to maximize economics of scale. Meanwhile, the Berkeley Co-op?s social accomplishments continued to mount. In 1962 they instituted "free speech tables" near entrances for literature and petitions. In 1963 they debated milk contamination from a proposed nearby nuclear power plant; supported a local anti-discrimination housing ordinance; stopped stocking products boycotted by the Central Labor Council. In 1964 they increased minority employment; held a food drive "to aid persons suffering Civil Rights discrimination" in Mississippi; pioneered biodegradable detergent with Co-op label. In 1965 they packaged meat with the better side down; lobbied for a bread and cereal enrichment law; educated on peanut butter additives. In 1966-67 they lobbied for a Fair Packaging and Labeling law; contributed to the United Farm Workers (UFW) co-op in Delano; instituted unit pricing on all shelves; lobbied for regulation of diet foods and for a unit pricing law; agitated against a phone rate increase; labeled all Dow products as boycotted because of their napalm production; assisted the legal defense fund for besieged integrated Southern co-ops. In 1968 they authorized centers to ban smoking; removed all nonunion grapes; withdrew from the Chamber of Commerce because of their consistent opposition to consumer legislation. In 1969 they battled against utility rate hikes; donated food to the Black Panthers children?s breakfast program; demanded the "immediate termination" of the military occupation of Berkeley by the National Guard (ordered by Governor Ronald Reagan because of People?s Park); posted statements at all co-op centers condemning the war; closed in solidarity during a People?s Park protest march and on Vietnam Moratorium Day.
At the same time, the co-op was continuously drained by failing expansion stores, and profits continued to spiral down. The truth had to be faced: expansion had failed. There were ten losing stores scattered around the north Bay Area, supported by the three still-thriving Berkeley Co-ops. "Just as the arrow was shot into the air, it fell back to earth," said president Fred Guy, "and in 1983 one by one all the losing operations were closed, at great financial loss, and the Co-op remained briefly with only the centers in Berkeley left, just being a community cooperative, which was perhaps what they should have remained all along.? In 1987 CCB filed bankruptcy, followed by the wholesale and the Palo Alto Co-op.
INTER-COMMUNALISM
The "inter-communalist" Black Panther Party, first organized in Oakland in 1966, ran a host of "survival programs pending political revolution." In Oakland this included a health clinic, free shoe factory, plumbing service, food and clothing, cooperative housing, job-finding service, transportation for elders, breakfast program for children, pest control, busing to prisons for visitors, and prisoners? commissary. All goods and services were free. The Panthers ran communal houses for full-time party workers. Through boycotts they convinced many businesses to recycle some of their profits back into the community through the Panthers? social projects.
COLLECTIVE MOVEMENT- COUNTERCULTURE
Starting in the mid-1960s, large numbers of young people worked to create a survival network outside of and against the capitalist system with a common ideological base of working to build a new social system based on cooperation and sharing ?within the shell of the old.? The mass media called it the ?counterculture? or ?alternative.? It was an era when many people, particularly young people, were searching for a better way to relate to the world and to each other. Many thought that they found it in collective and cooperative work. The world they rejected was based on hierarchy, power, and competition. They wanted a world based on equality, democracy, cooperation, sharing; a way to live and work that could liberate. In the mutual aid and support they found there, they saw the embryo of a new society in which the promises of America could at last become reality. The earliest rumblings of the counterculture probably came with the left?s rediscovery of the collective form of organization in the freedom rider groups of the early Civil Rights movement, and in the Anti-Vietnam war and student movements.

The collective form of organization helped break through formalistic ?democracy? at a moment when a new energy was bursting forth through the social fabric. Within a few years, dozens of these groups sprang up in numerous fields such as the women?s, ecology and anti-nuclear movements. Collectives were used to organize almost every activity from education, childcare, art, communications and counseling to legal services and recycling. Almost all the early countercultural forms chose the collective form because participants wanted their means to reflect their ends. These forms ranged from freestores to communes, from ?underground? newspapers to collective gardens, including cooperative houses, food conspiracies, and ?free? schools and universities. They developed the organizational technology that laid the base for the producer and merchant worker collectives and cooperatives that appeared in widespread areas.

Many of the early collectives tried to provide basic social services that capitalist society did not supply. Primarily young professionals formed the free clinics, law collectives and free schools. Others were connected to political movements, like the Young Patriots? clinic in Chicago and the Black Panthers? clinic in Oakland. Most clinics functioned through collectives of physicians, paraprofessionals and volunteers. Almost all had some combination of control by the worker collective and the community. Most of these social service collectives survived through donations and grants.

BAY AREA COLLECTIVES

Young people from all over the country were drawn to the San Francisco Bay Area, where conditions, including inexpensive housing, seemed ripe for a new consciousness. By the summer of 1966 the community of young people had grown to such proportions that it began to gather national attention in the news media. Communal households were widespread. A newspaper expressing the new consciousness appeared, the Oracle. The first ?Human Be-in? happened that fall in Golden Gate Park. The Haight became the hothouse in which the national movement called the counterculture was born.

The group known as the Diggers helped to channel the enormous energy that was exploding into the rudiments of a survival system outside of the old society. They began gathering necessities that were being wasted or hoarded, and redistributed them, organizing free food giveaways and a Freestore. Duplicated around the country, the Freestore was run entirely on collective energy. The idea was simple: people could bring and take what they wanted and needed.

But national attention brought a flood of people from all over the country to San Francisco in the summer of 1967, overwhelming the community and making it impossible to continue as it had been. Entrepreneurs looted the Freestore, coming at favorable hours to clean out anything sellable. This resulted in the store being replaced by a free box on the street.

Moving beyond the limitations of the Diggers? approach, people soon began setting up more organized structures. ?Alternative? news media, primarily ?underground? newspapers, grew to mass proportions around the country by the late 1960s, filled with information impossible to come by in the mainstream media. Collectives doing community service work were often ?open,? and almost anyone could join or participate as an unpaid volunteer. The open collective was for projects that attempted to draw in as much community energy and input as possible. In numerous university towns ?free universities? were set up, with courses in subjects ignored by the schools. These eventually gave way to a large variety of ?alternative? educational organizations.

Numerous collectives of every sort came out of the women?s and feminist movements. The collective structure was a natural form, as it provides group empowerment for previously disempowered people. A small collective group started the San Francisco Women?s Center in 1970. Over the following years, numerous women inspired by feminist ideology came together spontaneously into small consciousness-raising groups. Out of these developed many service projects, such as the Health Collectives and the Switchboard, to fill gaps not provided for by society; and many women? work collectives, such as Seven Sisters Construction, the Juice Bar, A Woman?s Place. The Women?s Center and Women?s Building became an umbrella organization of about eighteen collective projects.

Collectives hit the airwaves. In the Bay Area, listener-sponsored KPFA radio, begun back in 1949 as the flagship of the Pacifica network, struggled and experimented with the issues of collectives and internal democracy in these years. Like the Berkeley Co-op, KPFA earned recognition as a community resource.

Collective groups also played an important role in the development of the Bay Area?s gay and lesbian communities. The San Francisco Gay Men?s Chorus, for example, self-organized in the days following days the assassinations of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1978, after an impromptu gathering the night of the tragedy to sing on the steps of city hall.

WORKER COLLECTIVES IN THE 1970s

The earliest collective businesses were mostly connected with radical communication media: presses, bookstores and film. This reflected the explicitly political movement from which they emerged. They were followed by food-related cooperatives in the late 1960s, and artisan/industrial collectives and cooperatives beginning around 1970 both in urban and rural areas. Worker collectives and cooperatives represented the embedding of the counterculture in the working population; their revolutionary roots were in workers? control and self-management.

They took two basic forms. Some collectives were centralized, with each worker paid through the enterprise. Others, such as artisan cooperatives, were decentralized, maintaining the studio space or the means of production that the craftspeople used.

These early cooperative and collective work groups sprang up in many areas around the country. There were soon collective and cooperative bakers, teachers, truckers, mechanics, farmers, carpenters, printers, food-handlers, cabinetmakers, taxi-drivers, medical workers, sellers, artists, technicians, machine-operators, cooks, editors, etc. Cooperatives operated successfully almost everywhere in light production, distribution and services. Cities where the largest concentrations of worker collectives and cooperatives could be found included the San Francisco Bay Area, the Boston area, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, New Haven, Austin and Madison.

In Berkeley-Oakland, one of the earliest collectives was Taxi Unlimited, collectivized in 1965, in time to play a role in the Free Speech Movement; others included Uncle Ho?s Mechanix Rainbow, Movement Motors, Build carpenters, Alternative Food Store, and the Cheeseboard, all formed between 1970 and 1972, followed by Uprisings and Nabalom Bakeries, the Brick Hut and Swallow restaurants. Every loaf of Uprisings bread included a small flier announcing progressive political and cultural events. By the end of the decade, there were over 150 collectives and collective-cooperatives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Due to their underground nature, estimates of the total number of worker cooperatives in the US in this period differ widely. One study published in 1980 estimated between 750 and 1,000 small worker cooperatives in the US at that time.

THE FOOD SYSTEM

Collectives and cooperatives connected with food cut across rural-urban lines. Of all the countercultural organizations, they became the most interconnected, the most developed ideologically and?apart from music groups?had the most far-reaching effects. In the late 1960s, ?food conspiracies? formed in cities and towns across the country. Basically buying clubs, they called themselves conspiracies to indicate that they aspired to more than just stretching dollars, and aimed at overthrowing the established food distribution system. Most had literature and newsletters that publicized their larger motives along with local food news. Most were based on member energy and labor requirements, and run through democratic and collective systems. Many connected with small local and regional organic farms, and made ?natural? foods available in their areas for the first time, while providing the farms with needed outlets. According to the Cooperative League, between 5,000 and 10,000 of these clubs had formed across the country by 1975. The Bay Area was a West coast nexus.

The Haight-Ashbury Food Conspiracy began in 1968 as a buying club, reaching 150 member houses in 1973. At the same time across the bay, the Berkeley-Oakland Organic Food Association had some twenty-one affiliated neighborhood conspiracies. The conspiracies were organized around member participation. They got food from regional farmers as well as at the Farmers? Market, and were organized so that each neighborhood conspiracy was responsible for one job each month.

In the early 1970s, ?new wave? co-op stores began appearing, run by worker collectives and many stemming from conspiracies. They differed from the earlier co-op stores in that they were non-managerial. In some, the worker collective comprised the entire membership, while in others workers and member-customers shared control. Meanwhile, natural food stores began to appear, and chain supermarkets also began stocking organic and natural food lines, providing competition at the alternative system?s strongest point. The Cooperative League estimated in 1979 that between 5,000 and 10,000 small ?new wave? food co-ops of various structures had formed in the past decade, and several thousand were probably still functioning with a 500 million dollar annual volume.

When natural food stores began appearing in an area, the buying clubs generally took a dive as the stores were providing most of the same products almost as cheaply and with more convenience. Some of the most active people in the old food conspiracies were instrumental in starting some of the stores, and many of the former conspiracy members formed their customer base. By 1976, both the Haight-Ashbury Food Conspiracy and the Berkeley-Oakland Organic Food Association had lost most of their membership and were in a state of near collapse.

The conspiracies and collective stores found that due to their small size they could usually only compete with the supermarket chains in the area of natural foods. In response, the collective stores began forming alternative wholesales, some run by independent collectives, some by federations of stores and conspiracies. Trucking collectives connected the whole into broad interlocking networks on both coasts and the Midwest. Citywide and regional ?Food Systems? attempted to grow large enough to create a stable economic base for the whole movement and to create a viable alternative to the supermarket chains.

From the Seattle Workers? Brigade and the Portland Area Food System, down to the Southern California Cooperating Communities, across to the Tucson Peoples? Warehouse, the Austin Community Project, Minneapolis Peoples? Warehouse, the Federation of Ohio River Cooperatives (extending over a six state area), and the New England People?s Cooperatives, regional Food Systems soon overlapped coast to coast.

The collective movement of the era made its greatest impact in the Food Systems. Here the counterculture actually made a frontal challenge to the dominant system in one of its most vital spots, food. It was a real and serious attempt to provide a large-scale collective alternative to the corporate food system, weaving worker-run production units into a larger organism reminiscent of the 19th century Cooperative Commonwealth vision of the Knights of Labor and their coalition with the Farmers? Alliance. Because food is essentially a political issue, many of the most volatile of forces of the 1970s met in the Food Systems, and clashed.

The Food System movement became based in ?new wave? wholesales and regional federations around the country. As such, these became the center of ideological struggle over the aims and strategy of the counterculture movement by the mid-1970s. Some saw the movement as primarily part of an overall struggle against the capitalist system, and advocated more political involvement. In general, these people thought that the movement should be focused to serve the working population, that it should be anti-profit, that its capital accumulation should not be privately owned by groups of workers or consumers, and that the movement should be more unified and centrally structured. Others saw the movement as primarily economic and personal, and in general supported decentralization, structural diversity, and federation, with each group deciding questions like capital accumulation, profit, or political involvement as it saw fit. There were not two clear-cut camps, as each organization had its own variation of worker vs. consumer control, federation vs. centralization, etc., and there were many different viewpoints within each organization.

The mid-1970s was a time of crisis for Food Systems around the country. When many small collectives and cooperatives attempted to federate into larger organizations, they came up against the problem of how to grow large enough to be economically viable without becoming managerial bureaucracies like many of the co-ops started in the 1930s. This, together with the economic recession and runaway inflation, caused most to remain on shaky foundations.

The San Francisco People?s Food System was formed in 1973 by some of the most active people who had left the old Food Conspiracy and organized the first collective stores. Over its short life, the Food System actively and materially supported a number of progressive struggles, and was instrumental in organizing the alternative People?s Bicentennial celebration in San Francisco. Internally, there was a stress on struggling with racism and sexism.

The Food System centered on the San Francisco Common-Operating Warehouse (COW). Instead of using the collective structure like most groups, the COW took a structure that in theory combined representative democracy with centralized efficiency, but in practice invested real power in a small self-perpetuating group. It was not long before the Common-Operating Warehouse?s system collided with the autonomy and consensus system of most of the member work collectives.

In early 1975, SF Food System workers began gathering in regular All-Co-op meetings (?the Forum?) to try to develop and better organize the system. By 1976, the System was growing large and strong, with member collectives and co-ops on both sides of the bay. But internally, an ideological battle was brewing over organization, involving anarchists and marxists. In April, members decided that there would be an elected Representative Body (RB). By the end of the year, the Representative Body had drafted a Basis of Unity, which was approved by all the collectives, and the RB elected a steering committee in January 1977. But at that point internal disagreements and problems rushed to a head. A number of the food collectives were involved with the prisoners? rights movement, and there was strong conflict between competing radical prisoner organizations. When a small group disrupted and shut down an All-Worker conference in April 1977. the San Francisco Food System came crashing down and, as it did, a countercultural dream shattered and died.

With the SF Food System functionally defunct, the numerous small autonomous collectives again became the main base of the movement in the Bay Area. The following year, the old Food Conspiracy was reorganized and revived as a communal enterprise, with all member-customer energy requirements removed; under this system it grew to sizable proportions again in the Bay Area for a few years. The San Francisco Common-Operating Warehouse hung on for a few years, then closed its doors in February, 1982.

COLLECTIVE DIRECTORY GROUP and INTERCOLLECTIVE

Meanwhile, in 1976, a small autonomous Bay Area circle called the Collective Directory Group began a project of networking among collectives. The first edition of the Collective Directory was published in 1977. Updated editions came out in the following years. Besides listing information about groups, expanded Directories included articles on history and theory of the movement.

In 1980, workers from a wide variety of Bay Area collectives came together and formed the InterCollective, an association for exchanging ideas and information, promoting networking, and striving to develop the movement. The InterCollective had no centralized leadership or organization, but gathered in open monthly meetings and held political and cultural events. They organized a well-attended Collective Conference in 1982, weekly classes and workshops between 1981 and 1986, a Collectives Fair in 1983, and sponsored an anti-nuclear action collective for the 1982 non-violent blockade and civil disobedience at the Livermore Weapons Lab. The Collective Directory became a project of the InterCollective. The 1985 edition was the most extensive, listing almost 150 collective groups in the Bay Area and over 350 on the West coast. But by that time the collective wave had already peaked, the country dominated by Reagan-era economics. The competitive climate engulfed and bankrupted many of the most successful of the worker collectives. Some groups self-destructed. In those years, few new collectives or cooperatives were being formed. The 1985 Collective Directory was the last, and the InterCollective disbanded in 1986. But not all ?70s collectives succumbed, and some groups from this era continue today.
NOBAWC
The Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NOBAWC) renewed the movement in 1994, after growing out of monthly meetings between several groups to discuss their experiences and common problems, with the mission of information and resource sharing among worker co-ops, and building a movement for worker self-management. NOBAWC is today a member of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Herbert Baxter. History of Coöperation in the United States. John Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Sixth Series. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1888.

Collective Directory Group, eds., The Directory of Collectives, (San Francisco: Collective Directory Group & InterCollective, 1977-85).

Cross, Ira B. ?Co-operation in California,? American Economic Review, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Sept., 1911), pp. 535-544

Curl, John. For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements and Communalism in America. Oakland: PM Press, 2009.

Horner, Clare. ?Producers? Co-operatives in the United States, 1865-1890.? Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburg, 1978.

Knapp, Joseph. The Rise of American Cooperative Enterprise 1620-1920. Danville: Interstate, 1969.

______________The Advance of American Cooperative Enterprise 1920-1945. Danville: Interstate, 1973.

Parker, Florence E. The First 125 Years: A History of Distributive and Service Cooperation in the United States, 1829-1954. Superior: Cooperative League, 1956.

Shinn, C. H. ?Cooperation on the Pacific Coast.? Adams, Herbert Baxter. History of Coöperation in the United States. John Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Sixth Series. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1888.

Aug 10, 2010 4:46:00 PM (4 weeks ago)

Oakland Mayoral Candidates Support Local Currency

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
All of Oakland’s Mayoral Candidates Agree

Wednesday, August 11 11:00 am
In front of Oakland City Hall

The Oakland Community Action Network (Oakland C.A.N.) will be holding a press conference in front of the Oakland City Hall that will be attended by Terrence Candell, Greg Harland*, Orlando Johnson, Rebecca Kaplan, Don Macleay, Don Perata*, Jean Quan, and Joe Tuman**. All of these mayoral candidates have stated some degree of support for the creation of a local currency. Each will speak briefly on their candidacies and their support for the Alternative Currency for Oakland Residents and Neighbors (ACORN). Most of the candidates will be filing their nomination papers with the City Clerk that Wednesday.

That these candidates can come together at the formal beginning of this campaign to recognize this area of agreement is a testament to the new ranked-choice voting system in Oakland. Oakland’s mayoral candidates can state clearly their agreements and disagreements without resorting to personal attacks and without “knee jerk” oppositional positions merely because of the position of another candidate.

Background: Twenty-nine Oakland organizations endorsed the City ID/Value Storage Card and the City has received three vendor responses to the late March RFQ. A coalition of Oakland organizations have been working on the ID/local currency card for two years (http://oaklandcityidcard.org/).

Oakland’s efforts built on the local identification card
implementations in New Haven, Conn., and San Francisco, Ca. The debit card platform and the local currency function work synergistically with the City identification card to solve City implementation cost issues and many more complications. Not only will the card enhance the success of local small businesses but it also has the potential to resolve the City’s current budget deficit. More than 60 communities in the US have had local currencies at one time or another.

The E. F. Schumacher Society (http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/)
is a national depository of information – including on the legality of local currencies.

During times of economic crisis, interest in local currencies increases
because of their proven ability to relieve economic distress in a
micro-economy.

Oakland’s micro-economy is currently being stressed. This is recognized
by all the mayoral candidates.

Oakland C.A.N. does not see the ACORN as the solution to all of Oakland’s
problems. The issues of poverty, institutional prejudice, and the damage of past injustices must be addressed. Oakland C.A.N. believes that Oakland’s future as a model city for the nation is forth coming. Oakland C.A.N. is happy to host this press conference and to stand with these mayoral candidates.

*These candidates had not confirmed their attendance at the time of the press release but they have stated their support for the ACORN.
**Have not confirmed attendance or support from this candidate at the time of the release.

Contact: Wilson Riles
510-530-2448
wriles@pacbell.net
Oakland C.A.N. (Community Action Network)
3746 39th Avenue
Oakland, CA 94619
510.530.2448

Aug 10, 2010 4:38:00 PM (4 weeks ago)

San Francisco Considers Participatory Budgeting (After Chicago)

Here is a recent article about participatory budgeting in Chicago. Will SF be the next city? Perhaps to the first in the US to have a municipal-wide participatory budgeting process? The SF Community Congress has listed this among its top priorities to discuss at the Congress. Participatory budgeting is one giant step towards real democracy and participatory local self-governance, as well as a tool to move money towards other programs of real social change.

from Yes Magazine
by Josh Lerner

Chicago’s $1.3 Million Experiment in Democracy
For the first time in the U.S., the city’s 49th Ward lets taxpayers directly decide how public money is spent.

by Josh Lerner, Megan Wade Antieau
posted Apr 20, 2010

Ward 49 Ballot

All 49th Ward residents age 16 and over, regardless of voter registration or citizenship status, were invited to vote on the 36 budget proposals developed by the community.

On Chicago's far north side, citizens are taking democracy into their own hands. Through the first "participatory budgeting" experiment in the United States, residents of Chicago's 49th Ward have spent the past year deciding how to spend $1.3 million in taxpayer dollars. Over 1,600 community members stepped up to decide on improvements for their neighborhoods, showing how participatory budgeting can pave the way for a new kind of grassroots democracy, in Chicago and beyond.

From Porto Alegre to Chicago

Chicago may seem an unlikely site for participatory democracy, given the city's famous patronage system and lack of transparency in public finances. Faced with this system, community groups end up competing for budgetary scraps—an exhausting struggle. But frustration with backroom dealing is in part what makes Chicago and the United States ready for new ways of managing public money.

In 2007, Alderman Joe Moore discovered an alternative at a US Social Forum session on participatory budgeting. There, he learned about Porto Alegre, Brazil, where since 1990 tens of thousands of people have been directly deciding how to spend as much as 20 percent of their city's annual budget. Moore also learned how participatory budgeting has gone global, spreading to over 1,200 cities around the world and winning the United Nations' recognition as a best practice of democratic governance.

No U.S. city had let citizens directly decide how to spend public money, but Moore saw Chicago's 49th Ward as the perfect place to try.
Democracy in Action

The 49th Ward, home to over 60,000 people and the neighborhood of Rogers Park, is known for its diversity and vibrant community life. Over 80 languages are spoken within less than two square miles. Independent-minded citizens have often put intense pressure on local officials. Concerned that Moore wasn't responding to ward needs, they nearly voted him out of office in the last election. So how does one of the nation's most diverse neighborhoods bring opinionated residents together to make difficult budget decisions?

Moore started by setting aside his $1.3 million "menu money," the discretionary budget that each alderman receives for capital infrastructure projects. In April 2009, with guidance from The Participatory Budgeting Project, Moore invited leaders of all the ward's community organizations and institutions to form a Steering Committee, which decided the timeline and structure of the process.
"At the community meetings everyone was complaining about their block," says 49th Ward resident Laurent Pernot. "But now every single committee has taken stewardship of the whole ward as their mission."

At a series of neighborhood assemblies starting in November, residents brainstormed initial spending ideas and self-selected community representatives who would transform those ideas into concrete proposals. These representatives, along with Steering Committee mentors, split into six thematic committees. They then spent four months meeting with experts, conducting research, and developing budget proposals.

The Public Safety Committee, for instance, received many requests for security cameras. To learn more, they visited the neighborhood’s 24-hour camera viewing center. As community representative Marilou Kessler explained, "everyone [on the committee] came—about 15-16 people on a workday. It was astonishing cooperation." The trip shifted the committee's priorities: They learned that the cameras are used only occasionally, mostly by specialty police teams, and are not continuously monitored. After police explained that lighting is more effective at deterring crime, the committee replaced several camera proposals with street light proposals.

At first, some skeptics worried about what residents would propose. Would they rush through inappropriate projects, or focus just on their personal needs? Not quite. To identify sidewalks most in need of repair, Transportation Committee members walked almost every block of the ward, in the middle of the Chicago winter. "I will never look at sidewalks the same way again!" reflected Dena Al-Khatib, one of the sidewalk inspectors. Community representatives also learned to move beyond their initial assumptions and priorities. As Laurent Pernot of the Transportation Committee said, "At the community meetings everyone was complaining about their block... But now every single committee has taken stewardship of the whole ward as their mission."

 After months of work and more neighborhood assemblies, the community representatives presented a ballot of 36 specific budget proposals, and then helped organize a publicity campaign. The Arts and Other Committee put together an artistic exhibition of proposals at Mess Hall, a local cultural center. Andy De La Rosa, an artist on the committee, found himself swayed by the proposals from other committees. "This is all extra," he said of his committee's proposals for murals, artistic bike racks, and historical markers. "I hope people vote for the streets."

49th Ward Discussion

On April 10th, all ward residents age 16 and over, regardless of voter registration or citizenship status, were invited to vote on the proposals at a local high school. In the week beforehand, 428 residents voted early at the Alderman’s office—more early voters per day than during the 2008 presidential election. On the final voting day, a stream of people filled the school cafeteria, reading over proposals, consulting with community representatives, and voting for up to eight projects on paper ballots.

In the end, 1,652 residents turned out, not to elect someone to decide for them, but to make their own decisions about the ward. The turnout vastly exceeded expectations, considering the brand-new process, lack of media coverage, and absence of any other elections or ballot measures to inspire turnout.

The $1.3 million was enough to fund the 14 most popular projects. The proposal to fix sidewalks received the most votes, and other funded projects included bike lanes, community gardens, murals, traffic signals, and street lighting. Every committee had at least one proposal funded.

Democratizing Democracy

But participatory budgeting in Chicago still has a long way to go. Like at most community meetings in the ward, turnout did not reflect the full diversity of residents. In most participatory budgeting processes, disadvantaged communities turn out in droves, but not yet in the 49th Ward. Despite additional Spanish-language assemblies, materials, and outreach, Latino turnout was particularly low. According to Latino leaders, this was due largely to general distrust of government and worries about immigration status. Some community organizers added that there was too little time for one-on-one meetings with such leaders early on, and that the infrastructure funding did not speak to the concerns of many low-income residents. Had turnout been more diverse, would funding have been allocated differently?

Organizers will have a chance to find out, since Moore has already committed to continuing participatory budgeting. As he wrote in a letter to constituents, it "exceeded even my wildest dreams. It was more than an election. It was a community celebration and an affirmation that people will participate in the civic affairs of their community if given real power to make real decisions." Community representatives are already debating how to deepen community engagement by building on the outreach from this year.

Important as it is, the ward's $1.3 million discretionary budget is just the beginning. Residents are now discussing how to bring participatory budgeting to other budgets, and some reformers in other wards are already considering running on a participatory budgeting platform in the next municipal elections. This energy shows the power of truly democratic experiences, and opens up new possibilities for democracy in Chicago and beyond.

Josh Lerner is co-director of The Participatory Budgeting Project, a resource organization that has advised Alderman Joe Moore throughout the 49th Ward’s participatory budgeting process.
Megan Wade Antieau, a writer and ward resident, has served as a community representative in the 49th Ward Participatory Budget, working with other residents to transform community input into budget proposals.

Aug 6, 2010 12:16:00 AM (1 month ago)

Toronto Tenants Participate in $9 Million Budget Allocation

from http://www.torontohousing.ca/participatory_budgeting
see the UN Guide to Participatory Budgeting to find out how to move your city towards greater participatory self-management...

Despite a downturn in the economy that is putting the pinch on households and budgets, Toronto Community Housing tenants this year once again decided how to invest $9 million on ideas that will improve tenants' quality of life.

2009 is the eighth year for Participatory Budgeting at Toronto Community Housing, an idea which originated in Brazil, which gives tenants the power to decide how housing money is spent. They decide how to spend the $9 million in a democratic and transparent way. The theme of this year's process is "Working Together: Making a Difference."

This year, tenants have provided funding to more than 150 initiatives in buildings across the city, including:

* Garden beautification at 123 Sackville St. (at Queen and Parliament) - $5,000
* Playground improvements at Blake Boultbee (at Gerrard and Pape) - $25,000
* New hallway tiles at Kennedy-Dundalk (at Ellesmere and Kennedy) - $90,000
* Additional security cameras Finch-Brahms (at Finch and Brahms) - $30,000
* Paint common areas at Warden Woods (at Danforth and Warden) - $40,000
* Gym renovations at Scarlett Manor (at Lawrence West and Scarlett) - $50,000
* New kitchen cupboards at Thistletown (at Martingrove and Albion) - $55,000
* New bathroom vanities Jane-Yewtree (at Jane and Finch) - $50,000
* Computer resource centre at Swansea Mews (at Queensway and Windermere) - $25,000

How Participatory Budgeting works

pbIt all starts with getting people involved. Tenants in every Toronto Community Housing building come forward with ideas for improving their community. Then they sort through the ideas and democratically decide with their neighbours which ideas are the top priorities for their buildings. Only capital projects are eligible for funding.

Tenants bring forward those ideas to big voting events, where tenants from different buildings come together to hear about all the priorities and vote on the winners.

At the voting events, tenants passionately present their ideas to their fellow tenants to garner support. There is a time to ask questions. Tenants can learn more about the ideas by examining display boards that each of the buildings creates.

Then, it comes time to vote. It's a "dot-mocracy." Every building selects a delegate. They get sticker dots which they use to vote for the best ideas. The ideas with the most votes get funding.

A garden in the city

pb2Rfifi Abdessamad lives in a townhouse complex in the area of Queen and Parliament streets. He's a big supporter of Participatory Budgeting. Last year, he and his son made a legendary presentation. It was an impassioned plea for a new playground, urging tenant voters to "Do it for the kids." He got the votes and the tens of thousands of dollars in funding he was seeking. The community got the playground, much to the delight of children and their families.

This year, Mr. Abdessamad put forward a more modest proposal at his community planning meeting. Plant a garden to make the community beautiful. Just $5,000 would mean tenants being able to grow a lush, green garden for three years.

Mr. Abdessamad makes a convincing case. His neighbours agreed to make the garden the townhouse complex's top priority at the big voting event. And at that event, Mr. Abdessamad is equally convincing. Tenants from other buildings like his idea. The project receives funding and will go ahead.

"This will make people happy. It will make the children happy. That is very important,"
a beaming Mr. Abdessamad says.

Tenants decide

pb3Participatory Budgeting is one of the key ways Toronto Community Housing ensures tenants have a real say over decisions that affect their lives. A working group made up of tenant volunteers from an October 2003 tenant forum worked together with Toronto Community Housing staff to develop this process. It is one of the most popular events Toronto Community Housing hosts every year.

Different perspectives, unity in purpose

Tenants who take part in Participatory Budgeting come from different backgrounds. Some, like Juliet Flowers, who lives in the city's northwest, are long-term participants. This year's edition is Ms. Flowers' fourth.

"It's always an exciting process," she says.

This year, Flowers speaks out for better outdoor lighting in her building's breezeways (covered passageways). She says it pays to be creative. This year, she tells a spooky story about ghosts lurking in the breezeways. The only way to get rid of them? Better lighting.

"Humour adds to the presentation. If they laugh, they remember it," she explains.

Watching on is Alonzo Howlett. The Downsview Acres tenant is a Participatory Budgeting first-timer. He doesn't have the same experience as Flowers, but he has the same goal - convince tenants to fund his idea and improve quality of life in his community. He asks for money to renovate his building's lobby.

It wasn't easy for Mr. Howlett to take part.

"I am recently out of surgery, but I think this process is so important, I had to get involved," he said.

He's glad he did. His community's idea got funding. Ms. Flowers' idea received funding too.

No matter who wins, everyone benefits

pb4Participatory Budgeting is about bringing tenants closer to the decision-making process. But it's about more than sharing power. It's also about increasing transparency, accountability, understanding and social inclusion.

In that context, when tenants take part in Participatory Budgeting, everyone benefits - even tenants living in buildings whose bids happen to fall short.

Natalie Marquardt lives in the Gilder community in Toronto's east end. It's a community of 325 housing units spread between two buildings. Marquardt is another first time Participatory Budgeting participant.

After a lively community planning meeting, where Gilder tenants put forward ideas and voted to decide the best ones, painting and plastering common spaces and installing additional security cameras were set as top priorities.

"We are a tight-knit community with a lot of seniors and youth and we're doing our best to make sure we feel safe and our environment is presentable," Marquardt says.

It's time to present her idea. It's difficult to stand in front of a room full of strangers with so much on the line, but Marquardt steps up and does a good job. She receives a warm reception from fellow tenants.

"It was a little nerve-wracking, but everybody made me feel comfortable because we're here for the same reason -- to make our community a better place," she says.

It's time to vote. There isn't enough money to fund all the ideas. Unfortunately for Marquardt, the Gilder proposal misses out on funding in a close vote.

But for Marquardt, there are no hard feelings. She has experienced first-hand the challenge of making spending decisions when resources are scarce. Through that, she has learned more about challenges in other buildings. And she has developed a new understanding of fellow tenants and the communities they call home.

"It's very obvious that some of these places need a lot of care so there's nothing to get upset about. It's more about being happy for someone else to be able to live a better life," she says.

Jul 18, 2010 11:49:00 PM (2 months ago)

The Cooperative Movement in Century 21

The Cooperative Movement in Century 21
By John Curl
“There is nothing new under the sun.”
2010

INTRODUCTION

In 2002 the UN General Assembly recognized that cooperatives “are becoming a major factor of economic and social development,” and urged governments to promote their growth by “utilizing and developing fully the potential and contribution of cooperatives for the attainment of social development goals, in particular the eradication of poverty, the generation of full and productive employment and the enhancement of social integration;... creating a supportive and enabling environment for the development of cooperatives by, inter alia, developing an effective partnership between Governments and the cooperative movement.”(1) Recently the UN declared 2012 to be the International Year of Cooperatives.

The people of the world do not care what you call the economic system as long as it works. For the last century ideologists of both capitalism and state socialism have made extravagant claims and promises about the superiority of their economic ideas, but the proof was in the pudding. Neither one was able to bring peace, prosperity, and social equity to the world on a sustainable basis. That overarching goal could not be accomplished by either economic system, because neither was actually geared to bring it about. Social justice requires full employment, while capitalism structures unemployment and marginalization into the very bones of the system. Capitalism privatizes the world, transforms power and property into money, reduces people to labor or marginalized unemployed, disempowers democracy, and crashes periodically with disastrous consequences. State socialism centralizes power in the hands of bureaucrats, planners, and party hacks, disempowers civil society, and rigidifies into a self-perpetuating overly-centralized establishment which inevitably makes monumental social planning blunders. The economics of the 21st century must be based on intense practicality, not false ideology.

The cooperative movement of the present and near future operates primarily in the spaces that the corporate system cannot and will not fill. Cooperatives can provide a dignified living for the many millions who would otherwise be unemployed or marginalized. Cooperatives build bridges between people in conflict, as they did between east and west after World War II and during the cold war. Cooperatives played an important role in the formation of the European Union, and are continuing to build bridges today between Palestinians and Israelis, Bosnians and Serbs, and in conflict areas in Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka. (2) Cooperatives and social enterprises are the world’s best hope of achieving peace, prosperity, and social equity in this new century, and it is there that the eyes of the world need to turn.

The movement for worker cooperatives, workplace democracy, and social enterprises is resurgent around the world today. Grassroots social movements have turned to cooperatives in response to the depredations of globalism and the worldwide deep recession, to improve people’s living conditions and to empower them. People band together into cooperatives because they need others to share work, expenses, and expertise, and because they prefer working in a democratic situation. Many of the new social enterprises are arising from spontaneous initiatives of grassroots groups, and many are being organized, coordinated, and backed by nonprofit development organizations, governments, and communities. (3) Nonprofits have turned to organizing social enterprises to fulfill social equity missions. Communities and governments have turned to them for economic development.

In the US today 85 percent of jobs (nongovernment and nonfarm) are in the service sector (4), and these are often best performed by small enterprises. Startups in this sector do not have to begin with expensive, cutting-edge technological equipment. It is here in particular that cooperatives and other social enterprises are able to successfully set up. This sector will continue to be fertile ground for cooperatives for the foreseeable future. In addition, small industrial and artisanal enterprises also do not require expensive technology, and that is another strong sector in which worker cooperatives and social enterprises operate successfully.

But as the size of the firm increases, maintaining direct democracy in the workplace becomes increasingly difficult and complex. Large modern firms based on sophisticated technology, expertise, and management do not lend themselves easily to direct democracy, and efficiency of scale often conflicts with democratic processes. However, worker cooperatives have functioned successfully in America in medium-sized enterprises. (5) Mondragon, the world's largest group of worker cooperatives, centered in Basque Spain, has a workforce of over 92,000. (6)

Today’s movement is not primarily focused on transforming large corporations into cooperatives, although it does put workplace democracy and social equity squarely on the table. Larger enterprises are the territory of the labor movement, which has been reduced to an extremely weakened state in the US; only when workers force changes in the labor laws will American unions win the space to put workplace democracy in large enterprises on the immediate agenda. I will not deal with the questions of workplace democracy in larger enterprises in this paper.

Cooperatives are both a natural formation of human interaction and a modern social movement. They are probably the most integral and natural form of organization beyond the family. Without simple economic group cooperation and mutual aid, human society would never have developed. On the other hand, the cooperative movement was one of the first social movements of modern times, with roots at the beginning of the industrial revolution, and was an integral part of the early labor movement.

A dynamic has always existed between cooperatives as a natural social formation and cooperatives as a social movement. The social movement is based on the natural formation, and on the widespread perception that modern society has interfered with and denied the natural work democracy that humans crave. Market capitalism lauds the employee system as the basis of human freedom but, as most employees understand, the system has also almost always been a tool of oppression and bondage. The cooperative movement aims for liberation from oppressive social stratification and alienation.

What makes the new resurgence of the cooperative movement different from what came before? To elucidate that question, we need to take a brief look at some of the history of the movement. Since I know the US movement best, I’ll focus on that history. Since this is a world-wide movement, I’ll also relate US history to some other developments around the world. There are many approaches to the history of the cooperative movement, and various visions of its goals and mission. Every country has its own equally important history. The saga is not simple.

To begin in a traditional American context, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Whenever there are in a country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate the natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.” (7) That was a key concept of Jeffersonian democracy, and the underlying basis for Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act, which opened millions of square miles of land to people who were willing to work it. In today’s world we cannot all be small farmers, but these concepts still apply inalienably to the varieties of work as we know it. These ideas form part of the legal and historical basis for the American government providing a supportive environment and enabling infrastructure for cooperatives.

AN OUTLINE HISTORY
OF THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT IN THE USA (8)

Worker cooperatives were organized by some of the very first North American labor unions in the early 1800s. The earliest unions came out of guilds, which included both masters and journeymen, and structured the industries. They were basically mutual aid organizations. At the point that masters became bosses, the journeymen broke away and formed separate organizations. These developed into what we know as unions. They too specialized in mutual aid. In many of the earliest strikes, the journeymen formed worker cooperatives, sometimes temporarily to support themselves during the strike, and sometimes to continue on a permanent basis. These cooperatives were facilitated by the fact that most industrial production was still done with comparatively simple hand tools.

Worker cooperatives became a modern movement with a broad social mission in the 1830s, in reaction to the injustices of the rising capitalist system and the concomitant impoverishment and disempowerment of the working classes. Worker cooperatives were promoted by the first national labor organization, the National Trades’ Union (NTU). In the early 1870s, shortly after the Civil War, the National Labor Union (NLU) renewed the American worker cooperative movement, and honed its mission. In the early 1880s worker cooperatives found their greatest manifestation in the labor movement in the Knights of Labor (KOL), the largest labor organization in the world at that time, which organized a network of almost 200 industrial cooperatives. This was the era of the domination of the great industrialist “robber barons,” enormous social strife, and the KOL cooperative movement was in the thick of it.

Back in the colonial era, the early American governments were dominated by elites of large merchants, bankers, and plantation owners These elites continued to control federal, state, and local governments during the first decades of independence. As the industrial capitalist system increasingly predominated during the 19th century, manufacturing and railroad magnates joined the other privileged interest groups in asserting dominance over government for their own benefit. Under the control of these power elites, on the whole government was antagonistic to the cooperative movement. Control of state and local governments varied by place, and regional powers vied for a place within national power. Democracy for ordinary working people was mostly window dressing. People were treated as just labor input in the economic machine. In colonial America, a large part of the early work force was made up of indentured servants, people who signed themselves into temporary bondage in exchange for passage to America. These were slowly replaced in the North by wage labor (including child labor and prison labor) and in the South by slave labor. The capitalist system, the conquering ideology in the Civil War which abolished chattel slavery and replaced it with “freedom,” was based on the wage system. The employer-employee relationship was a subtler form of bondage in which people rented themselves to other people for specific time periods and under specified conditions. Other forms of the same system included piece-rates, share-cropping, tenant-farming, and various labor contracting. The social mechanism used to compel enough people to rent themselves into this temporary bondage, was poverty. The endless flood of immigrants to America provided a seemingly inexhaustible bounty of willing victims. The union movement was the revolt of the wage slaves.

Worker cooperatives by the decades after the Civil War had become integral to the overall strategy of the labor movement. At the same time as the Knights of Labor fought for higher wages and better working conditions, they were also attempting to construct a vast chain of cooperatives, with the mission of abolishing what they called wage slavery, and replacing the capitalist wage system with workplace democracy in what they called a Cooperative Commonwealth. This concept arose autochthonously in America, parallel to the growth of the socialist movement during the same period, to which it was conceptually interrelated. (9) The Cooperative Commonwealth vision was based on free associative enterprises in a regulated market economy, with the government relegated to infrastructural functions and public utilities, such as water systems, roads, railroads, etc. This concept was fundamentally distinct from the state socialist concept of the government running the entire economy with all workers as government employees. The Cooperative Commonwealth vision was Jeffersonian.

During this same period, between 1866 and the 1890s, American small farmers also organized cooperative movements with similar motivations, strategies, and ends. Thanks to Lincoln’s Homestead Act, the rural US at that time was populated widely by freeholding farm families, who organized cooperative movements for purchasing supplies and marketing farm products. Their opponents were the railroads, bankers and middlemen. The main farmer organizations were first the National Grange (NG) and later the Farmers’ Alliance (FA). Parallel to the union movement the farmer cooperatives saw their mission as organizing an alternative economic structure that would supercede the existing one, a vast network of cooperatives that would be the lever of their liberation from economic oppression. Historian Michael Schwartz called the Farmers’ Alliance Exchanges “the most ambitious counterinstitutions ever undertaken by an American protest movement.” (10)

As the worker and farmer movements developed, the consumer cooperative movement formed a third stream of the cooperative movement. The consumer store movement started independently in America at an early period, but was destroyed by price wars with capitalist competitors. Later consumer cooperatives achieved some success after adopting the British Rochdale system of keeping prices at about market rates and giving rebates to member customers. Cooperative stores run by farmer organizations and unions were notably successful. But the other side to the Rochdale approach was that they ran the stores managerially with workers as employees and not necessarily co-op members. This approach was expanded into an alternative version of a cooperative commonwealth in which giant consumer cooperatives owned all the factories and farms, with the wage system universalized instead of abolished. By this twist the consumer cooperative movement abandoned what had been a core goal of the worker cooperative movement: workplace democracy and liberating workers from wage slavery.

The Knights of Labor was defeated in 1886-87, in the wake of the national May Day strike for the 8-hour day in 1886 and the ensuing Haymarket riot and nationwide crackdown. The KOL worker cooperatives were destroyed at that time by the combined forces of the capitalist system and the government. This was the ultimate triumph of industrial capitalism in the US, and the end of the era when industrial workers thought they could defeat the system economically and supercede capitalism through peaceful competition by building an alternative parallel cooperative system. As the KOL waned, the American labor movement continued on a different footing from the European movement. In most of Europe the socialist movement and workers parties had become an accepted part of the political landscape, while in America they were excluded from the mainstream. As historian Kim Voss wrote in The Making of American Exceptionalism, “American industrial relations and labor politics are exceptional because in 1886 and 1887 employers won the class struggle.” (11)

In rural America the capitalist defeat of the cooperative system was completed a few years later, when the Farmers’ Alliance likewise saw their cooperatives destroyed and their organization defeated by a coalition of bankers, wholesalers, and manufacturers who cut off their credit, supplies, and ability to do business. (12)

The FA and the KOL played one last card. Forming a “third party” alliance, they went into electoral politics and were instrumental in organizing the Populist Party, the most successful third party in American History. They ultimately joined with the Democrats and narrowly missed electing William Jennings Bryan to the presidency in 1896. (13)

After the demise of the KOL, the surviving American Federation of Labor (AFL) began its domination of the mainstream US labor movement. The AFL abandoned the idea of abolishing the wage system, and instead focused only on negotiating contracts and working conditions. Some unionists in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other organizations continued to fight for industrial freedom and workplace democracy, but instead of building cooperatives they looked to take over the existing industries.

In the 20th century the consumer cooperative movement became the dominant cooperative philosophy in the US, promoted by the Cooperative League (CL), the most important national coordinating and educational organization. For much of the century CL excluded worker cooperatives and even farmer marketing cooperatives (farmer supply purchasing cooperatives were however acceptable to them).

The modern cooperative movement developed in other industrializing countries at the same time as the US movement. Every country had its own variation, related to its level of industrialization. France, first influenced by the ideas of Proudhon and then anarcho-syndicalism, was similar to the US in its focus on worker cooperatives, self-help and solidarity. The movement in Germany focused on banks and credit for farmers, artisans and small entrepreneurs. In Italy it was a diverse mix of worker, farmer, banking, and consumer cooperative experiments, with the Catholic church ultimately organizing a parallel cooperative movement. The movement in Britain started around the same time as the US, and in the 1830s involved thousands of artisans, farmers, and unions forming labor exchanges as part of the National Equitable Labour Exchange, with large warehouses in London and Birmingham. A parallel movement organized the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, an umbrella organization which immediately became embroiled in labor struggles and came under harsh attack by employers and government. Under duress both the labor exchanges and the union collapsed. When the British cooperative movement revived in the 1840s in Rochdale, it found great success as a consumer movement, and carved out a niche for itself through its core compromise of not threatening the market and abandoning workplace democracy. The British success resulted in consumer cooperative philosophy dominating much of the international cooperative movement as well the US movement during the 20th century, while worker cooperatives and workplace democracy became relegated to the realm of impractical dreamers and radical groups.

THE NEW DEAL AND THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT

When the economy collapsed, the “Self-Help” cooperative movement, stressing mutual aid and barter, quickly became widespread among the unemployed and underemployed. It was truly a spontaneous mass movement. These cooperatives produced a variety of goods for trade and self-use, and organized exchanges between laborers and farmers, in which people would work for a share of the produce. They sprang up in many locales around the country, and became a part of daily life for many people. Money was scarce. Scrip was sometimes used. By the end of 1932, there were self-help organizations in 37 states with over 300,000 members. A survey in December 1934 counted 310 different groups, about two-thirds of them in California with over a half million members. (14)

The Great Depression of the 1930s and the New Deal changed the relationship between government and cooperatives in the US for a generation. While the movement had always had isolated supporters among elected officials, as a whole government was anything but supportive. With the New Deal the American cooperative movement won support at the highest level of government for the first time. The New Deal was also a great backer of the labor movement and adhered to strong government regulation of the capitalist system.

Roosevelt’s programs provided enormous help to rural and farmer cooperatives. But urban cooperatives were not a significant part of the programs. Above all, industrial worker cooperatives were excluded. The New Deal drew the line at helping cooperatives that challenged the wage system.

One of the New Deal’s first acts was to set up a Division of Self-Help Cooperatives (under the Federal Emergency Relief Act), providing technical assistance and grants to self-help cooperatives and barter associations. (15) The “community projects” program in California included cooperative industries such as a wood mill, a tractor assembly plant, a paint factory, and hosiery mills. However, the law stipulated that production facilities set up with FERA funds could not be used in money transactions, while self-help cooperative groups usually tried to include money in their exchange arrangements whenever possible, as well as producing articles for their own use. This provision seriously undercut many self-help co-ops’ ability to function, since everyone needed cash badly. In some situations, FERA cooperators could receive pay, but only to produce articles for their own use.

The Farm Credit Administration (FCA) of 1933 set up Banks for Cooperatives, which had a very significant effect on the farmer cooperative movement. With a central bank and twelve district banks, it became a member-controlled system of financing farmer, telephone and electric cooperatives. After having been set up with government seed-money, the FCA became self-supporting. The banks were not permitted to give assistance to consumer or industrial cooperatives. Banks for Cooperatives became an indispensable institution for organizing and stabilizing farm cooperatives for the rest of the century. (16) The Farm Security Administration (FSA) of 1935, initially part of the Resettlement Administration, set up to combat rural poverty, helped organize 25,000 cooperatives of all types among about four million low-income farmers. The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) of 1935 promoted cooperative electrification in rural areas. Only about 10 percent of rural homes had service at that time but through REA loans, local electrification cooperatives served almost 300,000 households, or 40 percent of rural homes by the end of 1939.

While the New Deal’s backing of farm cooperatives was instrumental in the rural recovery from the depression, the exclusion of worker and urban cooperatives helped only to maintain working people in a state of disempowerment, and dependent on government relief or work programs.

Even though industrial production facilities were sitting idle around the country, the New Deal never supported the idea of workers taking them over with government backing and restarting them as cooperatives. The celebrated wave of factory seizures by workers, beginning with the Flint sitdown strike against General Motors in 1936-37, in which strikers occupied several plants for 44 days, repelling attacks from the police and National Guard, had as its goal union recognition, and the Flint sitdown ended in GM’s recognition of the United Auto Workers. A wave of sitdowns followed, with over 400,000 workers occupying plants and businesses around the country in 1937. The wave faded as the courts and the National Labor Relations Board held that sit-downs were illegal and that sit-down strikers could be fired. In the following decades many other powerful tools that American workers used in the 1930s to unionize were taken away.

From the New Deal’s beginning, reactionary forces worked tirelessly to stymie it, and succeeded in dismantling it piece by piece after World War II. Few cooperatives survived the war, and those that did were attacked by the dogs of McCarthyism, and most purged of any connection to a social movement. Government regulations over capital, corporations and the market were removed thread by thread, while worker organizations were diminished and hamstrung by new laws and regulations. Small farmer cooperatives found a fierce enemy in escalating corporate agribusiness.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation rediscovered cooperation, collectivity, and communalism, creating their own structures and definitions, inspired by a new political opposition movement and in turn shaping that movement. In a unique way, the Sixties gave new life to a vision of America that, unknown to most to the new visionaries themselves, closely reflected the older cooperators’ dreams. Like their forebears, the new co-ops and collectives struggled between their dual identities as “pure and simple” cooperatives and a radical social movement.

The most important milestone for mainstream cooperatives in that period was the chartering of the National Cooperative Bank under President Carter in 1978, to service all types of nonfarm cooperatives.

Shortly thereafter the country sunk into decades of a long rightward spin under the suffocating cloak of Reaganism and its false promises of prosperity through deregulated capitalism. Until the bubble finally burst in 2008 and the economy came crashing down.

URBAN HOMESTEAD MOVEMENT IN NEW YORK CITY (17)

The most successful contemporary radical cooperative movement in the US is a local movement spanning the last four decades and led by an inspiring grassroots spirit of revolt: the building occupations of the urban homestead limited equity cooperative movement in New York City.

In the mid-1960s, many New York landlords in low-income neighborhoods abandoned their apartment buildings because they considered them not profitable enough, averaging 38,000 abandoned units a year by the end of the decade. The City foreclosed for non-payment of taxes and serious code violations, and assumed ownership as “landlord of last resort.” In 1969 a group of neighbors on East 102nd Street in Manhattan, mainly Puerto Rican families, took over two buildings by direct action and started rehabilitating them through sweat equity as cooperatives. That touched off a direct action tenant movement in other neighborhoods. In 1970 groups of squatters took over vacant buildings on West 15th, 111th, 122nd streets, and along Columbus Avenue around 87th Street, proclaiming the community’s right to possession of a place to live. The City reacted by evicting most of the squatters, but public outcry resulted in their granting management control of some of the buildings to community organizations for rehabilitation by the tenants themselves. Several cooperative development nonprofits were formed, including the Urban Homestead Assistance Board (UHAB), which became the most effective organization. In 1973, 286 buildings were slated for urban homesteading, but funding obstacles undercut their efforts. Forty-eight of these buildings were actually completed as homesteaded low-income limited-equity co-ops.

In the 1980s New York tenant groups led many squats, taking over abandoned buildings illegally at first and rehabilitating them. By 1981 the City had become the owner by foreclosure of about 8,000 buildings with around 112,000 apartments, 34,000 of the units still occupied. At the urging of housing activist groups, particularly UHAB, the City instituted urban homesteading programs to legally sell the buildings to their squatting tenants for sweat equity and a token payment, with a neighborhood organization or a non-profit development organization often becoming manager during rehabilitation. By 1984, 115 buildings had been bought as limited-equity tenant co-ops under the Tenant Interim Lease Program, with another 92 in process. UHAB provided technical assistance, management training and all-around support. Autonomous groups of squatters continued to take over buildings, with an estimated 500 to 1,000 squatters in 32 buildings on the Lower East Side alone in the 1990s. Hundreds of Latino factory workers and their families squatted in the South Bronx. The City’s response changed with the political winds. Some City administrations curtailed the homestead program and evicted many of the squats, but some squatter groups successfully resisted eviction. In the ‘90s the City renewed its support of tenant homesteading, and by 2002 over 27,000 New York families were living in homesteaded low-income co-ops. Over the last 30 years UHAB has worked to successfully transform over 1,300 buildings into limited equity co-ops, and 42 more buildings are currently in their pipeline containing 1,264 units, most of them in Harlem and the Lower East Side.

The urban homestead movement is based in law on the concepts of squatters rights and homesteading. Homesteading is by permission, usually on government-owned land or land with no legal owner. The homesteader—like the squatter—gains title to the land in exchange for the sweat equity of working it for a certain time period, usually 10 years. In many cases people who start as squatters become homesteaders. Squatters rights and homesteading have been part of US and English common law since very early times, and are deeply embedded in American history. With squatting—legally called “adverse possession”—the squatter takes possession of the land or building without permission of occupancy from the legal owner. Squatters use adverse possession to claim a legal right to land or buildings. The idea is that a person who openly occupies and improves a property for a set amount of time is entitled to ownership, even though that property may have originally not belonged to them. For the first thirty days of occupation, squatters are legally trespassers liable to eviction without cause. During this time squatters are usually discrete about their presence, but open enough to be able to document their occupation. After thirty days, they gain squatters’ rights—or tenants’ rights—and in New York thereafter can only be evicted by a court order. At that time the squatters often openly begin to undertake major renovations or improvements.

The basic concept has been used beyond housing elsewhere in the Americas. The core idea of the Mexican Revolution (1910-17) was “land for those who work it,” and that concept was enshrined in the Mexican Constitution as the ejido system of communal property. The Brazilian Constitution (1988) says that land that remains unproductive should be used for a “larger social function." (18) Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) used that constitutional right as the legal basis for numerous land occupations. The largest social movement in Latin America today with an estimated 1.5 million members, MST has peacefully occupied unused land since 1985, won land titles for more than 350,000 families in 2,000 settlements, and established about 400 cooperative associations for agricultural production, marketing, services, and credit, as well as constructing houses, schools, and clinics.

RECENT FACTORY OCCUPATIONS

The same core concept has been applied to production and business facilities by the recovered factory movement in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, and Venezuela. Most of these started as occupations of shut-down or bankrupted factories and businesses by their workers and communities, and reopened as worker cooperatives. Many of them have received government recognition and support, particularly in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In Argentina there are about two hundred worker-run cooperative factories and businesses today, most of which started as plant occupations during the economic crisis of 2001-2002. Argentina’s is the largest worker-recuperated movement, despite receiving less government recognition and support.

The recent wave of factory occupations was next taken up in Ontario in 2007, when Canadian workers occupied three plants that were shutting down, and forced the owners to honor their severance agreements, but there was no plan to reopen these factories as cooperatives. The spirit arrived in the US in December 2008 in Chicago, when over 200 workers, members of United Electrical Workers (UE), staged a factory occupation at the shut-down Republic Window and Doors plant, demanding their vacation and severance pay, or that the factory continue its operations. (19) They were given only three days’ notice of the shut-down, not the 60 days required under federal and state law, and the management refused to negotiate with the workers’ union about the closure. After 6 days of occupation, the Bank of America and other lenders to Republic agreed to pay the workers the approximately $2 million owed to them. Meanwhile, the workers explored ways to restart the factory, including the possibility of a worker cooperative, and set up a “Windows of Opportunity Fund” to provide technical assistance and study this and other possibilities for re-starting production. But, as a union representative has since explained, “the fact that no real movement of worker-run enterprises exists in the US makes this option much more difficult at this point.” (20)

Instead of reopening as a worker cooperative, a firm specializing in “green” energy efficient windows bought Republic Windows in February 2009, and a union spokesman said that the new owner will offer jobs to all laid-off workers at the reopened plant. Nonetheless, that the UE union at Republic seriously considered a worker cooperative is an excellent sign. Historically many unions have feared their position would be weakened by worker cooperatives because they blur the line between workers and management. The labor movement, at least on the international level, has moved beyond that stasis today. The International Labour Organization (ILO), affiliated with the UN, strongly supports worker cooperatives today as a strategy to achieve full employment, and is working closely with the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), which represents the international cooperative movement. While the new cooperative movement is currently still embryonic in the US, it has the potential of becoming that “real movement” whose lack the worker at Republic Windows bemoaned.

A recent event of enormous promise is the collaboration, announced in October, 2009, between the United Steel Workers Union (USW) and Mondragon International. The USW is North America’s largest union, and Mondragon is the largest group of worker cooperatives in the world, centered in Spain’s Basque regon. According to USW International President Leo W. Gerard, they are exploring a partnership “towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada… Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants. We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities." Mondragon president Josu Ugarte added that their "complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America. We feel inspired to take this step based on our common set of values with the Steelworkers who have proved time and again that the future belongs to those who connect vision and values to people and put all three first." (21)

Today all over the US production and business facilities sit idle, while the sector of unemployed swells. The government has mortgaged our grandchildren’s future to bail out the banking system—for the most part those same banks that own title to the idle production facilities—with little in return. It would seem perhaps a small step for the US government to become “landlord of last resort” like the City of New York, and open tens of thousands of shuttered business, idle factories, and closed plants to worker cooperatives in exchange for sweat equity. That is a great stimulus plan that the economy sorely needs.

CONCLUSION

Today’s cooperative movement has centuries of history behind it. At the same time it is also a new movement of a new generation. Like every social equity movement, the cooperative movement rises and subsides, and its deeper goals cannot be permanently achieved because society is always changing: all social goals must be constantly renewed, and all social movements must go through cycles of renewal.

Some tendencies in today’s movement differ in several aspects from the cooperative movement as it was not long ago:

• it has returned to its mission of democratizing the workplace;

• it encompasses experimental structures of social enterprises;

• it is included by diverse nonprofits as part of their mission strategy;

• it has increased its worldwide character, with the international movement having stronger influence over national movements;

• it is reforging a close alliance with the labor movement;

• it has returned to direct action activism with housing, land, business, and factory occupations;

• it is achieving the backing of government in creating a supportive and enabling environment for the development of cooperatives;

• it is part of an international strategy, coordinated by the UN, to reorganize the world economy with the cooperative sector a permanent part, helping to provide full employment for the unemployed and marginalized people of the world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

John Curl is the author of For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America, (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009).

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NOTES

(1) UN General Assembly, “Resolution on Cooperatives in Social Development,” UN Resolution A/RES/56/114, Adopted 18 January 2002. http://www.copac.coop/publications/unpublications.html

(2) Rita Rhodes, The International Co-operative Alliance During War and Peace, 1910-1950, (Geneva: ICA, 1995); International Co-operative Alliance, “Peace-Building Through Cooperatives,” (Geneva: ICA, 2006), http://www.copac.coop/idc/2006/2006-idc-ica-en.pdf.

(3) For international examples, see the 11 case studies in Johnston Birchall, “Rediscovering the cooperative advantage: Poverty reduction through self-help,” Cooperative Branch, International Labour Office, Geneva: 2003, 31-62. The Uganda Shoe-shiners Industrial Cooperative Society began spontaneously. Nepalese hill community forestry user groups took over sustainable management of the public forests with support from the government. Milk Vita dairy cooperatives in Bangladesh began in a government program with international aid, and became independent. Women’s agro-tourism cooperatives in Greece were first initiated as a public development strategy, and then by grass-roots initiatives such as the Zagora co-op in Pelion. Tribal people’s cooperatives in Orissa, India, were started as pilot projects through the International Labour Organization and an NGO partner. The water cooperative of Santa Cruz, Bolivia was initiated by the community. Labor cooperatives in Finland were spontaneously organized by a variety of groups.

(4) Douglas B. Cleveland, “The Role of Services in the Modern US Economy,” (Washington, DC: Office of Service Industries, US Chamber of Commerce, International Trade Administration, 1999),” http://www.ita.doc.gov/td/sif/PDF/ROLSERV199.pdf

(5) Current examples of successful worker cooperatives involving larger groups include Sustainable Woods Cooperatives ( Lone Rock, Wisconsin), Equal Exchange (West Bridgewater, Massachusetts), Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives (Bay Area), Cooperative Care (Wautoma, Wisconsin), Chroma Technology Corp (Rockingham, Vermont), Rainbow Grocery (San Francisco). Cooperative Home Care Associates (New York City), WAGES (Oakland), Big Timberworks (Gallatin Gateway, Montana), Union Cab of Madison, and Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing (Madison, Wisconsin).

(6) Mondragon Corporation: Economic Data, http://www.mondragon-corporation.com/language/en-US/ENG/Economic-Data/Most-relevant-data.aspx

(7) Philip S. Foner, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Selections from His Writings, (New York: International Publishers, 1943) , 56-57.

(8) See John Curl, For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America, (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009). A detailed survey of this history can be found in my book.

(9) The extent of the worker cooperative movement was nationwide and regionally balanced. Early centers of cooperative growth were urban metropolises such as New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston, followed by smaller cities including Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco, as well as numerous small towns. Between 1865 and 1890, 72 worker cooperatives were opened in New York State; 69 in Massachusetts; 61 Illinois; 48 each in Pennsylvania and Ohio; 24 Minnesota; 20 Maryland; 17 Indiana; 15 Wisconsin, Kansas and Missouri; 13 Michigan; 12 Iowa; 11 New Jersey; 10 Louisiana; 9 Kentucky; 8 Connecticut; 5 Virginia and West Virginia; 4 Georgia; 3 Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas; 2 Tennessee, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington Territory, and District of Columbia; 1 each in Vermont, Delaware, South Carolina and Mississippi. New York City had the greatest concentration (38), followed by Chicago (27), Minneapolis (18), Philadelphia and Baltimore (16), San Francisco (15), Cincinnati (14), Milwaukee (13), Boston (11), St. Louis, New Orleans and Detroit (9). In addition 11 were in Canada, with 3 each in Montreal and Toronto. The leading trades (in descending order) were boot and shoe making, iron molding, printing-publishing, cigar making, coal mining, barrel making (cooperage), glass making, clothing manufacturing, furniture manufacturing, carpentry, and shipbuilding. See Clare Horner, “Producers’ Co-operatives in the United States, 1865-1890.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburg, 1978, 229-43.

(10) Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers' Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880-1890 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 217.

(11) Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 232.

(12) Curl, For All The People, 111-17.

(13) See Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Hicks, J. D. The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931. Reprinted. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961); Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (London: Oxford University Press, 1978).

(14) Clark Kerr and A. Harris, Self-Help Cooperatives in California (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Administration, University of California, 1939), California Emergency Relief Administration, 135-38.

(15) For the New Deal cooperative programs, see Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959).

(16) Joseph G. Knapp, The Advance of American Cooperative Enterprise: 1920-1945 (Danville, Illinois: Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1973), 260 ff.

(17) Ronald Lawson, The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers U. Press: 1986); Johnston Birchall, “Rediscovering the cooperative advantage: Poverty reduction through self-help” (Geneva: Cooperative Branch, International Labour Organization, 2003), 32; Urban Homestead Assistance Board, “Programs Overview,” “Co-op Development,” http://www.uhab.org; Robert Neuwirth, “Squatters' Rites,” City Limits Magazine, September/October 2002.

(18) Jeffrey Frank, “Two Models of Land Reform  and Development - Brazil, Z magazine, November 2002; Sue Branford, and Jan Rocha, Cutting the Wire: The story of the landless movement in Brazil, (London: Latin American Bureau 2002); Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, “About the MST,” http://www.mstbrazil.org/

(19) Michael Luo, “Sit-In at Factory Ends With 2 Loan Agreements,” New York Times, December 12, 2008; Michael Luo and Karen Ann Cullotta, “Even Workers Surprised by Success of Factory Sit-In,” New York Times, December 12, 2008.

(20) Benjamin Dangl, “Firing The Boss: An Interview with Chicago Factory Occupation Organizer,” Toward Freedom, January 15, 2009, http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1506/68/

(21) Carl Davidson, “Steelworkers Plan Job Creation via Worker Coops,” Znet, http://www.zcommunications.org/steelworkers-plan-job-creation-via-worker-coops-by-carl-davidson, November 3, 2009.

Jul 11, 2010 1:31:00 AM (2 months ago)

Festival of Grassroots Economics

Final cut of video from the festival we held last Sept in Oakland:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDrMkQFsQTQ

Jun 29, 2010 7:26:00 PM (2 months ago)

3 Cheers for Detroit's Local Currency

3 Cheers for Detroit's Local Currency
Kelli B. Kavanaugh Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Corktown, The Villages, Downtown Detroit, New Center, Midtown, Eastern Market
Detroit, some say, is a weird but cool blend of big city and small town. Detroit Cheers is making it weirder, smaller and cooler.

Detroit Cheers is a new local currency -- the city version of exchanging grain for flour or darned socks for a loaf of bread. Only it's more like beer for pizza, or housewares for a bike tune up.

With the goal of supporting a local small economy, a trio of Detroit business owners -- John Linardos from Motor City Brewing Works, Tim Tharp from Foran's Grand Trunk Pub and Jerry Belanger from Park Bar -- have put up their own cash to back a new local currency, or scrip, called Detroit Cheers.

The scrip concept was fairly common during the Great Depression (the city itself issued scrip in the 1930s) and is making a resurgence across the country these days. The basic premise is that participating businesses (listed below) accept Cheers and will make change from it -- in regular old fashioned dollars, scrip, or some combo of the two.

Consumers who use the scrip are making a defacto pledge to buy local, since only businesses within the city accept it.

And that's the point, says Greg Gedda, the owner of Union Street in Midtown, one of the businesses that will accept Cheers. "Because it's the city, it's for everyone, and this is our town to promote," he says. "This is the Detroit economic stimulus package."

Cheers 101

Put plainly, Cheers are locally issued currency accepted at select local businesses. Belanger, Tharp and Linardos each put up $1,500 to back the $4,500 worth of Cheers in circulation. The backing money is held in reserve at a bank. As backers are added, they'll release more Cheers. So one Cheers equals one dollar. "It's as good as the U.S. dollar … ironically, it's no better," Belanger says.

Dave Mancini of Supino Pizza in Eastern Market signed on to the Detroit scrip concept as soon as he heard about it, partly for his own benefit. "It's free promotion -- that sounds really selfish," he says. But as he surveys the scene at the Park Bar, he says, "I spend money here all the time, so I might as well take it."

That interconnected community of Detroit small business owners seems to be growing stronger, thanks to concepts like Detroit Open City and now, Cheers. "It means something to us ... that we're connected," says Belanger. "Spending Cheers is almost like giving a secret handshake."

So is this about warm and fuzzy, or is there real economic merit to a local currency? The possibility is certainly there. Berkshares, which are accepted at more than 350 businesses in southern Massachusetts, were launched in the fall 2006. There have been more than 2 million circulating to date, with five different banks and a total of twelve branch offices now serving as exchange stations.

Local backers have hopes for a similar strength. "This is not a novelty thing," says Linardos. "It will grow as we move forward."

Cheers were released into circulation earlier this month at the Park Bar. The party came off like a family reunion, with small business owners chatting about Final Four profits, clean and safe issues, and small successes while sipping on pints of Ghetto Blaster.

At one point, Belanger barked Cheers-accepting business names into a microphone, doling out free Cheers to guests in exchange for a promise that they will spend them at a business they hadn't yet patronized.

As Mancini watched a dozen people picking up Supino-bound Cheers, he shook his head, saying, "He's a saint."

But you know what they say about saints: They sometimes have clay feet. Belanger admits that the Cheers roll-out, while enthusiastic, hasn't been flawless. "We've been overwhelmed with the response, with people who want to use Cheers -- almost too much," says Belanger. "It's been bad in a good way or good in a bad way."

One issue has been with the paper that Cheers was printed on. The trio of backers chose a cotton rag paper for durability, and bought a ream of it -- no cheap purchase. Then they had to print the stuff.

"In keeping with spirit of the whole idea, we could have gone to a printer from out-of-state that has already done this for other municipalities, where we wouldn’t have had the learning curve," says Belanger. "But that would have been kind of contrary to our sustainability, local thing -- so we're going through a learning curve."

The worst-case scenario that Belanger fears is having to completely reissue the scrip. "To have that expense all over again ... it's not always just roses!"

Not to end on a sour note, Detroit Scrip seems to have some legs -- not yet with the mainstream, but with a community of people who tend to already spend their money in the city. And the reserve bank looks like it will be growing: Union Street is preparing to join as a backer. "I'm bowled over by everyone wanting to be involved," says Belanger.

Detroit Scrip FAQ

Q. Is it legal?
A. Yes. Scrip dates way back -- it was issued as wages in early mining towns and was even accepted as payment for Federal land in 1835, thanks to President Andrew Jackson. The concept is experiencing a comeback in recent years. Traverse City, The Berkshires in southern Massachusetts and Ithaca, New York are just three of the many places around the country with some form of local currency. The E.F. Shumaker Society has lots more info on local currency.

Scrip may not attempt to look like Federal money, and anyone holding some must be able to exchange it for equivalent Federal legal tender at any time -- i.e., it must be "backed." To do that with Detroit Scrip, visit Foran's Grand Trunk Pub, Park Bar or Motor City Brewing Works and turn it in for the green stuff.

The businesses only ask that if you are planning on exchanging a lot -- say, a few hundred -- of Cheers at one time, you give them a heads up so they can make sure they have enough cash on hand.

Q. How do I spend it?
A. Simply use it as you would any ol' three dollar bill! Cheers is printed in denominations of 3. If your pizza tab comes to $8, you can pay it with a U.S. fiver and a Cheers. Or three Cheers and get a dollar back. Or, you can pay for a $2 beer with a Cheers. and you'll get a buck back in change. Or you can use a U.S. $5 bill, and then ask for one Cheers back.

Q. Where do I spend it?
A. These businesses accept Cheers. Check the web site for updates.

Restaurants and Bars

* Union Street: 4145 Woodward, Midtown, 313-831-3965 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-831-3965 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* The Bronx Bar: 4476 2nd Ave., Midtown, 313-832-8464 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-832-8464 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Motor City Brewing Works: 470 W. Canfield, Midtown, 3131-832-2700
* Woodbridge Pub: 5169 Trumbull, Woodbridge, 313-833-2701 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-833-2701 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Supino Pizza: 2457 Russell St., Eastern Market, 313-567-7879 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-567-7879 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Park Bar: 2040 Park Ave., Downtown, 313-962-2933 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-962-2933 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Cliff Bell's: 2030 Park Ave., Downtown, 313-961-2543 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-961-2543 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Eph's Deli: 608 Woodward, Downtown, 313-964-4511 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-964-4511 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Foran's Grand Trunk Pub: 612 Woodward, Downtown, 313-961-3043 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-961-3043 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Retail/Services

* Bureau of Urban Living: 460 W. Canfield, Midtown, 313-833-9336 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-833-9336 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Canine to Five Detroit Dog Day Care: 3443 Cass Ave., Midtown, 313-831-3647 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-831-3647 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Wheelhouse Detroit: 1340 E. Atwater, Downtown, 313-656-2453 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-656-2453 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Dormouse Design: 6447 Mack, The Villages
* Recy-Clean: 1331 Holden, New Center, 313-871-4000 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 313-871-4000 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
* Steve Adams Design
* Treetop Craftsman, Inc.
* Electrician Pat Deegan

Q. How do I get it?
A. Go to the bank! Which, in this case, is Foran's Grand Trunk Pub, The Park Bar or Motor City Brewing Works. You want $40 bucks worth? Hand over two twenties and you will receive 13 Cheers and a US dollar. Also, when you are at any of the aforementioned businesses that accept Detroit Scrip, you can ask to receive all or part of your change in Cheers.

Q. Why should I participate?
A. As Liz Blondy, owner of Canine to Five Detroit Dog Daycare puts it simply: "Karma."

Jun 16, 2010 10:22:00 PM (3 months ago)

SF Community Congress Economic Development Summit

Letter from the SF Community Congress Organizers

Hello progressive friends,

You’ve survived the mid-year elections and the annual budget crisis! Many of you have spent long hours developing revenue measures. Some of you have just returned inspired from the US Social Forum, ready to imagine that another San Francisco is possible! On Thursday July 8, 2010, we are inviting you to join community and worker organizations in building a progressive agenda to protect and expand economic opportunities for all San Franciscans.

This will be an important day building up to San Francisco's second citywide Community Congress in August – which will produce a progressive social, economic, and environmental roadmap. The "New Deal for the City" Community Congress is an exciting follow-up to the 1975 Congress that led to district elections and many other progressive gains. Since last Fall, members of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, the Human Services Network, Jobs with Justice, and numerous tenants rights, workers center, and environmental and economic justice organizations, have been meeting regularly to develop draft documents for the Congress. The principal goal is to develop a locally-actionable legislative and policy platform that we’ll encourage candidates for Supervisor (in 2010) and Mayor (in 2011) to support. This year's full Congress – including caucuses on economic development, housing, transportation, and health and human services – will take place at the USF campus on August 14-15.

You are all, in one way or another, important participants in community-based economic development (some of you have likely been playing a role already in this and other Congress working groups), and your participation in July 8's pre-Congress gathering is critical in order to discuss ideas, debate, and draft our economic development platform to bring to the August Congress. We need a strong turnout to create a strong progressive force for meaningful and lasting change in how – and for whom – the city works. We are inviting workers centers, small and back streets businesses, worker cooperatives, arts and cultural workers, urban agriculture, and students and low-wage workers: people and organizations that are key to a vibrant San Francisco future.

The attached framing document is a work-in-progress, emphasizing the critical role of the public sector as a major economic driver, with the responsibility to lead the city's economy, and on the importance of small businesses and cultural work that underpin other economic sectors. We believe the city should approach development in terms of economic opportunities for people who live and work in the city and who are most in need of dignified livelihood. We will discuss proposals for revenue and city budget reform that prioritize front-line workers, a municipal bank and city enterprises, labor standards, community jobs programs, green workforce development, arts and cultural economies, and light-industrial back streets businesses.

The July 8 Community Economic Development summit will be from 3:30 pm. to 8:30 p.m., at the SF Lighthouse Church (1337 Sutter Street @ Van Ness, San Francisco), appropriately located in the shadow of planned mega-development projects, where we will chart a different course for the future of San Francisco. A first working session will take place from 3:30 to 5:15, with a half hour break for light refreshments, and a second working session from 6:45 to 8:00. Please let us know by July 2 if you are planning to attend, or if you have any childcare needs (RSVP el_compay_nando@yahoo.com). Also, if you cannot make it, but someone else from your organization or from allied progressive organizations can, feel free to pass on the information to them. For updates, and to review and comment online on the full draft recommendations of the working group, please visit http://sfcommunitycongress.wordpress.com/

Thanks for your support and involvement,
Fernando

Fernando Martí
Community Planning Program Director / Project Architect
AsianNeighborhoodDesign

Jun 14, 2010 6:31:00 PM (3 months ago)

Neighborgoods

From Shareable.net
By Micki Krimmel
06.09.10

After a long discussion with my ex-boyfriend about his 8 year old son Evan and the perils of a childhood staring at glowing screens, I decided to do my part to encourage Evan to break away from the television to read more. "He loves the Harry Potter movies so surely he would love the books!" I thought. The first Harry Potter book is so popular, I knew for sure that one of my friends would have a copy Evan could read. I searched NeighborGoods and no one near me had it listed so I added the book to my wishlist.

Later that day, Jory logged into NeighborGoods and saw that someone in his neighborhood wanted to borrow Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Happy to help out a neighbor, he promptly added his copy to his NeighborGoods inventory. I received an alert email and I logged in to request the book from Jory. We set a time to meet and a couple days later, Jory was ringing my door bell. He delivered the book and a sweet bonus - Jory brought me a bag full of fruit from his avocado tree! Jory and I spent 20 minutes or so chatting in my living room about his family, NeighborGoods, and our Los Angeles neighborhood, Atwater Village.

Since that first meeting, Jory and I are now friends on all sorts of social networks. We share stuff on NeighborGoods all the time, we share local news and deals at our favorite taco place with each other on Twitter, and we compete for mayorships on Foursquare. Jory and I are now neighbors in the true sense of the word. Through Jory, I've met several other Atwater Village residents and we all stay in touch online.

I returned the book to Jory a few weeks later. I don't think Evan read it. But thanks to the technology on our glowing screens, our neighborhood got a little better. I now feel much more connected to Atwater Village. I feel like I'm a part of the community. I feel connected to the people around me and the ground under my feet.

And that's why I created NeighborGoods.

---

NeighborGoods.net is the online community where you can save and earn money by sharing stuff with your friends. Need a ladder? Borrow it from your neighbor. Have a bike collecting dust in your closet? Rent it out for some extra cash! NeighborGoods helps you live better and more sustainably by saving resources and strengthening local communities.

NeighborGoods is currently in limited beta in Southern California.

Jun 13, 2010 6:20:00 PM (3 months ago)

Slow Money: A New Community Movement Is Picking Up Steam

June 11, 2010
By BARBARA BEDWAY
The Fiscal Times

Two years of global economic shocks, a whipsawing stock market, a credit crisis, and revelations of mismanagement and corruption at the heart of the nation’s financial system have catalyzed a fledgling nationwide movement to “slow money down” and put it to work close to home.

Making it easy for people to invest in their local economies is the holy grail for Woody Tasch, a Santa Fe-based venture capitalist and author of /Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered/. Two years ago, he founded the nonprofit Slow Money Alliance , in response to the economic meltdown and what he calls “the nuclear explosion in complexity and volatility of financial products” that precipitated it.

Using the tenets of the slow food movement (buy local produce, take time to prepare and savor meals at home), the Alliance’s small network of investors, entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens are devising ways to get investment capital flowing to local, small food enterprises. The modest goal: to get a million Americans investing 1 percent of their assets in local food systems within a decade.

Call it nurture capital.

Why food enterprises? Tasch believes they will yield stronger local economies, a healthier environment, and improved supplies of affordable, healthful food.

“Right now, money goes zooming around the planet, invested in distant, large-scale, complicated things,” he says. “You can add four layers of noncorrelating razzmatazz to securities, they’re still just money circulating between different classes of investors.” Slow Money, he asserts, is a kind of antidote; investing in things close to home that you can understand.

At the first Slow Money conference last year in Santa Fe, four companies received a total of $265,000 from a group of individual investors. Among the recipients: the Carrot Project, which makes loans to small organic farmers in New England; and Gather, an organic restaurant of locally sourced foods, where the banquettes are covered with recycled leather belts.

If all goes well, Tasch believes such investments would deliver returns in the low single digits over a number of years. But these investments would offer the added dividend of what Tasch calls “true diversity” — diversity that comes from promoting small local farms and related businesses, as an alternative to industrial agriculture's millions of acres of single-variety corn and soybeans, for example.

The expected low single-digit returns, however, may not cut it for most investors who expect their money to work harder than a certificate of deposit. Slow Money is still a few years away from directly funding anything (currently membership is about 1,100, with 180 founding members who have contributed $1,000 each), so time will tell if investors accept social good as sufficient dividend.

What’s more, investing in small companies can be risky. “The risk with a small local company is disproportionate to any potential return,” says Matt McGrath, a financial planner with Evensky & Katz in Coral Gables, Fla. “There’s a greater chance the company could go under.”

*Raising Nurture Capital
*Michael Shuman, director for research and economic development at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies , points to growing evidence that every dollar spent at a locally owned business generates two to four more times economic benefit—measured in local income, jobs and tax revenue—than a dollar spent at a globally owned business.

Eventually, Slow Money advocates hope to create regional slow money funds that would connect local people to local food enterprises needing investment. Other pilot projects include offering slow money tax-exempt municipal bonds to fund a diversified portfolio of local food ventures; and a slow money short-term bond, developed with the Calvert Foundation, which is partly funded by Calvert Group, a mutual fund company specializing in socially responsible investments.

*Beyond the Dollar
*Local currencies, which briefly flourished in this country when federal dollars were in short supply during the Depression, are one way of getting money re-circulating within communities. Some of these local currency systems, meant mainly for transactions among individuals, involve forms of barter, where you receive local currency in exchange for a service or good you provide. Other systems involve notes that can be exchanged for federal dollars, and can be spent at any local business that accepts them.

One of the more sophisticated networks, and the largest of its kind in the country, is BerkShares , begun four years ago in the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts. BerkShares founder, Susan Witt, says the program was initiated in 2006, before the global meltdown, as a way to build wealth locally in a region that “sees more tax dollars flow out than come back into it.”

The notes — printed in 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 denominations—feature local heroes including W.E. DuBois and Norman Rockwell. BerkShares can only be spent at the almost 400 area businesses that formally accept them, and in another 200 home-based businesses that also take them.

And yes, the IRS gets its share. When someone pays for goods or services with local money, the income to the business is taxable, says Ed Collom, a University of Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies. For accounting purposes, the discount is shown as a business expense, like a credit card fee, and the total is taken from profit at the end of the year in determining a business's federal and state income taxes.

“We’ve had nonstop requests from other communities asking how to do this,” says Witt, who says that since its start in 2006, $2.6 million worth of BerkShares have gone out and she estimates about $130,000 is currently in circulation in a region of about 19,000 year-round people. “The current economic situation is demanding a response, and citizens are stepping up,” she says.

*“Comfort Dollars” Save a Business
*John Halko, chef and owner of Comfort Lounge, an organic restaurant in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, had no choice but to step up. Two years ago, when he was halfway through the renovation of an expanded space for his original 14-table café, his home equity line of credit ran out. (Small businesses are often, funded with credit cards and home equity lines; in the past two years, more than $1.5 trillion in credit card lines have been cut.) Unable to get a loan, he raised the money himself by printing his own currency, in the form of a swipable card, called “Comfort Dollars,” and sold them to his customers. They were an instant hit. For every dollar spent on a card, the customer received $1.20 worth of credit at either restaurant—a 20 percent rate of return.

“I’ve been told I’m the best thing that ever happened to Hastings, and I knew at one point I’d want to give back,” says Halko, who raised nearly $40,000. “The Comfort Dollars were sort of giving back, and the customers were giving to me.” No longer in need of financial support, he’s no longer offering the cards. In spite of offers to expand to other locations, he’s staying small and local for now.

Jun 12, 2010 7:22:00 PM (3 months ago)

The Central Bank of Ecuador Supports Complementary Currency Development

The Complementary Currency Program

Fundación Pachamama and the Central Bank of Ecuador jointly organized a workshop on complementary currency systems that was held on June 3 and 4 in the headquarters of the Central Bank in Quito. Ultimately the goal is to develop new economic models for rural development including new exchange networks and alternative, complementary currency systems, which will help people in Ecuador get access to credit and promote local production, consumption and trade.

The workshop, called “Systems of Alternative Pay and Means of Complementary Pay,” was held to strengthen the conceptual understanding of the diverse methods of complementary currency systems and the key elements for implementing a system on a national level. In addition, the workshop aimed to explain the workings of a successful model developed in Uruguay (called C3U), and the advantages of creating and applying this system. Finally, the workshop aspired to establish work links between administrative organizations and Uruguay project architects with the Central Bank of Ecuador and Fundación Pachamama.

The first day was a planning meeting with personnel of the Central Bank; Javier Félix, advisor from Fundación Pachamama, and the invited participants from Uruguay; Fernando Cetrulo from Foundation STRO Uruguay and Enrique Baraibar, from the Direction of Development Projects of the Uruguayan Presidency. The workshop began with various presentations from the different projects of the Central Bank, discussing alternatives to economic policies with complementary payment means and compensation systems, and the C3U model. Conceptual input was given to widen the vision of those charged with the diverse projects of the Central Bank, based on the experience of peers from Uruguay.

On the second day, the workshop was opened to the public, including members from the Ecuadorian State, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, directors of Savings and Credit Cooperatives, and other organizations related to the Solidarity Economy, and university students studying economics in Quito.

The workshop achieved the planned objectives and culminated with the signature of a cooperation agreement between the Central Bank of Ecuador, Fundación Pachamama, the STRO Foundation, and the Direction of Development Projects of the Uruguayan Presidency, recognizing the importance of the development of alternative currency methods for the participating institutions. This agreement lays the groundwork for cooperation between all the participants for implementing alternative currency methods that benefit an improved distribution of wealth, employment generation, economic stability, and social development for Latin American countries.

http://www.pachamama.org/content/blogcategory/105/166/#9

Jun 12, 2010 5:34:00 PM (3 months ago)

New Economics Institute Founding Meeting

On June 5th the New Economics Institute held its founding meeting. Guests
helped imagine the future of the Institute -- its vision, its programs, the
urgency of its realization. Members of the board of directors outlined
future projects:

1. Launching a new economic model of an economy that works and thrives
despite dwindling resources (Gus Speth).
2. Developing the Happy Planet Index as a better measure of success (Stewart
Wallis).
3. Developing new economic teaching materials that break the stranglehold of
the old economics (Neva Goodwin).
4. Using Vermont as a model for rebuilding our economies, one neighborhood
at a time (Will Raap).
5. Modeling new ownership options that change the meaning of work and the
role of the worker (Gar Alperovitz).
6. Bringing the case for a new economics into mainstream thinking and
action. (David Boyle).

Shifting mainstream economics is a huge task. It will take significant
resources to accomplish. We need your support financially
(http://neweconomicsinstitute.org/support_us) and we need your help telling
the story of a new economics, raising awareness, and activating a movement
of change.

Opening remarks from the founding meeting are excerpted below.

Yours truly,
Susan Witt, Stefan Apse, and Kate Poole
Staff of New Economics Institute
formerly the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA USA
neweconomicsinstitute.org

Board of Directors: Gar Alperovitz, Jessica Brackman, Eric Harris-Braun,
John Fullerton, Neva Goodwin, Hildegarde Hannum, Dan Levinson, Richard
Norgaard, David Orr, Constance Packard, Will Raap, Gus Speth, Peter Victor,
and Stewart Wallis.
Advisory Board: Peter Barnes, Merrian Fuller, Bill McKibben, Otto Scharmer,
Doug Tompkins, and Robert Wade.

* * * * * * * * *
New Economics Institute
Founding Meeting

In his theory of art the painter Wassily Kandinsky stated that every great
work of art must have three elements: something that arises out of the
artist¹s personal circumstances and his or her character; something
representative of the spirit of the time and place, reflecting the struggles
of a people in an era; and something universal that will speak to what lies
common in all humankind throughout the ages.

I'd say that every great organization must have the same three
elements--something that evolves out of its particular circumstances and the
people involved in it; a mission that addresses the most critical problems
of the times; yet all the while staying true to the universal values that
inspire and direct us all.

We are gathered today as the E. F. Schumacher Society transitions to a new
form as the New Economics Institute. It is an appropriate evolution for the
Society that for thirty years has stewarded in a small way a large mission
and intellectual heritage. Our websites last year totaled seven million
hits. Our local economic programs have gained wide media attention. The
broadly circulated Schumacher lectures collectively tell a story of a new
approach to economics. Yet we are too small to take advantage of the
opportunity this attention offers. Thus, the board of directors has entered
an agreement to partner with the New Economics Foundation
(www.neweconomics.org), one of Europe¹s most effective economic think tanks,
to bring the power and depth of its programs to the United States. The
evolution of the organization is possible only because of the mature stage
of its development and because of the experience and vision of its
remarkable board of directors.

This transition comes at a most critical time in our economic history, a
time of disillusionment and failure of existing systems. It has always
seemed to me that the destiny of America is in the economic sphere as its
designer and driver. As a people we are comfortable in this sphere of
producing and trading and buying. It is our element. And it is our destiny
to shape our economics either for greatness or for limited ends. History
will judge us on how we do it. The New Economics Institute emerges at this
particular time in our history to help shape and lead the implementation of
a new economics so urgently needed.

Though the medium of this new Institute is economics, its work is informed
more broadly. It was Martin Buber, the great Hasidic writer, who described
the task of human beings on earth as nothing less than striving to raise the
sleeping spirit from stone to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to
speaking being. He would have our every action permeated by this intent.

What is economics at its core but a system for organizing human labor to
transform the earth into products for one another? The outcome of that
transformation can either degrade or enhance all involved; the nature of our
economic institutions determines which it will be. If we accept Martin
Buber's admonition, then it is our responsibility‹our spiritual task, if you
will‹to create an economic system that embodies our highest ideals as human
beings, one that builds community, advances ecological health, creates
beauty, provides sustainability, and encourages mutuality.

This is the task that the New Economics Institute is setting itself. This is
the work we are asking you to join us in undertaking.

Susan Witt
Interim Executive Director
New Economics Institute

Jun 11, 2010 11:01:00 PM (3 months ago)

2 Day Timebank Training at the US Social Forum

Register here

TimeBanks USA has teamed up with the Michigan Alliance of TimeBanks to present a regional TimeBanking Training for 2 full days on June 26th and 27th.

Why you should come:

These are tough times. Find the Wealth of your community and discover what it takes to rear healthy children, preserve families, care for the frail, redress justice, build community, sustain democracy, create inclusion and generate well-being.

What you can expect:

Expect to be informed, excited, and inspired. Expect to take part in TimeBank simulations, exercises and games. Expect to hear powerful stories of people who have made TimeBanking work for their communities and organizations. Expect to envision possibilities with people who are passionate - like you! Expect to be ready to take action, and for others to take it with you, step by learning step.

NEW!! A limited number of SCHOLARSHIPS are now available. Please click here to apply by JUNE 15.

Training Schedule: Detroit

Saturday, June 26

Session I: A Wealth of Possibilities, 9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Participate in a Group Simulation. Apply the core principles of TimeBanking, and experience how individuals, groups and organizations earn and spend Time Dollars to match unused talents and resources with unmet needs.

Session II: Get Organized, 1:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Learn critical “must-knows” about TimeBanking, including developing membership and the key elements for visioning and planning a TimeBank.

Sunday, June 27

Session III: A Wealth of Experience, 9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Meet members of the TimeBanks USA Ambassador Corps and other TimeBank practitioners from across the United States through a series of small group discussions. Hear their stories up close, and find out the many ways in which TimeBanking has been applied to meet different goals in different communities.

Session IV: Get Connected, 1:30 - 5:00 p.m.

Connect with others who share your interests or who live in your geographic area, and discuss ways to expand and strengthen your work.

Jun 11, 2010 4:29:00 PM (3 months ago)

The Unplugged

Editor's note: I wish many more entrepreneurs would take heed from this lesson. On a tangential note, I was speaking with someone yesterday about why alternative currencies have been able to take root more easily in poorer countries. I don't think it is just that they are desperate and don't have a good source of currency, it is also that even in poor countries more people own their own houses, land, and other assets, either individually and communally. It is incredibly challenging to get alternative currencies to circulate through entities (especially corporate banks and governments) that have control over our assets, when they will only accept dollars. They won't accept anything else lest they lose their control to some extent. So if we move to a way of live where we have fewer assets, but outright own all of them, we will have more control over our currencies, our energy flows, our lives, our resources, and lot more. To the extent that our lives do not depend on the dominant system is the extent to which real change - political, economic, ecological, social, spiritual - is possible.

From Shareable.net
By Vinay Gupta
06.08.10

The author of this fiction, Vinay Gupta, is the creator of the Hexayurt, a real-life, inexpensive disaster relief shelter that embodies and anticipates many of the ideas in this piece.

A Video News Report from 2030....

Anchor: Touting their movement as a combination of the economic theories of Mahatma Gandhi and the political science of Buckminster Fuller, the Unplugged have now reduced the environmental impact of the United States of America by 8 percent over their 15-year program.

Opponents of the movement call Unplugging an unscientific and cult-like political movement, but proponents say that "Unplugging" was the best decision they ever made. Let's hear from Jack Houston, a former investment banker...

Cuts to video

[Screen opens to Jack Huston, a muscular early-40s New Yorker.]

Presenter: Jack, could you explain what Unplugging did for you?

Jack: Well, first we've got to cover briefly how Unplugging works. The core of the theory is that we can all live off the interest generated by our savings, or the profits from our investments, if we possess enough capital - and generations of Capitalists have dreamed of "getting off at the top" - making enough money to cash out of the workplace and live as they like for the rest of their lives.

Presenter: But what does that have to do with living in a housing pod in the middle of Oregon?

Jack: Well, it comes down to the nature of capital. Wealth stored as dollars was essentially a share in America's national economy - a credit note backed by the US Government. But Buckminster Fuller showed us that wealth-as-money was a specialized subset of Wealth - the ability to sustain life.

To "get off at the top" requires millions and millions of dollars of stored wealth. Exactly how much depends on your lifestyle and rate of return, but it's a lot of money, and it's volatile depending on economic conditions. A crash can wipe out your capital base and leave you helpless, because all you had was shares in a machine.

So we Unpluggers found a new way to unplug: an independent life-support infrastructure and financial architecture - a society within society - which allowed anybody who wanted to "buy out" to "buy out at the bottom" rather than "buying out at the top."

If you are willing to live as an Unplugger does, your cost to buy out is only around three months of wages for a factory worker, the price of a used car. You never need to "work" again--that is, for money which you spend to meet your basic needs. However, there are plenty of life support activities to keep you busy, and a lot of basic research and science to do. Unplugging is not an off-the-shelf solution, it's a research career!

Presenter: So tell us about your house over here? It looks pretty weird!

Jack: Unpluggers don't have our own manufacturing facilities for these yet, so we shop them out to fabs in Turkey. The shell is aluminum and aerogel, 50 percent collector panels, 12 volt appliance wiring, super-insulated windows with liquid crystal shades for internal temperature control. Heat comes from either a wood stove or a peltier solid state heat pump running off ground heat, depending on how much power we need. Cooling, similarly. We cook in the solar oven on the side sometimes, but mainly on woodgas or in the microwave.

The houses - or "Pods" as you call them - have a reputation as being "one size fits all poorly" but, in fact we found that 90 percent of people got on very well with one of three basic designs. The economies of scale made mass manufacture of those models more cost effective but people still do custom work for about one unit in ten.

We're working towards local fabs for a lot of this stuff now, but that's hard to organize without winding up with internal industries which run on grid power and commercial supply chains, both of which are no-nos for our way of life: you can't be an alternative if you still rely on the industrial infrastructure for your basic daily lifestyle needs. So we build the housing pods in Turkey as part of the "Final Purchase" process - where a person becoming an unplugger buys their home, tools and land, to support them and their family for the rest of their life, and then disconnects from the national economy.

It's not perfect. We're still using the resources of the industrial world to disconnect from it. But until we have green fabs for the collector panels and other necessities, it's what we have to do.

Presenter: Can you explain what this has to do with Fuller and Gandhi?

Jack: Gandhi's model of "self-sufficiency" is the goal: the freedom that comes from owning your own life support system outright is immense. It allows us to disconnect from the national economy as a way of solving the problems of our planet one human at a time. But Gandhi's goals don't scale past the lifestyle of a peasant farmer and many westerners view that way of life as unsustainable for them personally: I was not going to sell my New York condo and move to Oregon to live in a hut, you know?

Presenter: Ok.... with you so far.... what about Fuller?

Jack: Gandhi's Goals, Fuller's Methods, if you like.

Fuller's "do more with less" was a method we could use to attain self-sufficiency with a much lower capital cost than "buy out at the top." An integrated, whole-systems-thinking approach to a sustainable lifestyle - the houses, the gardening tools, the monitoring systems - all of that stuff was designed using inspiration from Fuller and later thinkers inspired by efficiency. The slack - the waste - in our old ways of life were consuming 90 percent of our productive labor to maintain.

A thousand dollar a month combined fuel bill is your life energy going down the drain because the place you live sucks your life way in waste heat, which is waste money, which is waste time. Your car, your house, the portion of your taxes which the Government spends on fuel, on electricity, on waste heat... all of the time you spent to earn that money is wasted to the degree those systems are inefficient systems, behind best practices!

Presenter: Wow! So tell us about the Humane Human Footprint.

Jack: The Human Footprint is simple: it's the share of the world's resources you can use without really harming anybody simply by existing. We call it the Human Footprint as opposed to the Inhuman Footprint. You take the sustainable harvest of the earth - the bounty we can consume without reducing next year's harvest or reducing the resilience of the earth in other ways - and your share of that is one Human Footprint. The earth's Wealth - its life-giving power - is like a trust fund split between seven billion humans and a gazillion other living creatures. That which consumes more than its share is defrauding all the rest of their right to life. And this isn't religion, this is common sense: if there are winners and losers, we're in a race for survival. If there are only winners, we're all artists, scientists, lovers and scholars.

I know how I want to live.

Presenter: So how close to your Human Footprint are you, Jack?

[Jack looks uncomfortable.]

Presenter: I've heard five times over is a typical number for Unpluggers...

Jack: Well, it depends how you measure it but yes, about that. I have three children, so my family footprint is about 11.2x HF but my personal footprint is about 7.3x. I'm working on it, though. It's hard to make the adjustment, and we only have a few tens of thousands of people at 1.0x or lower.

Presenter: So let's talk politics. Unplugging is also a political movement - you yourself are mayor of a township here, and your "town" is the local Unplugger population plus a few hold outs in ghost suburbs east of here. Why play at politics if all you wanted to do was drop off the Grid?

Jack: Because political assumptions wire everything. Building codes dictate how you can build, which dictates the size of your housing cost, which is the primary factor in your Unplug Cost. Our sanitary systems are greatly more effective than those of the Grid but, because we fertilize food with human waste after extracting what energy we can from it, some say our food isn't suitable for human consumption - even though, in fact, there is no scientific evidence what-so-ever of any disease organisms in the fertilizer stream. Just the idea of fertilizing using processed human waste freaks people out, even though it is how humans always lived. And this pattern repeats for water, our medical practices, all of it. You would think that preventative medicine was a crime!

Because we are different, the existing legal infrastructure works against us at every hand and turn. To create change, we have to play politics. But we are careful to simply use our small-but-growing clout to open doors for our chosen lifestyle, not to close doors on other people's choices. We aren't ecostalinists. Gandhi's approach: voluntary enlistment in the army of truth, if you want to think about it that way, has proven to be the only effective model of political change which is consistent with all of our shared values. We embrace some parts of Gandhi's model more than others - as with Bucky - but you can't argue with the historical success of his approach: India, South Africa, America, Poland, Mexico... the list goes on.

Presenter: Even my kids have an Obey Emperor Gandhi bumper sticker. What's that about?

Jack: It's an Unplugger joke. We call Gandhi "Emperor Gandhi" because in our way of looking at things, he was the political leader of India - a network of Kingdoms - and therefore technically he was an Emperor [laughs]. In that role, he organized collective defense against the invasion of India by raising a volunteer army of people who bought nothing from the invading colonials, made salt, and got beaten while maintaining rigid discipline - just like an army. All they did not do was leave home or use violent methods to resist their invaders. The fact Gandhi himself didn't own much of anything and advised self-reliance as a keystone of freedom makes him the John Locke of our movement. But we don't take the Emperor Gandhi thing seriously, you know. It's just a bit of our cultural humor.

Presenter: The threat of "Mom, keep yelling at me and I'll get a job delivering chinese food and then Unplug when I've saved up!" has kept many a parent up at night...

Jack: Unplugging isn't really something you can sustain from youthful rebellion: kids who don't choose this way of life for themselves as adults are usually really poor Unpluggers - they don't take soil metrics seriously, they don't really understand the invest-in-your-lands model of labor, and so on. It's not really something for punks and anarchists, even though there is superficial appeal.

Presenter: There's a lot of science here!

Jack: Oh yes. We monitor everything we have proved pays, and more: soil bacteria genetics, nutrient levels in the soil, nematode populations, you name it. We have such excellent yields and pest control because we don't move around much - we get to know our land as scientists and artists and designers - we share knowledge and models.

Of course, not everybody contributes equally to this knowledge base - I have a neighbor who is a molecular biology professor by (former-) trade and, well, I use his numbers a lot [grins]. But we all do what we can, and the results are proof that our farming techniques - "high monitoring biointensive agriculture" or "Technical Permaculture" depending on where you live and which school you follow - our farming methods work, and will continue to work for at least a few hundred to a few tens of thousands of years.

And that's enough for us: leave it to our children to figure out how to get their own lives to be even more integrated morally, ethically and socially.

Presenter: Some say that Unplugging is a cult because of your "Unplugger Morals" doctrines...

Jack: Acting as if the god in all life mattered is radical politics. But we have people from every faith and tradition living as Unpluggers, as well as those with no beliefs but a deep moral conviction that this is the right thing to do. But as with Satyagraha - Gandhi's social change approach - this takes everything you have and more and you can't do it without a solid internal framework, a deeply personal commitment to this as Right Action in a Buddhist sense, as Dharma from a Hindu perspective, as The Life Divine if you are a Christian. We have radical Benedictine monks - on the edge of getting booted out of the Catholic Church - who have updated the lifestyle passed down from Benedict himself to use Unplugger Farming and who became part of the Unplugger Community as a result. But we also have anarchosyndicalist atheists.

All it takes is a belief you can act on which helps you make personal changes for global reasons. And a political faith isn't usually enough to do that, but it can be. Religion has proven over time that it can move people in ways that nothing else can, and Unplugging is the biggest change a society can make.

Living up to your values is hard. Faith helps some people do it, so we tend to see more of those kinds of people making the switch. It's just a selection bias.

Presenter: What do you mean "a change that society can make?"

Jack: Unpluggers now constitute 5 percent of the United States population. At first, we were the very ideologically motivated, and there was a lot of interface with older communitarian groups and prior generations who had attempted to make this transition.

But as we became more defined, and our thinkers elucidated our case more clearly - as our farmer-scientists began to really get the yields predicted in theory, on a per-square-foot basis... it became clear that we were talking about a partial solution to the problems that have faced the human race from the beginning of time: how do I live myself, and how does my family live.

And a society is just individuals and families, and sometimes families of families, all the way up to States and Governments and the International Agencies and so on. If you solve the problem for a single family, and it's something which can compete in the evolutionary marketplace of ideas, then eventually you can solve the entire problem.

You know why GDP has gone down 20 percent because of Unplugging? Unpluggers are entrepreneurs. We used to start businesses because we wanted to buy out at the top of the game, now we usually buy a fairly lavish Pod, and some really, really good quality land, unplug by 30, and some of us expect to spend the rest of our lives learning, teaching and exploring what it is to be alive. Farming five or six hours a day seems like a lot of work, but you do it with friends, and you're doing science and research some of the time, and you eat what you make. The basic activities of life are so much more satisfying that earn-and-spend-and-eat-carry-out when you actually respect them as basic human activities, as links we share with everything that is alive.

Presenter: Tell me about the Endowment.

Jack: The Endowment is how we help the poor to Unplug, and it is easily the most controversial part of our program. We encourage the developing world to Unplug as the ultimate form of Leapfrogging: skip hypercapitalism and anarchocapitalism and democratic socialism entirely and jump directly to Unplugging. Many Unpluggers take their excess capital, keep investing it in the system, and use the proceeds to fund private Unplugging programs. Others simply took their capital and added it to funds managed by a Grameen-bank like institution called the Unplugging Bank which lends people money to unplug, and has them pay for their Pods by selling excess farm goods and teaching agriculture for us. The leverage of these approaches has yet to be verified but - judging by the political repression of Unpluggers in China and India and some parts of Africa - judging by that resistance, I think we are going to be successful.

As the Mahatma said: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Software used to be an industry, you know?

Presenter: Thank you, Jack, for telling us about your life.

Jun 8, 2010 6:11:00 PM (3 months ago)

MasterCard to Unleash Payment Innovation by Launching New Open API Developer Portal

Select MasterCard Payment and Data Services Will be Released via Open API to Worldwide Software Developer Community to Create New, Innovative Payment Applications
Purchase, NY, May 25, 2010 - MasterCard Worldwide announced that later this year it will release Open Application Programming Interfaces (Open APIs) for third–party and independent software developers around the world. By opening up previously proprietary payments and data services, developers will be able to create a new wave of e-commerce and mobile payment applications.

The new Open API program is the first initiative from the newly created MasterCard Labs. A new developer portal will also be launched to enable developers to easily sign up for access to all of the Open APIs that MasterCard makes available will also be launched.

Through the portal, MasterCard will provide developers with technical documentation, software development kits (SDKs), sample source code, reference guides, and “virtual sandboxes” for testing new and innovative applications. A developer forum designed to spur collaboration between MasterCard engineers and developers will also be an integral component of the new portal.

“We are excited about tapping into the ingenuity of software developers around the globe to help create the next generation of game-changing payment applications,” said Josh Peirez, Chief Innovation Officer, MasterCard Worldwide. “We feel this will unleash innovation within our industry especially in the burgeoning areas of e-commerce and mobile payments.”

In addition to payments, MasterCard has identified approximately 20 platforms and services that it plans to open up to developers via the portal. These platforms and services provide additional functionality and enhancements to MasterCard’s payment capabilities. The Open APIs will further enhance the development of new applications and systems beyond those currently available, including CRMs, ERPs, online games, merchant e-commerce web sites, eWallets, mobile applications, and payroll systems.

MasterCard payment and data services also could be integrated with other data sources and functions to create “mashups” – new applications that are a result of combining multiple data sources.

“Over the past few years, we have used some of our Open APIs internally to create groundbreaking new iPhone applications, such as MasterCard ATM Hunter and MasterCard Easy Savings,” said Garry Lyons, Group Executive, Research and Development, MasterCard Worldwide. “Opening these and other APIs to the global development community developers will provide developers the opportunity to leverage MasterCard’s leading payment platforms and come up with new ideas that may not have been previously considered or thought possible.”

“In addition, our new Open API program and developer portal will strengthen MasterCard’s position as an industry leader in innovation and give us an even greater competitive advantage as the payments industry continues to evolve,” said Lyons.

Interested developers should contact MasterCard at api@mastercard.com in order to learn more on how to participate in the program. By virtue of the guidelines applicable to the program, all developers will be approved and registered by MasterCard to ensure that MasterCard payment and data services continue to be used appropriately and productively.

May 28, 2010 1:30:00 AM (3 months ago)

Thai, Argentine Textile Workers Unite Against Slave Labour

By Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 23, 2010 (IPS) - Textile cooperatives founded by former slave labourers from Argentina and Thailand will jointly launch a new brand of clothing in June to raise awareness about exploitation and promote decent jobs in the garment industry.

On Jun. 4, La Alameda from Argentina and Dignity Returns from Thailand will start selling thousands of T-shirts bearing several different designs under the "No Chains" trademark. They ultimately plan to produce additional clothing items in association with other cooperatives.

"It's a cry of support for decent work and a way to prove that high quality clothing can be produced without having to enslave workers," one of the initiative's promoters, Gustavo Vera of La Alameda, told IPS.

La Alameda first emerged as a community kitchen in 2001, during Argentina's severe economic crisis. It served many undocumented Bolivian workers who had escaped the garment industry sweatshops that had mushroomed in Buenos Aires.

La Alameda's repeated complaints about the dismal working conditions, in addition to a tragic accident at one of the sweatshops in which six people died -- five of them children --, finally focussed public attention on slave labour, which in Argentina largely involves undocumented immigrants.

The workers spend long days toiling without rest, crowded into spaces where they also live with their families. They lack documents and money, and have little freedom to venture outside the premises.

The clandestine factories provide products for major clothing brands, like Puma, Bensimon, Lecoq, Soho and Kosiuko, according to the complaints that former workers filed in the courts. Justice authorities have seized the machinery from some of the workshops, but have yet to sentence those responsible.

Some of the workers joined together to set up a textile cooperative that sells its own brand, Mundo Alameda, and has the backing of the non-governmental AVINA Foundation.

Meanwhile, halfway across the world in Thailand, a group of women laid off without compensation by the Bed and Bath company when their factory shut down founded the Solidarity Factory cooperative, which later became Dignity Returns.

The members of Dignity Returns say that the factory made clothing for brands including Nike, Gap and Reebok, and that they were forced to work extremely long hours. To add insult to injury, their wages were docked if they complained about fatigue.

The two groups, who met in 2009 at an international conference hosted by the Hong Kong-based Asia Monitor Resource Centre, resolved to join forces to make their voices heard around the globe.

The new clothing brand will be launched simultaneously in Buenos Aires and Bangkok.

On the No Chains website, their position is clear: "The clothes produced in typical garment factories trap workers in chains -- in chains of debt, chains of control by bosses who care about money and not workers -- chains of global production, where many parties grab profits that come from the blood of the workers."

That is why it is not just about launching a brand or a new self-managed venture, but also about calling attention to the need for industrial production that respects the dignity of workers, without exploitation or slavery, according to the promoters.

"Through purposeful action we are denouncing the persistence of slave labour, which has global markets and which leads major brands to take advantage of vulnerable groups and of lax legislation in order to impose forced labour in various parts of the world," Vera said.

The cooperatives held an international contest for T-shirt designs, and of the six winning motifs, two came from Argentina, and one each from Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea and the United States.

The cooperatives began production in time to meet the launch date, and the idea is to distribute the clothing by consignment through various non-governmental organisations and trade unions.

The next goal, said Vera, is to expand the network to include cooperatives and society at large in the anti-slave labour campaign. There are talks under way to incorporate two more cooperatives, from the Philippines and Indonesia.

"Within a few years we want to have 20 to 30 cooperatives from different countries in the developing world," he said. There are also plans to diversify the brand to other types of garments.

According to the organisers, the project is not without precedent. The "Clean Clothes Campaign," led by consumer organisations, promotes sales of clothing that is not produced by slave labour.

But No Chains is the first led by independent cooperatives: "This is the first time that workers coming from the world of slavery are coming together to denounce exploitation and prove that it's possible to produce clothing under decent working conditions," said Vera.

May 25, 2010 6:13:00 PM (3 months ago)

Urban Farms vs. Urban Zoning

Editor's Note: Why I am posting an article about urban zoning in a blog about alternative, local economics and currencies? Because this is a good case study of how politics and economic paradigms have to shift to support the transition to a sustainable local economy. I don't think we have any choice with peak oil and the problems with the global economy. These ridiculous laws about restricting small business need to change. People need to be able to grow large amounts of food in the City. People need to be able to provide services and even sell goods out of their homes in order to relocalize. Laws are skewed to benefit large, profit oriented businesses that can undertake these financial and legal hurdles. Import replacement will happen too slowly in my opinion to save us if City governments don't start getting out the way and instead start helping.

from Terrain Magazine
By Casey Miner

Terraced into the uphill slope of a backyard in a quiet neighborhood in North Berkeley, Sophie Hahn’s vegetable garden looks like many others in the city: planter boxes bursting with kale, lettuce, and cauliflower, a compost bin for green waste, chickens clucking in their coop. The garden produces eight garden beds worth of veggies and sixteen chickens’ worth of eggs—much more food than Hahn’s family could possibly eat.

The oversupply is intentional: while the yard belongs to Hahn, she does no gardening herself. Instead, she hires two professional urban farmers to plant, weed, harvest, and deliver the bounty to her family’s doorstep—and to her neighbors’ doorsteps—once a week. “I don’t even go down there,” the attorney and community activist said one morning last fall. “I’m busy!”

To Hahn, this arrangement makes perfect sense. Instead of hiring a gardener to tend her roses, she hires a farmer to tend her vegetables, thus putting her land to productive use. “If I turn my backyard into edible food plants, that means five or six other families don’t have to,” she says, as the chickens, which produce four to five dozen eggs each week, cluck in apparent agreement. “I spread the benefits to more than just my family.”

But feeding six families costs money, and Hahn has shouldered the set-up costs alone, installing garden beds and drip irrigation, buying seeds, and paying the farmers to coax the land to produce. To recoup those costs, Hahn wants to charge her neighbors a small fee for their weekly food baskets. This exchange, she says, would be similar to a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, in which people pay a subscription fee to a farm in return for regular deliveries of seasonal food. Since she lives in Berkeley, a city that just last year made building a local food system part of its long-term Climate Action Plan, Hahn figured she would have no problem getting a license from the city to run her small farm.

She was wrong. In fact, the process of getting a license turned out to be so convoluted, and so expensive, that for now she’s given up trying to do it. At a time when it seems everyone wants to bring the farm back to the city, and urban food projects are all the rage, Hahn’s story is a study in just how great a challenge this can be. Her adversary is not an anti-vegetable city official or a NIMBY neighbor—all that’s stopping Hahn is a few bland paragraphs in the zoning code.

Hahn’s backyard farm project started when she moved into her house in late 2006. At that time, she recalls, there was nothing at all in the yard—the previous occupants had laid down a layer of sod, which died soon after Hahn moved in, leaving the yard, she says, “ugly and useless.” Not much of a gardener herself, Hahn didn’t think about what to do with the space until more than a year later, when a flier in the neighborhood caught her eye: A woman named Willow proposed to set up a backyard garden in exchange for room and board. While she thought the flier “lovely,” Hahn was initially skeptical. “Seriously … Willow?” she recalls, rolling her eyes in a just-another-Berkeley-hippie sort of way.

But one phone call changed her mind. Willow Rosenthal was the founder of West Oakland’s food security project City Slicker Farms and about as far from a dreamy hippie as raspberries are from ramen. When she looked at Hahn’s yard, she saw potential. A veteran urban farmer, Rosenthal plans intensive gardens—so intensive, she says, that she only reluctantly concedes space for a picnic table. Hahn’s forty-by-sixty-foot backyard area, Rosenthal thought, could easily feed five or six families. The two hatched the idea to create a neighborhood-scale CSA, with Hahn lending land that would otherwise go unused to two farmers—in this case, Rosenthal and her assistant Laurel Sharp—who would manage its daily operation.

The problem is that Berkeley’s zoning code says nothing about a neighborhood CSA, and its absence is significant. Technically, such an operation would be considered a business, since money changes hands. But Hahn’s North Berkeley neighborhood is strictly residential. Its zoning code allows people to run small, low– or moderate-impact in-home businesses but mandates that all activity take place indoors. It also forbids “customer visits,” “handling or transport of goods or products” on-site, and “offensive or objectionable noise, vibration, odors, heat, dirt, or electrical disturbance perceptible by the average person.” An outdoor operation that uses a pickup truck and a compost pile, and would require customers to pick up vegetables, is not allowable under the code.

Hahn and Rosenthal discovered all this when they called the city’s health and planning departments to see what would be required to get a business license. While all the city officials they talked to said they supported the project in theory, they said that legally, there was no way to make it work. One official, says Hahn, described the farm as a “high-impact home occupation.” If Hahn and Rosenthal wanted to go ahead with the project, they were told, they would need a special exemption, which would require a public hearing, six to eight months of waiting, and close to $4,000 in fees. After months of haggling, they pulled their application last summer and decided to regroup the following season. “We didn’t think it was going to be so complicated,” says Hahn.

Berkeley city planning director Debbie Sanderson agrees that while a backyard CSA sounds like a good idea, as the laws are currently written it is unquestionably illegal. While the city could change its code, either under the direction of the city council or in response to a citizen petition, the process
is lengthy and complex. The most recent change, which created a provision allowing in-home teaching, took nearly a year to implement, Sanderson says. Still, she says, the code is a living document: “Life in the world is always changing, so the code has to change too.” Indeed, the question of how to integrate agriculture into urban landscapes has started to pop up in American Planning Association journal articles in recent months—one article analyzed the cities of Portland and Vancouver—but it hasn’t come up in Berkeley until now.

Decades ago, when Berkeley’s zoning codes were written, people wanted cities to be urban. Ornamental landscapes demonstrated leisure and wealth, a lifestyle different from working on the land. Far from encouraging backyard farms, city planners dismissed them as relics of the past. It’s only recently that people began transitioning to backyard farms. (Or, as Hahn prefers to call them, “edible gardens”—“When you say ‘farm,’ people think of tractors and Porta-Potties,” she says.)

“The bottom line is that the code didn’t contemplate this,” says Hahn. “It anticipates piano lessons, college counseling, therapy.” In other words, quiet in-home businesses. This makes sense to her. “I don’t want, say, a car repair shop in the yard,” she says. “But edibles grow as quietly as flowers.”

Hahn is not the first would-be backyard farmer to encounter this set of problems. In an era of E. coli outbreaks, high food prices, and a torrent of food industry exposés, the push for locally-produced food has taken off in cities nationwide. But in many cases it has run straight into a regulatory wall. Most zoning codes, like Berkeley’s, are written to maintain separation between commercial and residential areas, and almost none address food production. Add the challenges of potentially contaminated soil, limited water, and neighbors unhappy about the smell of compost, and any project more ambitious than a hobby garden can seem daunting. Still, the small scale of what Hahn is proposing makes it possible to resolve these issues. None of her neighbors has ever complained about the farm, she says, and if anyone did have problem, it would be easy for that person to come talk to her because they’re neighbors. (That said, Hahn notes that changing the code would make it harder for one disgruntled person to sabotage an otherwise popular project.)

Farmers across the country have found individual workarounds. In Flint, Michigan, a collaborative of urban gardeners is working with the city to rewrite outdated codes with an eye towards local food production. In Detroit, which has a large percentage of vacant land within city limits, high– and low-tech urban agriculture is one solution to the search for a new industry. Entrepreneurs and do-it-yourself homeowners are flocking to the city, and a number of proposals to rezone certain neighborhoods and authorize farm projects are currently before the city government. (The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network says 900 farms already exist within city limits; meanwhile, an entrepreneur and money manager named John Hantz is offering to put up $30 million to convert large plots of city land to a conventional farm.) In Buffalo, New York, a couple last year reached an agreement with the city to lease 27 acres of vacant land for farming, provided they sell the food locally, and with the understanding that the city may still develop the space in the future. And in Sacramento, the city government amended its codes in 2007 to allow front-yard vegetable gardens, which it had previously forbidden as unsightly.

With the possible exception of Detroit, these are piecemeal solutions to what many people believe is a much bigger problem. Cities might be able to produce enough food to feed their residents, but to do it they need to rethink the way they use space, and that includes changing zoning laws to allow for small-scale businesses like Hahn’s. Berkeley has written goals for local food production into its long-term Climate Action Plan, including commitments to “encourage… buildings to incorporate rooftop gardens that can be used for food production,” “encourage residents to grow food in home and community gardens,” and “support local efforts to provide training to residents in farming and gardening techniques.” Right now, though, they’re just goals.

For now, Hahn and Rosenthal are giving their produce away to neighbors, but as the farm heads into its first full season, they’re again looking at ways to change the law. Though the concerns someone might have about a farm—“yucky smells and loud noises,” says Rosenthal—seem not to apply to Hahn’s farm, both she and Rosenthal say that zoning changes must take neighbor’s comfort levels into account. Still, they say, those changes can be consistent with levels of nuisance and noise that people already take for granted. “People are allowed to have dogs, and dogs are noisy,” says Rosenthal. “Construction workers and landscape workers can start making noise at 7 am.”

“I think it will take time for people to change their way of thinking about this,” says Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguín, who has spoken with Hahn about drafting legislation that would change the city’s code to encourage small-scale farms like the one she proposes. “We’re trying to achieve more sustainability,” he says, “but it takes a while for our law to change to catch up.”

Why go to all this trouble in the first place? Hahn lives in a foodie Mecca, replete with farmers’ markets and local produce at every grocery store. But for Hahn, even local food isn’t local enough. For example, she points out, “local” food often comes from the Central Valley. “If I can grow it in my own backyard, why would I get it from Salinas?” she asks. She wants to do everything she can, she says, to reduce her “food-miles”—the distance food travels from farm to plate—to zero.

The idea of food that’s “more local than local” has a certain appeal for some, though they can’t always put their fingers on exactly what that appeal is. “When I get the veggies, they have just been picked,” says Austene Hall, who lives down the hill from Hahn and has been getting vegetables from her for a number of months. After a pause, she adds, “I really like having it right next door. Willow and I chat over the wall; I hear all about what they’re planting and why.”

Hall also likes that she can eat vegetables that may as well have been grown in her own backyard, without actually having to grow them. Though she’s vegetarian and describes herself as an avid gardener, she prefers flowers to food and has no interest in trying to meet her own vegetable needs. To Hahn, that’s the reason the model she’s proposing is so crucial. Growing food requires time, resources, and skills that most urban dwellers don’t have and aren’t willing to acquire. “If you want to reduce the total amount of food trucked and shipped, you need a model where a paid professional
is doing it,” she says.

Rosenthal agrees. “We don’t think everyone should sew their own clothes. Why should everyone grow their own food? It doesn’t make sense,” she says. “There’s a huge number of people interested in using their yards to produce food for their families, but because of life circumstances they will never put time into actually growing it. They are in an economic bracket where they want to hire someone to do that for them, just as they would hire a landscaper to maintain their nonedible landscape. If we ignore these people, we ignore a vast productive capacity within the community.”

Despite the challenges, says Rosenthal, people’s growing interest in the origins and sustainability of their food means that the time is right for cities to take on these issues. “People are starting to ask, ‘How do we want to use our collective resources?’” she says. “I have complete faith that these things will change.”

May 19, 2010 5:22:00 PM (4 months ago)