Steve Dubb is research director of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland.
As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In ‘New Economic Visions’, a special five-part AlterNet series edited by Economics Editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.
As resistance has grown to America’s widening gulf between the “1 percent” and the rest of the population, something new has exploded in America’s communities; “community wealth building” is an explicit strategy to democratize the ownership of wealth from the ground up. With traditional regulatory and tax-and-spend approaches faltering at every level, the notion that we should create new democratic economic institutions to build wealth, community by community, is quietly gaining traction. We now have the potential for larger and longer-term transformation throughout the nation.
Power for the People
The central idea is simple: people join together through some form of public, community or employee-owned business to meet local needs and thereby regain a measure of local economic democracy and control. Partly self-help, partly community mobilization, and partly sketches for future system-wide expansion, community wealth-building efforts can be found in virtually every region of the country. The range of efforts is vast. Community wealth-building institutions include community development corporations, community development financial institutions, social enterprises, community land trusts, employee-owned enterprises, and cooperatives. All pool capital in ways that create new jobs and anchor jobs in communities.
The efforts also define a new approach to challenging corporate power— a strategy that changes who owns, controls and benefits from the underlying economic wealth of the system. It involves not merely replacing private capital, but displacing it through developing community ownership of business. In other words, profits should flow to workers, consumers or the community—rather than outside investors. And these businesses need to succeed! Increasingly, too, ecological concerns are structured into the very core of many models.
Transformation Everywhere
Examples of the new approach are evident around the world, including worker-cooperatives in Argentina; the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh (which, with its founder, Muhammad Yunus, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize); and the Mondragón cooperative network in northern Spain, which employs nearly 85,000.
Non-profit social enterprise is a community wealth building strategy through which nonprofits independently secure resources to meet their missions in the absence of adequate government support. In San Francisco, a group known as REDF (formerly the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund) has helped boost the business activity of 50 social enterprises that have employed 6,500 people and earned revenues of more than $115 million. Three-fourths (77 percent) of social enterprise employees interviewed two years later were still working. Average employee wages had increased by nearly one-third (31 percent) and monthly incomes had almost doubled (90 percent). One of the enterprises in REDF’s portfolio is Buckelew Programs, a mental health agency with 220 employees that provides a continuum of services to roughly 7,000 clients each year and operates three social enterprises, including a green café and a green cleaning service, as well as a staffing service. This year, it intends to open a fourth social enterprise, a fresh-cut produce processing business.
In Grayland, Washington, Coastal Community Action—a nonprofit agency that operates a range of housing, food, healthcare, and employment programs—has built a 6 MW wind farm consisting of four wind turbines. The wind farm, which sells energy to the electrical grid, generates enough power to satisfy the energy needs of more than 1,500 households. The nonprofit estimates that its ownership of the $14-million wind turbine project generates $720,000 in unrestricted income each year, enabling it to increase service delivery options, lessen its local dependence on outside funding, and supplement the community’s ongoing projects and to meet more of the community’s needs.
In Seattle, Pioneer Human Services, founded in 1963, offers drug- and alcohol-free housing, employment, job training, counseling, and education to recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. It employs a total of 1,000 people and finances 99 percent of its $70 million budget through fees for services and earnings generated in the manufacture, distribution and sale of products. Businesses include retail cafés, sheet metal fabrication, aerospace precision machining (it’s a contractor for Boeing), wholesale food distribution, and contract packaging. Not only do these enterprises build community wealth and provide independent resources that finance social services, the businesses themselves are central to Pioneer’s mission of helping “people on the margins of society” stay out of prison and off the streets, enabling Pioneer to employ more than 700 men and women drawn from the ex-offender, homeless and drug-recovery populations it serves.
Community development corporations (CDCs), formed initially in the 1960s in a crucible of urban riots and rural neglect, now perform important community wealth-building and planning roles in cities and counties across the United States. CDCs can be found in virtually every major city. A Massachusetts study found that between 2003 and 2011, Massachusetts-based CDCs created or preserved over 9,000 homes and 14,000 jobs, while supporting more than 8,000 businesses and 160,000 families, generating nearly $2 billion of economic activity. A 2005 survey found that nationwide an estimated 4,600 CDCs help create 75,000 jobs per year.
Community development financial institutions (CDFIs), first given federal recognition in the 1990s, have the explicit aim of building wealth in low-income communities through providing financing where conventional lenders fear to tread. Even in the face of contracting conventional finance, assets in community investing institutions rose more than 60 percent–from $25.0 billion in 2007 to $41.7 billion–in 2010. In 2008 alone, credit unions financed and assisted businesses and microenterprises that created or maintained 35,624 jobs, financed the construction or renovation of 60,205 units of affordable housing, and provided 16,405 responsible mortgages to first-time and other homebuyers.
Community land trusts provide still another powerful illustration of community wealth building. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, pioneers like Bob Swann in western Massachusetts and Charles Sherrod in Georgia struggled against huge odds to develop modest land trusts efforts, often also involving other concerns, like respect for environmentally sound land use practices and rural community development. Today hundreds exist; in Irvine, California, the city’s strategic plan calls for 5,000 units of housing to be developed using land trust strategies.
Trusts of this kind keep the ownership of land underlying housing in non-profit or public ownership. Appreciation in land values is split via a formula between the homeowner and the trust, thereby avoiding gentrification. A study of a community land trust in Burlington, Vermont — the nation’s largest — also found that during its first two decades, 61.9 percent of residents who sold their land trust home after an average residency of six years were able to “step up” to traditional homeownership. Meanwhile the equity gain that the trust retains enables it to continue providing affordable housing to future generations. In a down market, community land trusts are even more important. Simply put, community land trusts keep people in their homes. A 2011 study found that land trust homeowners were 10 times less likely to be in foreclosure proceedings than conventional homeowners.
Employee ownership is another powerful community wealth-building strategy. The National Center on Employee Ownership (NCEO) estimates that in 2009 there were 9,800 companies owned in whole or part by workers through their pension contributions through a form of ownership known as an employee stock ownership plan or ESOP. As of 2009, there are 10.3 million employee-owners of companies own in whole or part by ESOPs, with net assets of $869 billion. In other words, the average ESOP employee-owner has an ownership stake of over $84,000. NCEO estimates that since 2009 the number of ESOPs has climbed over 10 percent to 10,900 companies.
Employee ownership also has powerful economic stabilizing effects: between 2000 and 2008, while the number of manufacturing jobs fell 29 percent in the state of Ohio, employee-owned manufacturing jobs held steady, dropping only 1 percent. Nationally, in 2010, 12.1 percent of all workers—nearly one in eight—had faced a lay-off in the previous 12 months; by contrast, only 2.6 percent of workers who were employee-owners were laid off.
Sharing the Wealth
Perhaps the most visible form of a community wealth building is the cooperative. More than 130 million Americans are currently members of a co-op or credit union. Because many Americans own shares in more than one co-op or credit union, the total number of co-op memberships in the United States exceeds 350 million. Overall, a 2009 University of Wisconsin study found that nearly 30,000 cooperatives in the U.S. account for more than $3 trillion in assets, $514 billion in total annual revenue, and provide 856,000 jobs.
Credit unions are governed by the core cooperative principle of one-member, one-vote. Importantly, they make their loans directly to their members – member-owners of credit unions can be confident that their deposits will be reemployed productively through loans that help finance local consumer purchases, create jobs and build wealth at home.
Another powerful community wealth-building mechanism is the state-owned bank. In North Dakota, a state-owned bank has operated since 1918, earning the state more than $300 million over the past decade, while helping support local banks and local community investment. Legislation exploring or creating such banks has been introduced this past year in more than a dozen states, including Arizona, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington.
As experience with the various democratized forms has become increasingly enriched over time, innovative strategies of collaboration among enterprises and/or with local governments have also begun to emerge. In California, a comprehensive, community-owned development project consciously links individual and collective wealth building in the diverse working-class Diamond neighborhood in southeast San Diego. With the support of the Jacobs Family Foundation, the community raised philanthropic and government funding to develop a commercial and cultural complex, anchored by a shopping center. A key element was the community public offering, which provided community residents and employees an exclusive opportunity to buy shares (valued at $200 and capped at $10,000) for a total 20 percent ownership stake in the project. As one community owner noted, “That we own stock, and that we have an opportunity to make a difference in what type of business goes in the community [is unbelievable]. We have some say-so in the community environment.”
The Neighborhood Unity Foundation also has a 20 percent ownership share that provides it with a sustainable source of funding for its community wealth building efforts. The Jacobs Family Foundation, which retains 60 percent ownership, intends to turn over its share to community owners by 2018. Ultimately, area residents will own 50 percent of the project and the neighborhood foundation the other 50 percent, retaining the profits generated to benefit the community rather than outside investors.
In Cleveland, Ohio, an integrated group of worker-owned companies, supported in part by the directed purchasing power of large hospitals and universities, has opened a major new vector of urban strategy. The first of Cleveland’s planned network of cooperatives opened its doors for business in September 2009. The co-op industrial scale laundry is a state-of-the-art, ecologically green, commercial facility capable of handling 10 million pounds of healthcare linen a year. Its sophisticated business plan provides all employee-owners a living wage and health benefits. If current projections are realized after seven years on the job each employee will have a $65,000 equity stake in the enterprise.
In October 2009 a second employee-owned, community-based energy company began large-scale installations of solar panels for the city’s largest nonprofit health, education and municipal buildings. (Additionally, it provides home weatherization services.) A third business scheduled to start operations this year is a year-round hydroponic food production greenhouse capable of producing three million head of lettuce and approximately 300,000 pounds of basil and other herbs a year.
More to Come
Many other enterprises are in the planning stage. Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson praised the co-ops for being “a model for how we can put our people back to work and rebuild our community.” A growing number of economic development officials, tired of chasing corporations with public subsidy dollars, like the idea of creating anchored, community-owned enterprises that won’t get up and move. Already, the Cleveland co-ops have inspired efforts in other cities to develop similar networks, including Amarillo, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Washington, DC.
Community wealth-building strategies offer powerful possibilities for longer-term change. First, in most instances, the new wealth-democratizing approaches provide responses (or suggestive directions of response) to economic dislocation and social pain where traditional political approaches have failed. Second, in many instances, they involve quite unusual local alliances, frequently including small business and religious leader support. Third, often the institutional trajectories have also begun to define (and secure) new supportive measures from local, state and national policy makers, thereby also beginning to define new directions for potential ongoing and more expansive policy and political action. Finally, that they are based in local, everyday experience may also lead to changes in the foundations of political and democratic cultural development over time.
Together the above suggest a long, slow developmental arc left in the wake of the failure of conventional politics and economics. And already, a growing number of Occupy activists are looking to worker-owned cooperatives as a way to self-fund the movement, displace corporate economic space, and develop an economic base that can support alternative economic and political formations. The path to building a truly democratic economy may be long, but the growing base of community wealth building institutions provide some building blocks that, over time, suggests the quiet development, potentially, of the basis for a community-sustaining economy that serves the interest of all Americans, rather than our current system which disproportionately benefits the wealthiest at the expense of the 99 percent.
59 comments
Comments are closed.
Importantly, they [credit unions] make their loans directly to their members – member-owners of credit unions can be confident that their deposits will be reemployed productively through loans that help finance local consumer purchases, create jobs and build wealth at home. Steve Dubb
Credit unions engage in fractional reserve lending too so the more “credit-worthy” members are allowed to steal purchasing power from the less “credit-worthy” members and from non-members too.
An ethical way to consolidate the capital (including labor) of many small owners is a common stock company in which the common stock itself is used by customers to buy the goods and services of the issuing company and by the company to buy assets, including labor.
It’s called “sharing” wealth and power.
You have yet to make a persuasive case that common stock representing equity in a small- to medium-sized business would ever be acceptable as a currency that would be useful either as a medium of trade or a store of value. The primary problem is valuation–how does one value the shares of a business such as a corner grocer or small brewery? Also, if shares are somehow accepted as trade tokens, the businesses in question quickly stop being owned by the workers/stakeholders as traded shares (and therefore ownership) necessarily become diffused throughout the market.
You have yet to make a persuasive case that common stock representing equity in a small- to medium-sized business would ever be acceptable as a currency that would be useful either as a medium of trade or a store of value. James Cole
Why wouldn’t it? Does common stock have value or not?
The primary problem is valuation–how does one value the shares of a business such as a corner grocer or small brewery? James Cole
By looking up the share price at the checkout stand? Also, local businesses might easily accept the common stock money of other local businesses so that other businesses would accept theirs.
Also, if shares are somehow accepted as trade tokens, the businesses in question quickly stop being owned by the workers/stakeholders James Cole
Not if only 49% of the stock is sold and stock splits used to create additional shares with some of the new shares (less than or equal to 50%) being distributed as immediate profits and the rest being used for further investment.
as traded shares (and therefore ownership) necessarily become diffused throughout the market. James Cole
Diffuse ownership is a feature not a bug.
Please forgive my ignorance but how would common stock be acceptible to anyone outside the small business to pay for assets that could be sold anywhere else for currency.
Although I don’t grasp it I can see that this is quite an idea..CommonWealth.the real dialectical opposite for Capital?
I always look forward to your comments as I always learn something
Please forgive my ignorance but how would common stock be acceptible to anyone outside the small business to pay for assets that could be sold anywhere else for currency. Siem
Well, with modern communications and computers one should be able to obtain the real time price (in fiat) of a stock and to transfer ownership instantaneously even at the checkout stand.
But note that though genuine private currencies should be allowed, no one is forced to accept them. People and companies could still use fiat for all debts, not just their taxes. However, once companies can no longer loot purchasing power from the public via loans from the counterf**ting cartel, the banks, their options for finance would be:
1) Out of earnings.
2) Borrowing at true free market interest rates.
3) Issue new common stock.
I’m hoping that 3) would be the preferred option but 1) and even 2) are ethical too.
I understand where you are coming from when you equate fractional reserve banking to counterfeiting, but I think you are taking an extreme position when you say it loots purchasing power from the public.
It’s kind of like claiming that there would be more food available if we stopped feeding sick people or children. It’s technically correct, but the wrong approach to gaining more food.
In practice, the increase in inflation due FRL is probably much less significant that the damage it does when it forms bubbles. If a farmer can justify the price of a new tractor, then a bank making that loan, regardless of of reserve levels, has a positive effect on the economy. The externalities multiply in a similar fashion to FRL when all the downstream activity is accounted for. If everything goes well, then the increase in the money supply is offset by the increase in wealth it created – there’s more money, but there’s also more stuff. Ideally, it didn’t even pull demand forward because it also created growth.
There are many places where it can break down, and I’ll give just one example. If the bank made the same loan to 50 other farmers, all with the same idea, then supply and demand decouple on two fronts: the price of tractors will soar on the front end, and the price of the crops will fall on the backend – the numbers change dramatically. Farmers go broke, loans sour, demand for tractors plummet, capacity has to be downsized.
100% reserve banking would probably slow the oscillations, but it would greatly concentrate ownership because the bank would never put capital at risk. They would demand 100% collateral on any loan they made. Loans would still get made, but at usury rates.
Bingo! It s the usury, stupid! July, 2008 Bill Moyer interview with William Greider:
Very well said, but I disagree. Without “credit-creation”, the farmer could more rapidly save to buy that tractor. Or the tractor maker could extend him credit in the form of the tractor himself. Or several farmers could pool their capital in a co-opt to buy and share farm machinery. Or investors using existing money could buy tractors and rent them out. In other words, there are options beside theft of purchasing power to fund investment.
As for usury, it is the charging of ANY interest, not just high interest.
Correction: “himself” should be “itself”.
Loans would still get made, but at usury rates. K Ackermann
That’s where common stock would come in. High interest rates might force a tractor maker, for example, to finance his factory with common stock which would be redeemable in his tractors. It would be in the interest of brokers to get those shares into the hands of farmers.
Bingo! It s the usury, stupid! MontanaMaven
It’s not just high interest rates, it is ANY interest rate.
But without a doubt charging the poor interest is a sin:
“If you lend money to My people, to the poor among you, you are not to act as a creditor to him; you shall not charge him interest.” Exodus 22:25
He who increases his wealth by interest and usury gathers it for him who is gracious to the poor. Proverbs 28:8
… he keeps his hand from the poor, does not take interest or increase, but executes My ordinances, and walks in My statutes; he will not die for his father’s iniquity, he will surely live. Ezekiel 18:17
Its cheering to hear that positive change is afoot. EVen if the politicians do not mention or sanction it, even if the mainstream media ignore these movements a few dedicated souls will advance the cause of decentralization and sharing wealth. As for the politicians and mass media you can certainly ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of reality…..
“Charles Sherrod in Georgia.” Connect the dots&DNA to another “Sherrod” and Obama’s “good works” in Chicago, helping “The Souls of Black Folk.”
Are their motives pure?
Regarding Grameen: According to Doug Henwood in (what Nomi Prins called “visionary”) “Wall Street”
“…well under half (of the women) have significant control over the businesses held in their names. By contrast the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA) offers credit, but as part of a package of education and political organizing. With Grameen, male lending officers really call the shots.
The appeal of microcredit schemes like Grameen–which have been adopted enthusiastically by the likes of the World Bank, Hilary Clilnton and Citibank–is that they are a low-cost, nonthreatening substitute for real self-organization, like SEWA, and for expensive public programs like education, health care, and infrastructure investment.
…it is very difficult, if not impossible, to borrow your way out of poverty.”
“microcredit schemes” have been discredited.
Stan, really, discredited? Micro lending of credit has been DIS–credited? Are you the Stan of Stan fame who brings us glad tidings of discrediting. Where are your discrediting credentials, ‘Stan’?
“The central idea is simple: people join together through some form of public, community or employee-owned business to meet local needs and thereby regain a measure of local economic democracy and control. Partly self-help, partly community mobilization, and partly sketches for future system-wide expansion, community wealth-building efforts can be found in virtually every region of the country. The range of efforts is vast. Community wealth-building institutions include community development corporations, community development financial institutions, social enterprises, community land trusts, employee-owned enterprises, and cooperatives. All pool capital in ways that create new jobs and anchor jobs in communities.
The efforts also define a new approach to challenging corporate power— a strategy that changes who owns, controls and benefits from the underlying economic wealth of the system. It involves not merely replacing private capital, but displacing it through developing community ownership of business. In other words, profits should flow to workers, consumers or the community—rather than outside investors. And these businesses need to succeed! Increasingly, too, ecological concerns are structured into the very core of many models.”
This is fine as far as it goes. A couple of things though that concern me.
1) I believe that schemes like this put an excessive focus on “the local community.” This is troubling because it reeks of a certain nostalgia for the past, i.e. there’s something of a reactionary character to the language of community. The language of community is provincial and inward-looking and historically has manifested in a politics of patriarchy, xenophobia, racism and overall narrow-mindedness.
We (meaning leftists, broadly speaking) must not be taken in by the seductions of locality in an age of globality. And I understand the temptation: this same capitalist system which has given the world its cosmopolitan character is now in deep (possibly terminal) crisis. There doesn’t seem to be any firm ground to stand on. Upheaval is the rule. And under those circumstances the first instinct is to look inward for some stability. But this is wrong. Now more than ever we must be capacious in our orientation. And in order to do that we need to create not “local alternatives” in the narrow sense, but broad international networks and coalitions.
Every reactionary believes deeply in community: the “intelligence community,” “military communities and familes,” “the financial community,” “the faith-based community”…etc. I don’t believe in community. Or at least not in the way this term is typtically used. I believe in a single human species composed of heterogenous peoples spread out over a beautiful, blue, borderless orb.
Which bring me to 2): we can’t to simply create an apolitical “alternative economy” to gradually take the place of the old monopoly-capital corporate structures. These alternatives can only ever be prefigurative placeholders for a much larger, much more comprehensive project. As such they need to be educational laboratories, not only for members after business hours, but for the customers as well. The goal of these businesses should not be merely to allow their worker-owners to subsist but to educate the massses, to raise consciousness, to prepare minds for the coming of a new world.
>We (meaning leftists, broadly speaking) must not be taken in by the seductions of locality in an age of globality. And I understand the temptation: this same capitalist system which has given the world its cosmopolitan character is now in deep (possibly terminal) crisis. There doesn’t seem to be any firm ground to stand on. Upheaval is the rule. And under those circumstances the first instinct is to look inward for some stability. But this is wrong. Now more than ever we must be capacious in our orientation. And in order to do that we need to create not “local alternatives” in the narrow sense, but broad international networks and coalitions.
Well speak for yourself, I really cannot see any future for the current top-heavy style of “globalism” where the cunts pretending to be “leaders” can say what goes and what doesn’t. While it may be reactionary from one perspective, the current style of internationalism has brought little more than misery and thus stepping back from that path is wholly justified.
Now I’m not saying that globalisation or internationalism are bad in and of themselves, but the impulse for them /must/ come bottom up. Otherwise it’ll amount to little more than cultural and economic imperialism. We are already well underway on the bottom up internationalisation with the internet, so just have patience. We’ll get there even if we have to take a couple of steps back to take a huge leap forward.
Or do you honestly expect we can build a real global community from a bunch of people who are deathly afraid for their next meal and are desperate to please their high and up masters?
“Well speak for yourself, I really cannot see any future for the current top-heavy style of “globalism” where the cunts pretending to be “leaders” can say what goes and what doesn’t. While it may be reactionary from one perspective, the current style of internationalism has brought little more than misery and thus stepping back from that path is wholly justified.
Now I’m not saying that globalisation or internationalism are bad in and of themselves, but the impulse for them /must/ come bottom up. Otherwise it’ll amount to little more than cultural and economic imperialism. We are already well underway on the bottom up internationalisation with the internet, so just have patience. We’ll get there even if we have to take a couple of steps back to take a huge leap forward.
Or do you honestly expect we can build a real global community from a bunch of people who are deathly afraid for their next meal and are desperate to please their high and up masters?”
Actually, today’s globalism has given the world a lot.
First and foremost, it has contributed to a great quantitative leap in the development of the productive forces. This is an absolutely necessary precondition for finally overcoming scarcity and creating a world of abundance.
Second, culture, following the progressive development of the productive forces, has taken on a more worldly, cosmopolitan character. That is a wonderful thing. The world today is much less racist, sexist and xenophobic than it was, say, 50 years ago. Which is not to say that we don’t have an enormous distance to go, but the trend of cosmopolitanism and internationalist hospitality is clear.
Now, of course the way in which the 1% has presided over this progress has been less than optimal (to put it mildly.) And I certainly don’t want to underestimate or apologize for the growing possibility of barbarism that these people have helped foster in their misrule of society. But this is a case where one divides into two.
The epoch of capital has planted the seeds for a new epoch in which humanity as a whole for the first time will be able to take control of their own destiny. History doesn’t make any guarantees of course. Barbarism, as I said, is also a real possibility. But overall, I’m quite optimistic about the future. I think the old man was right when he said:
“Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”
So again, to be clear, some of the things this article talks about are quite good (especially workers cooperatives.) But I object to the provincial “community” framing. And I reject the notion that this can somehow in and of itself lead to state power (or, for my anarchist-oriented friends, working class hegemony.)
I’m not at all a fan of the particular character that globalization has under the rule of capital. But the call must be for an alternative globalization, not a retreat into the womb of community.
Well, that’s certainly one theory. And community localism is another theory. I would suggest that those who support your theory work on behalf of it and those who support community localist development do their work on behalf of THAT. People do their best work on behalf of that which they believe in.
I hope you aren’t poo-pooing local-based economic development because you are secretly afraid that it will work and thereby cut into the pool of potential recruits for your theory. That would be dog-in-the-manger behavior on your part.
Good points. What is attractive about the “community” even “neighborhood” emphasis is that the small scale makes direct democracy more feasible–and it is direct democracy that offers so many benefits that it should be a priority.
Murray Bookchin struggled with the limitations of locality that you raise in his proposal for a Libertarian Municipalism (note that this is real libertarianism, not the Randian Propertarianism that has tried to coop the term). He was trying to describe an entity large enough to celebrate diversity and foster a certain dynamism while remaining small enough to permit citizen democracy. The Greek city state, with its admitted shortcomings, served as a model. Whether or not you think he succeeded, the discussion is an important one.
The “neighborhood” is where we really live, and our neighbors are part of the fabric of our lives. If we can make positive changes at the neighborhood level, our community will benefit. We need to build trust, and where better to start than among our neighbors?
I agree that it’s an important discussion. Perhaps in the age of the internet something like “direct democracy” is feasible on a large scale.
Although I must say that I’m not entirely convinced that “direct democracy” is some kind of universal form(ula) that we can simply apply to create the kind of society that we need. I think there are some inherently representative aspects to politics and to the governing of a large society. I think direct democracy could be a very significant part of the mix, but things like council democracy with recallability of representatives can also play a role, along with structural minoritarian protections and even democratic centralist leadership aspects (though preferably not in its traditional party-state modality.)
Perhaps society is just a word with no meaning. No, it is a word without meaning. There is no society. It can not be measured or described outside the mechanistic model of the territory controlling nation states and their bureaus. But, if you are not in direct touch with a bureaucrat, are you outside of society? How many old people are dead, decomposed in their homes. Are they in society to be left so alone? How many areas in America are territories of a failed state under the thumb of a local violent dispensing network of organized criminals and corrupt officials? How many poor neighborhoods are left without trash removal, schools, libraries, food stores, much less a supermarket? And them you can drive a few miles and find a region shopping center surrounded by dozens of supermarkets the size of an air craft carrier. I see disjointed, unconnected islands of humanity, but I’ve never seen a society. If I can not detect social relations, then there are none, and I do not see any society that I am connected to. I am connected to the internet. Is that why facebook is really so valuable, because aside from the delusional myth of the invisible hand and the social contract, facebook has actually put a tool in the opposable thumbs of humanity so that social relations can be made and maintained for the first time in history? For the first time, people from outside your family and your immediate capacity to meet and talk to people in your spatial arena has been produced that breaks down time and space to build a social network that can be measured. Measured in the form of the Arab spring and other such social events that are not just commodities and behavior relating to getting and spending but behavior where building convivial networks of people, community, is happening and is being reproduced over and over again around the world.
I’d like to read some Bookchin. Where do I start?
Re: Libertarian Municipalism–
http://www.democracynature.org/vol1/bookchin_libertarian.htm
He also wrote a book on the subject:
The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin
And a good history of the pre-Revolution CNT in Spain:
The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936
And the Henry Jackson Foundation, and Bechtel, Northrup and Lockheed – dedicated to controlling and maintaining outflows from the US Government at the expense of most everything else.
Their charters are noble, the expression is of peace and benevolence but the titles are created to fool you.
So it is with countless non-profits allegedly dedicated to assisting the poor, or the disenfranchised – the substance isn’t there, the advertising is. Not to delegitimize groups that do in fact have a benevolent mission, the problems are that they become self sustaining ponzi schemes with an occassional success story. Non-profits themselves underwent signifigant mission changes during our heralded neo-liberal era.
It’s great that Yves is featuring this series on the beginnings of what could be a counter society that will take the place of this old, collapsing world.
While I understand the positive tone adopted in describing all these efforts, we should be wary of Establishment nonprofits and quasi-governmental agencies. They employ the language of democracy while, in reality, they create top-down entities that treat people like clients and consumers.
These better organizational forms, like coops, that avoid some of the built-in evils of the liability limiting corporation are a component of a better world, but a deeper commitment to democracy and mutual aid is what is really required along with an explicit rejection of the consumerist, self-obsessed, profiteering mores of the status quo.
These ideas are all well and good but they really amount to a shouting into the wind as the vast, vast majority of money and power will still be ensconced in the hands of a few who have the ability to determine how society is ordered.
It’s great that individuals are trying to be more conscious of the world around them and seek ways in which to make that world better but without directly confronting the corporations and the armies of whores that support them, there will be no change.
Much like how the individual tries to be environmental by recycling, it really amounts to a hill o’ beans when considered next to the waste and pollution of the corporations who aren’t recycling nor are environmentally conscious.
It might feel good but on the large scale it’s not accomplishing much.
Again, ideas like these mean well but if you think that many/most of these endeavors won’t be co-opted or crushed when they approach a level that threatens the corporate elite, you are naive.
What happens when they pass laws banning co-ops?
What happens when corporations collude to push the co-ops out of business?
What happens when the corporations decide to price the co-ops out of business?
Oh, it will happen and those who thought that they could simply work around the corporate structure in this country will then have realized that their efforts would have been better spent educating people as to the need for a whole new, anti-capitalist paradigm one which necessitates direct action not workarounds.
You can’t bargain with or ignore the beast, unfortunately.
I’m sure the many environmental groups who now take corporate money and who have CEOs sitting on the board once thought that they too were immune to such influence at one point.
No, only be starting from and building on the philosophical postition that corporations/capitalism must be eliminated will there be any steadfast and true committment to causes like these when the corporations get around to tossing money at above-cited projects and attempting to ruin them.
Why, who’s gonna stop the buy-out of a co-op when the workers all stand to make a lot of money?
Not the co-op workers who have been born, raised and brainwashed in our hypercapitalist “show me the money” American society.
99.99999999999% of Americans have a price and it’s drilled into their heads that that’s just the way they system works and there’s nothing wrong with “getting theirs”.
Sure, these projects will help some workers in some areas but when placed against the epic scale of the economic/political/social crises we are facing and the BILLIONS of people worldwide who are being crushed by the present system I think this amounts to happy talk and nothing more.
That few Americans have a price?
I share your concerns about how our culture operates to make sustained efforts at democracy and mutual aid difficult, but I do believe that we cannot get anywhere without trying to develop a counter-society.
The first point about such efforts is that people have desperate needs here and now that are not–and will not–be met by governmental or “charitable” agencies. Folks must self-organize to make survival possible in these circumstances, so this is less a strategic choice than it is a necessity.
Should such efforts at self-organization spread and succeed at helping people survive, then I would expect to see all of those counter-measures you list. Those self-organized entities will have to mature and respond to these threats, but at least two things will be working in their favor:
1) People will know each other from working together to establish community gardens or deal with vacant houses in the neighborhood or taking over a plant that would otherwise have been shuttered. They won’t be working from scratch in developing trust and democratic skills; and
2) In resisting, people will be fighting to retain the concrete benefits they have created for themselves, not waging a struggle based on mere promises.
It is also highly possible, even probable in my view, that the existing structures are so creaky that they are close to collapse. If they become ineffective over a relatively short period of time, these alternative structures provide a way of coping and an example that will help us weather such a collapse.
My disagreement isn’t really with the need for such activity as much as it with the need for activity AND education.
At the turn of the century, socialists et al, understood that helping desperate people could successfully be coupled with educating peope as to how they had arrived at such a state, how the capitalist society had largely determined the course of their existence and what needed to be done to change that.
I really believe that if people don’t really understand WHY they are creating an alternative society and have a solid and unshakeable committment to creating said society they will be easy targets for said predators.
Couple the actions described above with educating people as to the reasons why non-corporate/capitalistic alternatives are actually better for them and you are creating a movement that is not as easily fragmented.
I mean, after posting I thought about what I had written and could actually envision a scenario where in which successful co-ops would be “exchanged” by the likes of GS, JPM etc so that we would have the NYSE, the NASDAQ and the COOPX where shares of the cooperatives would then be sold to investors and the whole plan would have then been for sh*t.
Which co-op could resist all that “IPO” money?
Not only do people have to resist the power and money of the corporations but they have to takes measures to steel their minds against the incredible deviousness of the capitalist elite.
The only thing that can combat the well-paid armies of the “best and brightest” con-men who spend all day dreaming of new schemes to exploit people is to confront those schemes – in whatever from they may take – with a philosophy in which they can’t find an easy foothold.
I am a proponent of raising “class consciousness” but call it what you will the people have to start coalescing around some tenets that confront said system and which is so antithetical to the system that it’s corruptibility is difficult to achieve.
“Not only do people have to resist the power and money of the corporations but they have to takes measures to steel their minds against the incredible deviousness of the capitalist elite.
The only thing that can combat the well-paid armies of the “best and brightest” con-men who spend all day dreaming of new schemes to exploit people is to confront those schemes – in whatever from they may take – with a philosophy in which they can’t find an easy foothold.
I am a proponent of raising “class consciousness” but call it what you will the people have to start coalescing around some tenets that confront said system and which is so antithetical to the system that it’s corruptibility is difficult to achieve.”
I agree with all this.
We must be explicit anti-capitalists. That is the one ideological orientation the 1% can never co-opt. Anti-racism, feminism, cosmopolitanism…all vital, but all can find space within the framework of “the market.”
And there’s no question that these efforts at creating alternative institutions, while possibly valuable, are not nearly enough. That’s why I agree that the mission of these institutions must be as much a matter of education/raising consciousness as of practical economics. Only the inculcation of a thoroughgoing anti-capitalism can prevent the kind of co-optation that you rightly worry about.
As for the repression that worry about if these alternative institutions ever grow to become a sigfificant challenge, that is surely inevitable. But this is also where education makes a difference.
It’s important to note the increasing level of repression that the 1% are resorting to is a sign that the legitimacy of their system and their rule is now in crisis. This system is rapidly crumbling and their only answers to the growing misery and resistance of the people is thuggery. They have no real plan for jobs. They have no real plan to alleviate the suffering of the masses. And so all they have left is state violence. That’s the sign of a system on the brink. When the people no longer believe the rulers’ lies then the only option they have left is crude despotism.
I was just watching a Brooking Institution conference on C-SPAN. And the wonderful thing about it was the incredible level of denial exhibited by these people. We’re seeing the beginnings of global conflagration of resistance and all these people had to talk about was more of the same: austerity, militarism, American exceptionalism. It was absolutely wonderful to witness! A ruling class in total disaray and denial of what’s going on!
These people still haven’t admitted to themselves that austerity in a global depression in absolute political and economic disaster. They’re so ideologically blinkered that they think they can just keep doing down the same road and things will just magically work themselves out. Let’s not disabuse them of their illusions.
What happens when the Power Elite tries and maybe succeeds in outlawing co-ops and etc.? Well, they will certainly radicalize all the members of those co-ops. Those co-ops and their co-oppers may not go out of bussiness. They may well go underground into an evergrowing black market and shadow society. The Power Elite may well drive their targets into a Syrian Uprising. The Power Elite may well create a Civil War which one side will win by exterminating the other side. Will the Power Elite really choose to take America down that road? Maybe. Should we let fear of that possibility paralyze us from Building Survivalism in the meantime? No.
If it’s still within the framework of capitalism, particularly that “those who would eat must work”, then it’s doomed.
liberals, always trying to be everything to everyone.
Nothing like a bonfire of unproductive children, sick relatives and grandparents to warm the cockles of the cold libertarian heart, huh?
Can’t you just smell the sloth being burned away?!
How wasteful! We should roast them.
Since you mentioned it, I’m actually in the blackboard stages of a plan to provide nourishing “liquidity” for all American consumers.
It’s called Medic-ade.
Will you outsource mfg to Jonestown?
I eat human flesh and I vote!
Nothing washes down Soilent Green like Medic-Aid.
New Economic Visions provides a service we will not receive from MSM. No surprise. But so nice to hear all these stories and examples of community based economics. And I for one cannot help but enjoy the sweetest part. Revenge. It will take a while but the TBTF monsters will disappear.
http://azizonomics.com/2012/05/25/keynesianism-eugenics/
A Link???
Unfortunately, having used the libertardian ZeroHedge as a source of information – Aziz’s blog is also regularly showcased there – all one can really say about the place is that they are a masterful propaganda outfit.
First, get people to hooked into the mysterious Tyler Durdens’ postings which provide an near insider-like analysis of the financial crisis/happenings all the while promulgating the laughable theme that in some way bailing out the banks can conceivably considered Keynesianism, thus helping quash any attempts at people seeking redress/succor through the state.
I’ll admit that some of their info is good but like any propagandistic outfit worth it’s salt, you have to pay the price of admission and that price is a view of the world that deliberately uses the wrong terms to describe what is happening in our world today and what we should do about it.
Just as the MSM uses terms like “shared sacrifice” and “democracy building” to cloud the terms of debate, for all the seeming intelligence the folks at ZH seem to display at times they come off as a bunch of mouth-breathing idiots with much of their space dedicated to posts about how the entirety of world’s woes can be placed on the altar of Keynes.
Aziz had an article a while back in which he categorically stated that global warming was a myth so accusing Keynes of eugenics is about par for the course for the poor tarder.
Aziz here.
Global warming is not a myth. I have never said it is a myth, and I have never implied it is a myth — although I have said that its effects, and their extent are uncertain, and there may be hidden upsides as well as downsides.
It would be a good idea for you to actually read my work before you start casting assertions about it.
Also, for your information I am not “accusing” Keynes of being a eugenicist — he was head of the Eugenics Society, now known as the Galton Institute, for seven years. So he is, I think, accusing himself.
Oh, that’s right, you’re the guy who thinks that global warming – snicker, sorry couldn’t help it – is just peachy keen because it’s keeping us from suffering through another Ice Age!
Sorry – chortle – my mistake!!
Maybe you’d also be willing to make your pool available to any “collateral damaged” polar bears, eh?
http://azizonomics.com/2012/04/06/the-face-of-authoritarian-environmentalism/
As concerns eugenics, let’s have a look at who else supported eugenics in the early 20th century, shall we?
Winston Churchill
Alexander Graham Bell
George Bernard Shaw
H.G. Wells
Margaret Sanger – whom you did mention
and many others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Eugenics_Society
Gee, I guess one could make a case that a number of people seemed to think the idea of eugenics had some merit at the turn of the century?
So, tell us, was Churchill’s leading of England during WWII related to his thoughts/feelings on eugenics?
What was the first word Bell said over the telephone?
I bet it was N*GGER, right?
Did all of the plays of Shaw reflect his admiration for eugenics?
H.G. Wells?
You are smart enough to see where this is heading but apparently not smart enough to stop yourself from looking like a loon what with your fanatical, absurd and entirely misplaced fixation on Keynes.
Nope, Keynes’ economic theories are of course part and parcel of his determination to setup concentration camps and start a mass culling of humanity.
You certainly don’t sound like a loon to me, Aziz!
Gee, was people’s interest in eugenics kind of like how a number of scientists at the time thought they were on the cusp of discovering the ubiquitous ether throughout the universe, eh?
Probably not, they were all Eichmann, Jr’s, right?
Let’s further smear Keynes as the originator of all that is evil in the world even though his economic ideas have absolutely ZERO to do with today’s society and the economic mess we are in, shall we?
Hmmm, and why would people want to do that?
Because in the absence of a true leftist presence in the Western world Keynesian economics present the greatest viable threat to the established order as they call for at least an attempt at increasing investment in ways in which the common person might benefit.
Cry all you want, try and deny it, but you and the other libertardians just hate Keynes because you’re all greedy selfish bastards who try and hide said greed and selfishness behind the farcical facade of Hayek and other assorted fools and hypocrites.
BTW, don’t think I’m advocating for Keynes. As a socialist, I believe Keynes to be misguided for many other reasons so please don’t tell people that I want to setup my own secret sex farm at which I can conduct my own personal humanoid genetic mutation experiments, ok? Deal?
To recap:
Your basic argument – in reality, let’s not kid ourselves, Aziz – amounts to this:
Help out the common person with direct investment in their lives?
Well, did you hear the one about how Keynes was actually a concentration camp capo at Auschwitz?
That is really the intellectual tenor of your post – you know it, I know it and anyone with half a mind knows it – so if you want to keep on limply defending your propaganda go ahead, just know that we all really do know what you’re trying to do.
Adding:
In addition, why don’t you tell us how the definition of eugenics as here offered by Wikipedia differs considerably from the “neo-Social Darwinism” of the libertardians?
From the 3rd sentence of the entry:
“Historically, many of the practitioners of eugenics viewed eugenics as a science, not necessarily restricted to human populations; this embraced the views of Darwinism and Social Darwinism.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
So, even though Keynes was a member of a society that probably professed a belief in Social Darwinism his economic theories have been utilized to combat social inequalities and thus run counter to an acceptance of Social Darwinistic tenets.
OTOH, libertardians – who so seem to fear the diabolically Mengeleian Keynes – themselves promulgate ideas that call for the furtherance of economic policies that not only exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities but which seek to make said inequalities the foundation(head) of society.
Summarized:
Keynes may have believed in Social Darwinism but his theories actually helped combat the idea.
Libertardians believing Keynes was a eugenicist – aka Social Darwinist – actually promote policies that have as their basis the acceptance and continuance of Social Darwinism made manifest.
Well, who then is more of a eugenicist?
The person whose ideas combat eugenics?
Or the persons whose ideas promote eugenics?
Well, golly gee, jsmith, are you telling me that libertardians once again don’t know what the f*ck they are talking about?
That they are still spewing stupid shite that contradicts itself and doesn’t make sense to any one outside of their own circle?
Why, yes I am, jsmith, thank you and good day!
It’s a strong possibility, with scientific support: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16439807
Yes, an awful lot of people other than Keynes advocated this kind of thing. It’s vicious and nasty wherever I see it. I don’t care if it’s Churchill, or Keynes, or Sanger, or Shaw or Malthus. Democide (i.e. governments killing their people) was the leading cause of non-natural death in the last century, above even war. Let’s hope that it isn’t the leading cause of non-natural death this century
Didn’t say they were. You’ve been watching too much Alex Jones. The point of the post was that central planning — of the economy, as well as of heredity — doesn’t work, because we don’t understand the side-effects.
I am sure, as a socialist, you are familiar with the debates between Oskar Lange and Friedrich Hayek. Without a market mechanism, everything — capital, labour, etc — is misallocated. Effective central planning is impossible, even more so in our high-tech era where algorithms give a pseudo-scientific sheen to central planning. Nope — economic planning always and inexorably leads to a stagnation in innovation, creativity and wealth creation, and that is an empirical fact.
You do understand that on the internet, name calling automatically loses the argument, right? Just a hint — slow down on the ad hominem attacks, speed up on the evidence. This is actually your most interesting point though — is experimental capitalism social darwinism?
I’d tend to think not. First of all, in an economy driven by market experimentation in resource/capital/labour allocation, there tends to be a lot of innovation and wealth creation (unfortunately this has slowed down in the West in recent years as our economy has become more planned). The distribution of resources may be unequal, but let’s not forget that in the era before global capitalism there was less than 1 billion people, and now there are over 7 billion. That’s 6 billion extra people who get to experience reality, which is a pretty good figure. And global living standards continue to rise. Yes, there is awful poverty in patches, and yes there is a lot of exploitation of workers, the earth, etc. But overall there has been a lot of improvement in living standards, and that improvement has been driven by the engine of wealth creation, something that redistributionism has never grasped.
I believe in charity and compassion. I don’t believe in the socialist reality of taking wealth at gunpoint, and giving a tiny sliver to the poor and much more to party members, your friends, and for your own palace.
LMFAO!!!
Thanks for the heads-up, too.
Aziz, when do you think central planning is called for?
You do understand the US won WWII because of central planning, right?
And the space program happened through central planning. You know – weather satellites, global communications, etc.
Railroads (admit it)
Most of the big ticket items that lurch humanity forward do not begin under market forces. Market forces are great at setting prices. A side effect of that is directing capital, but it is not the only means of directing capital efficiently. It took until just a few days ago for a company to put a capsule in orbit, and even that was with huge subsidies.
Go ahead… tell me how inefficient a space program is and that’s why the market never delivered it.
K Ackermann —
Democracy is a kind of experimental market process, too.
Some statism is inevitable, in the modern world, and yes this means misallocation of capita/labour/resourcesl relative to market preferences, but so long as it’s democratically accountable then I don’t see that as a huge problem, because people can just vote for something different.
Obviously things like the space program are vastly superior to nation building in the middle east, but their innovations are only possible because of a productive and innovative and dynamic private sector to pay taxes to fund such activities. Have you noticed that NASA spending as a percentage of GDP has vastly fallen since the US became more corporatist during and following Reagan-Bush? My hunch is that that is no coincidence, as corporations have amassed power their preferences (i.e. lower taxes) have taken preference over society’s wider democratic preferences (i.e. space exploration).
When all the parties represent the same interests, a larger security state, less individual liberty, more protections for corporations then democracy ceases to be an experimental/emprical process, and that seems to be what has happened here.
Reply to Aziz actually . . .
Preventing another Ice Age is fine if we don’t overcorrect and cause a new Heat Age. In my humble opinion as a lay amateur science-buff, that is what we have done and are doing.
But those who think differently may well be presented with a tremendous contrarian-investing opportunity. If one believes the Ice Caps are not melting and will not melt, the oceans are not rising and will not rise, etc.; one should really invest all the money one can in buying land along the Gulf Coast, along the East Anglia seaside, etc. etc. You could well sow the seeds of Vast New Family Fortunes and your descendants could be Laughing Last for centuries to come.
differentclue:
The icecaps are melting, and coastal land is a bad investment for reasons beyond the ones you mention; a lot of it (e.g. Anglia) was sinking into the sea even before we started pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. I think that we are heading toward a new heat age due to overcorrection (although I am pretty optimistic about being able to rebalance this with technology, e.g. carbon scrubbing trees), but even if we go to a full heat age informed scientific opinion is really just guessing in saying that that will be a huge disaster, because of the huge quantity of hidden variables. It could be, but maybe not.
Aziz,
I am just a lay amateur science buff. My purely amateur reading and thinking and scattered personal experiences over the past few decades satisfies me that mankind’s organized industrial leadership/rulership has engineered a new Heat Age into motion and I am satisfied that it will get very very bad.
Reduction of further atmospheric infra-red trapping/ back-to-ground re-reflecting gasses must be reduced and suppressed soonest, and airborne CO2 loads must also be bio-recaptured and bio-sequestered starting soonest . . . if we are to avoid the worst of the Big Heat which our Evil Overlords have prepared for us. If we can’t reduce and remediate, then we will just have to make our best guesses as to how bad it will get, and pursue our separate survival pathways as best as we can.
Those who realistically fear the extent and consequences of The Big Heat should of course try to counter it at the politiconomic level. But those among them who are also preparing their own personal survival plans-B should at the very least withhold their knowledge and plans from those other people who affect “not to believe in Global Warming”.
Those who caused and engineered the problem have no right to exist and do not deserve to survive. Helping them survive would be an unforgivable crime against humanity and against the future.
Don’t forget the Tupelo Model, which goes back to the 1940s. :)
http://www.berea.edu/brushyforkinstitute/handoutpapers/projecttoolboxes/tupelomodel.asp
Yves Smith,
I am pleased and grateful to see this post. It begins to address the plea for articles referrencing specific countermeasures that people and groups-of-people are taking to the ongoing Upper Class Aggression agenda in mid-rollout.
I hope many readers here will extend this beachhead by offering their own suggestions and referrences to useful thinkers and doers, groups, advice, etc. There are thousands and thousands of such groups and people. I will begin by offering a few suggestions: Woody Tasch–Slow Money, Catherine Austin Fitts, Permaculture and all its successful developers/practitioners/extenders, Ran Prieur with his super-informative and challenging website, John Robb with his new website called Resilient Communities, Sharon Astyk, for just the barest minimum start.
Surely other readers can come in with other sources, links, etc.
People inside the state of California were able to watch local rural economies blossom into being, as various forces helped each other put medial marijuana clinics on the map.
these clinics brought prosperity to both those who rented out the clinics (strip mall owners, in some cases, and small business office owners in others) as well as those who were required to grow the plants, transport the plants, man the clinics, et al.
Overall the communities across California saw enough success that the state itself was receiving, on an annual basis, some 125 millions of dollars in tax revenues. And on the city, town and county level, there was ample tax revenue as well. Even the Sheriff of Mendocino county was found to praise this system as helping with monies the struggling northern counties have needed since the housing bubble burst.
Meanwhile, those folks who had ailments such as cancer and MS were able to obtain relief with far less money spent than if they had stayed involved with conventional medicine.
This could not have happened without Pres. Obama honoring his pledge to leave medical marijuana alone. However, last autumn, Eric Holder’s DOJ decided to act in a punitive manner. In just the past six months, some 3,200 people have lost well paying jobs, as the clinics have shut down. Growers are now doing cultivation under the threat of jail terms. The people who benefit are the drug cartels, the Big Banks that will be assured of continuing in their usual role of money laundering, the Big Pharma concerns, which have been patenting cannibinoids for various ailments and were fearing that the home grow clinics would keep a good bit of profit away from them and int he hands of the sick and the clinics and growers. Prison for profit types are pleased as well.
For Holder, it is just business as usual. He has a long time association with nefarious causes, as Reuters has just released a survey of how closely allied Holder had been in the early 2000’s with “Covington” and the Big Banks. Shame on all involved, from Obama to Holder and to those “I’ll support Obama no matter what” charlatans who are overly involved with the Democratic Party.
The cossacks work for the Czar. Eric Holder works for Obama. This persecution of medical marijuana in California is
strictly from Obama. I would not let Obama off the hook by accepting the excuse that Holder went rogue and diddit on his own while Obama wasn’t looking.
I believe Obama also deliberately on purpose retained a Bush Administration creature as head of the DEA, so as to stealth-continue the establishment anti-marijuana policy mindset. I believe Rolling Stone recently ran an article about that. If today’s young people of today knew about the depth of Obama’s utter betrayal of medical marijuana freedom, would they get in touch with their own hatred? Would they bring that hatred with them to the polls?