Auto Ownership

At Richard’s behest I am thinking about autoworker ownership of the auto industry and in particular the parts sector of auto. Parts plants are smaller, probably lending themselves to a cooperative ownership in which it easier for workers to view themselves as owners and have a real impact on production.

Thinking about this is tough for me. A BIG, but hopeful change. I am an old UAW rank-and-filer, given more to battling management for jobs than thinking as an owner. But I am now engaged with some folks in Ohio who attempted a worker buyout of Chrysler just a year and a half ago. The UAW turned its back on these workers, favoring Cerberus over the union’s own membership as the new Chrysler owner. The leader of that ESOP attempt is now about to renew the effort but wishes to remain out of the picture for a few weeks. A few posts ago, Race recommended the ESOP folks at Kent State for assistance and this woman has been working with them for a couple of years now. She has made a courageous and well-informed beginning. In the meantime I have asked her to review Mondragon’s management and production structure and she seems interested. I have also recommended John’s book to her. I expect there will soon be some meetings in Ohio with Chrysler workers/buyers and perhaps some autoworkers from Ford and GM.

So far as proposing worker ownership in the auto parts sector, it seems to me we have to see this today as not viable. American auto parts manufacturing is just not making it. The margins are too thin and as the Big 3 keep slicing away, the parts companies are forced to Mexico and other cheap labor countries. It is impossible for American auto parts workers to compete with foreign wage slaves who are truly slaves. We should help the Mexicans win a comfortable wage. We’d have to first fix the trade agreements, which means fixing a universal Just wage as the first step in settling trade agreements. That could be easily done, almost overnight through direct action. But we have no direct action.

The problem with organizing direct action is that too many auto workers have simply given up. Others depend on the UAW to save them. But for 30 years the UAW has been a very open, company union, publicly proclaiming the end of Solidarity and promoting worker-against-worker competition. Complicating the development of transparency of the UAW as traitor, are any number of liberal voices and writers who support the UAW as if this was the Solidarity UAW of the 1930s. Most workers are angry at the UAW but are not going to give up on it until they understand it is now on the other side, and they see a true alternative to it. Until that comes, we deal with a lot of hopelessness in auto.

Below is a little bit of what I see an awful lot of. Hopelessness is a terrible block to organizing. I received this yesterday, just after the UAW presented it’s latest concessions to the American Ford workers:



Tom,

First of all, my father sends you his regards. He retired in December. Secondly, you know that here in the States it's a "screw you Jack, I've got mine" mentality. The ideology of Solidarity is a concept that is totally foreign to most people. Take a look at your own neighborhood! People turn their heads so they don't get involved! It's sickening actually. I don't know what it's going to take to turn things around. It's almost as if we've bred a generation or two that have no heart, no soul, no conscience. It's very sad really and I wonder how bad it's going to have to get and how much people are going to be willing to take until the pendulum swings back the other way!

Here’s my response in bullets. I like to write in bullets because as Chesterton observed, bullets can be “pills for pale people”:

· "From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy." - "A Case In Point," The Outline of Sanity by GK Chesterton
· The UAW people who have, for the past 30 years, led us against Solidarity and into dog-eat-dog competition with each other are insane. Most troubling is that most of them have been Catholic and what Catholic is raised to assist the filthy rich, cheat other people and expand the ranks of poverty? They have renounced the Justice teachings and soul of their own Church!
· 30 years of the most intense UAW propagandizing against worker friendship, duty and Solidarity has had a terrible effect on us all. It has not only destroyed the UAW as a fighting force for autoworkers and a fair society, it has disillusioned and created hopelessness throughout our Locals.
· The UAW is, in every way, a company union and has been for years. However, most autoworkers still think the UAW will save us. As long as most autoworkers can't see the UAW for what it is, they will not think and talk about what we really need: Which is a new Solidarity Movement based in the virtue of the old and one that uses the proven tactics, and strategies of the old Trade Unions: Strikes, Plant Seizures, Sitdowns, Slowdowns, etc.
· We should take a lesson from Polish Solidarity which organized itself against formidable odds and life-threatening dangers. Solidarity saw the Commie regime and Leninist production for what they were: jokes that didn't work. They went plant-to-plant, town-to-town, meeting themselves. That is what's needed here- that sort of horizontal organizing.
· No one can get this rolling until we recognize that there are still a lot of good people out there who are isolated by the UAW. No one apparently has the guts any longer to talk common sense in Local Union meetings because those meetings are insane too - riddled as they are with sucks, dog-eater appointees, stupid officers and their terrified supporters. We need to sell the good folks we have left on the necessity to reach out, beyond our Locals and meet with people like ourselves.
· The UAW is plagued by the Left. We need to organize ourselves without the Marxist-Leninists who seem to pop up every time someone does something that looks like it may go somewhere. We don’t need the Left. We need the center, the core, the truth of the thing and the good folks who naturally stand for each other and our families and communities.
· We need a model for production. The best model today for auto production is the Mondragon Corporation. It is the closest production model to a Catholic Guild. IMHO the Guilds were the best production systems in world history.
· Another model we should consider is the ESOP, if we could remodel it to provide real decision making to engineers, trades, crafts and production. We know what we have now sucks.
· Can we really do anything to save auto? Why not? If not us who would save the industry and us? We know that the UAWs latest concessions are just another notch in the company's belt tightening. It will go on and on until we stop it. But we can't even begin to stop it until we get clear about wha;'s gone wrong and what will make it right again. Certainly not the present management and owners. Certainly not the Banksters Obama is placing in charge. Look at all our experience, yours, your husband's, your Dad's! Joe Riley's! We do know a few good reps who are great leaders, speakers, writers and thinkers with good souls. Why not get together and talk about Solidarity vs. Dog-Eat-Dog?
· Our kids and grandkids need us to do this. So do our friends, neighbors, towns and cities. - Sorry to go so long and it is great to hear from you and your Dad again! God bless the Irish! (As He always has.) Tom

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The Tennessee Ernie Ford Solution

The markets took great comfort in Ben Bernanke's testimony to congress yesterday, reading it as a statement that the economy could recover by the end of the year. However, his statement was in the subjunctive mood, not the indicative; it was a conditional statement: IF all the bailout plans work by the end of the year, THEN the economy will recover. Well, duh. But as well-intentioned as the bailout plans are, there is good reason to believe that we are nowhere near the bottom. Further, all the plans do--if they do anything at all--is restore the pre-crash economy. But that economy was not viable; it was a house of cards to begin with, and restoring it will not place the economy in a secure position.
For example, a large portion of the capital of the banks is tied up in mortage obligations and, more importantly, "derivatives" based on those mortgages. But the housing values are nowhere near their bottom, if historical averages can be trusted.
If housing prices correct to their historical averages, which is likely, then the banks balance sheets will weaken and there will be a lot more "troubled assests" for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to buy.
The President also laid out his plans last night. It is certainly a comprehensive and well-meaning plan, but I doubt that it will work. The problem with the plan is that it fails to recognize the structural problems in the economy. Obama hopes to restore American manufacturing through a heavy investment in "green" technologies. But even if this was successful, there is no reason to think that manufacturing of these new products won't be outsourced. This is the Tennessee Earnie Ford solution: in the end, we will be "another day older and deeper in debt," but we will not have accomplished anything.
A nation can only grow prosperous by making things. It can never grow properouse by speculation. Our economy is built not on real assets, but on speculative bets. But in speculation, for every winner there is a loser; one party's gains are precisely measured by another party's losses. Only making things can make the nation wealthy, only in the farms, fields, forests, fisheries, factories, and mines can we find our future. Bailing out the old economy will at best give us the old economy. At worst--and more likely--it will bankrupt us.
So what should the President be doing? There are many things he could do, but there are at least four things he ought to do over the course of the next four years:

1. Devalue the dollar. The worth of money relative to other currencies should reflect their trade balances. A country like the United States, with a constant trade imbalance should have a constantly "shrinking" dollar, which by itself is sufficient to bring trade back into balance. But we have the worst of both worlds: a strong dollar and a trade deficit. Devaluing the dollar over the next four years will make imports more expensive and exports cheaper.
   
2. Devaluing the dollar will make lenders more reluctant to lend. But this is not bad news, it is good news. Instead of borrowing the money for infrastructure improvements, we should just print it. While this seems radical, the fact is that we borrow it from people who just print it up themselves: the banks and the Chinese. The idea of "printing" money conjures up visions of hyperinflation. And if the money is just printed to finance tax cuts and operating expenses, this is a possibility. But if it is used to finance actual improvements, like roads, education, and the like, there need be no monetary inflation, so long as there are unemployed resources in the economy. In other words, we can invest our own money in our own future, and provide both jobs and real improvements along the way.
   
3. Finance the highways through weight and distance based tolls. Right now, the "free" ways constitute a subsidy to long distance shippers and the globalized economy. But if the shippers had to pay the full cost of transporting their products, local and regional manufacturing would suddenly have a great advantage over foreign producers, no matter how little they pay their workers.
4. Buy up and break up the institutions that claim to be "too big to fail" (see Buy it Up! Break it Up!.)

Whatever happens, nothing good will happen without a restructuring of the economy. Geithner, Bernanke, and company are trying to chase falling assets and prop them up, but they will fall faster then the government can build supports. It is like trying to "catch a falling knife"; you are likely to get cut. We cannot go back to where we were because where we were was nowhere. The nation will have a distributist solution, or no solution at all.

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Slumdog Success Story

The hit movie Slumdog Millionaire will likely garner a large share of the Oscar awards tomorrow, honors which it no doubt deserves. Yet along with the honors, the movie is also garnering fierce protests in Dharavi, the “slum” in which it was partially filmed. What the residents object to is not the use of the term “slumdog” to describe them, so much as the use of the term “slum” to describe their neighborhood. It is not that there is not squalor and poverty in this district. Built on a swamp at what was then the edge of Bombay, it is the home to somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million people crowded into less than 500 acres, it certainly does not lack for squalor. So why do the residents object to the title “slum”?

Because, according to an article in today's New York Times, Dharavi is a commercial and community success story. As Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava 0f PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge and Research) describe it:

Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Well over a million “eyes on the street,” to use Jane Jacobs’s phrase, keep Dharavi perhaps safer than most American cities. Yet Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city.

Just how industrious is Dharavi? According to some estimates, there are over 15,000 small factories and workshops generating as much as $650 million. These are potters, dyers, seamstresses, and, especially, recyclers, who turn the trash of modern life into useful products; together these businesses export crafts and manufactured goods as far as Sweden. All of these businesses operate under the official “radar” that regulates so much of modern commercial life.

No master plan, urban design, zoning ordinance, construction law or expert knowledge can claim any stake in the prosperity of Dharavi. It was built entirely by successive waves of immigrants fleeing rural poverty, political oppression and natural disasters. They have created a place that is far from perfect but has proved to be amazingly resilient and able to upgrade itself. In the words of Bhau Korde, a social worker who lives there, “Dharavi is an economic success story that the world must pay attention to during these times of global depression.”

But Dharavi is now the subject of “redevlopment” plans. For “redevelopment,” read “destruction.” Once on the edges of the city, Dharavi now occupies valuable real estate between the city's two main rail lines. Doubtless the area could use some improvements to its water and sanitation facilities, which are rudimentary at best. And some housing credits to upgrade building in the shantytown would be helpful. But that is never what “redevelopment” is about, and government is never really about “helping” such people. Rather, redevelopment is always about displacing the poor in behalf of the rich. As Mukesh Mehta, the architect in charge, gushes, “You're talking of a location that's fantastic. This is the only location in Mumbai where I can bulldoze 500 acres of land and redesign.” Of course, he makes it clear that he will re-design the current population out of existence; redevelopment is meant for a better class of people.

In many ways, Dharavi is the ultimate user-generated city. Each of its 80-plus neighborhoods has been incrementally developed by generations of residents updating their shelters and businesses according to needs and means. As Ramesh Misra, a lawyer and lifelong resident, puts it: “We have always improved Dharavi by ourselves. All we want is permission and support to keep doing it. Is that asking for too much?”

Support for poor people who help themselves? Yes, that is asking too much. Especially when they occupy some of the priciest real estate in Asia.

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What Is Distributism?

[Note: We wish to introduce a second pamphlet for the benefit of our readers and activists. Originally written at the start of the new millennium, Thomas Storck reintroduced us to the social and political economics of Distributism. Once again, our readers may feel free to print, distribute, and post the following onto their websites.]

What Is Distributism?

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Paleo Radio Announcement

Paleo Radio will run from 5-7 p.m. (EST) on http://wocrfm.com. If you have Quicktime, then just go to mms://mediasrv.olivetcollege.edu/WOCR. 

At 6 p.m. I will be discussing anarchism, atheism, and the political-economy with a man who identifies himself as a libertarian socialist. It will last the better part of a half hour, but all calls are welcome after the discussion. 

Call: 269.749.7398

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Action This Day

I propose elements for a Distributist agenda for the months immediately ahead of us. Is it possible in the face of the global economic meltdown to focus on practicalities such as the enormity of the calamities that already are overtaking countless households, with greater numbers still to come? And on what in practical terms Distributism might have to offer in response to them? And on what sort of alliances might be needed in order for a Distributist response to be effective - for a place to be found for Distributism on the agendas of our respective countries, and in part also in the context of the community economic development packages that will inevitably be on offer, and as inevitably in too many cases fail for want of the conceptual underpinning a Distributist perspective might provide? And on whether - mixed metaphor imminent!! - the silver lining to the current dark economic clouds might be that they present a window of opportunity to get Distributism taken seriously in circles which previously have been oblivious to it? And on whether right now might not be an auspicious moment for planting the Distributist acorns from which mighty Distributist oaks may in future arise? 

I'm in normal times as much as anybody up for informed discussion on the great historical and philosophical questions, but right now I'm mindful of the old saying 'When Cicero spoke men listened, but when Caesar spoke men marched'. What distinguishes the truly great Distributists of the stamp of Fr Jimmy Tompkins, Fr Moses Coady and Fr Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta is that they too marched. Who among us has actually fronted the board of the local credit union - a quintessentially Distributist institution, to which it is to be hoped all of us belong - not just with a sympathetic inquiry about how they may be making out in the face of the current stresses, but to ask what more imaginative responses along Distributist lines they might contemplate in response to the likely protracted unemployment or under-employment of large numbers of their members? Who among us has hooked up with a repositry of employee ownership expertise such as at Kent State University about possible employee acquisitions of businesses whose owners currently are walking away from them? Who among us is seeing in the enormous numbers of houses currently vacant in the US an opening for the establishment of housing co-operatives such as Jimmy Tompkins founded at Antigonish? Who among us has introduced an elected representative at the local, state or federal level or a local bishop, priest or congregation to Distributism, perhaps through the linkage that it was in precisely such times of impoverishment and immiseration as many currently are experiencing that Mondragon had its inception?    

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Thomas Storck Podcasts

I recently uploaded a three-part interview with Mr. Thomas Storck. They are podcasts. While the quality may not be the best, this is something we are working on. We will also be working on podcasting the interview with Dale Ahlquist. Hopefully I am not naive to say "all in due time."

The links to the podcast archive section will direct you to them. 

NOTE: There were certain difficulties. I found that if one clicks on the title of the particular podcast rather than the generic podcast image, it worked fine. If this still doesn't resolve the problem, I'll have to work on figuring it out.

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Distributism in the Populist Moment

Life is full of pleasant things, regularly coming at times when they are least expected. Today just so happened to be one of those days. As I went out to check the mail, I noticed that my edition of The Week magazine had arrived. And there, on the cover, was a splendid picture of people rioting around the idol (i.e. the statue of the bull) in front of the New York Stock Exchange. The people with their fists in the air, shouting at the symbol of swinishness, pulling it down from its pedestal in a way reminiscent of the famous topple of Saddam’s statue, and the words “Populist Uprising” gracing the bottom of the page. The image beautifully captured the sentiment, and the words accurately reflected the image. It was spectacular in the truest sense of the word

Unfortunately, as with many articles of this nature, my joy was quickly and significantly diminished. The story was on page 18 in the Talking Points section and it only consumed the larger part of the upper-half of the page. That aside, the article was concerning to the $500,000 salary cap Obama has issued for all bank CEOs to receive per-annum. While I should have paid more attention to the cover of the magazine (which has the words “the new, $500,000 limit on CEO salaries” as the tag line), I figured that the story would deal with… well, the overall uprising of populism.

It was the earlier portion of January, 2008, when I began speaking more about populism, and in particular what I saw as the rise of populism in America. The populism I predicted was relatively moderate. I insisted that it would be a hodgepodge of ideas derived from what is typically referred to as the “right” and the “left.” People would be generally conservative on abortion, homosexual marriage, and a host of other “culture war” issues. On the other hand, people would still support public schooling. Very few would want to rid the system of Medicaid. Unemployment and welfare benefits would remain. They’d stand by the notion of Social Security. If trends continue to go in the direction they appear to be going, people maybe even endorse some form of universal health care. Furthermore, I believed that we would see an outcry against Wall Street, CEO salaries, and mega-monsters like Wal-Mart.

I still stand by my predictions, and I believe most of the indicators are pointing in that direction. Sadly, I don’t see this rising tide lasting too long before it breaches.

People are angry, this much is sure. But they either don’t really know why they are angry or they are taking it out on the wrong things. A casual conversation with Johnny Q. Public will get you an earful of emotionally charged tirades concerning the salaries of CEOs, how Scooter’s Hardware is going out of business because they can’t compete with Wal-Mart, and how the average Joe just can’t make the kind of living he used to with a hard day’s work. In all likelihood, you’ll even hear them talk about the hucksters and swindlers in Washington and Wall Street.

None of this is necessarily problematic. What is problematic is how this tirade is followed up with the same old song and dance that got us here in the first place. The very same person will go to the grave defending state capitalism, quoting “the ole Gipper” by saying “Government is the problem.” This person may be on their way in (or even out!) of Wal-Mart, while Scooter’s is just one mile up the road. He’ll stand by the wage-slave concept, decrying a Living, Family, Just Wage or vocational organizations as socialism. And he’ll probably tell you (depending on how the next few years go) that all we need to do is get more “conservative” Republicans like Sarah Palin in office to begin “taking care of business.”

If you haven’t been formally introduced to this person, or the mass of individuals he happens to represent, you haven’t been in the US very long. Or maybe you just haven’t been paying attention. At any rate, intellectual schizophrenia is the way of the day, and apathy runs thick through Main Street.

This isn’t to deny the ray of light peaking through the clouds. Not at all! It is simply admitting that, as of yet, it is little more than a sunbeam piercing through the clouds of convention tomfoolery. It’s a mere acknowledgment that the masses aren’t as angry with the socio-political apparatus as they are with who may be in control at the time. It’s a blame game, with all their bets being on top-down measures to make all the difference.

Yet even here it is not entirely doom and gloom. This underlying sentiment is real, it is emotional, and it is angry. What is required is good old distributist education. While a large portion of the populace may be experiencing frustration with the status quo, they need to realize that the answer is not found in merely tweaking the status quo, or even crossing their fingers in hope that those on Capitol Hill who just so happened to micromanage the status quo will make all the difference.

Distributists, then, are living in a time of great opportunity. People are dissatisfied, and they are willing to listen to “new” ideas. Better yet, most do not realizing that those “new” ideas are far from being “new.” Capitalists have had their chance. Socialists have had their chance. Now it is time for distributists to have their day in the sunbeam.

How long this uprising lasts is unknown. But it would be foolish not to take advantage of a brilliant opportunity to direct this populist moment towards a more humane political economy.

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Announcements, Announcements, Announcements!

Dear friends and readers of The Distributist Review,

Allow us first to announce that fellow distributist and author Thomas Storck will be interviewed tomorrow on Paleo Radio by fellow TDR contributor, Jeremiah Bannister. The interview will be conducted tomorrow at 6pm EST and may be heard by connecting to www.wocrfm.com.

For our readers in the Ohio area, Sebastian's Church, Akron, will be hosting a performance of "Old Thunder: An Afternoon with Hilaire Belloc", a one-man show featuring Kevin O'Brien, founder of Theater of the Word, on Sunday, March 15th at 1 p.m. in Zwisler Hall. The program is free and open to the public; a free-will offering will be taken. Come and meet Catholic historian and poet Hilaire Belloc, who lived in England from 1870-1953. "Old Thunder" provides a stirring presentation, which includes Belloc's prophetic take on modern society and culture. [St. Sebastian's Church, Zwisler Hall, 476 Mull Avenue Akron, OH]

We wish to remind everyone to please register if you have not already done so for the upcoming conference, "Catholicism and Economics," hosted and sponsored by the Nassau Community College Center for Catholic Studes. The school has received a lot of registrants from the distributist camp, so please make sure to register and support our efforts.

Many surprises are in store for readers of the Review and The ChesterBelloc Mandate in the upcoming months. Of course, as things materialize, we will make the appropriate announcements, but it may suffice to give our readers a hint. "Bye-bye Google"

For now, we bring you the first in a series of pamphlets, brochures, and other printable distributist materials, which will be used for the event mentioned. We begin with John Médaille's "An Introduction to Distributism." We welcome our readers to print, copy, distribute, or simply place the following on their websites.

Servire Deo regnare est!
Richard Aleman

An Introduction to Distributism

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Something Old, Something New

G.K. Chesterton once said trade, which by its very nature is a secondary thing, has become a primary thing.

Case in point, the portrait of an unnatural matrimony between government and the powerful elites of business and finance. What happens when big government and big business collaborate? For one, justice becomes –to put it bluntly– empty. Judges order billionaires to “go to their room” after robbing fifty billion dollars, while the average criminal sits in jail for stealing $50 from a 7-Eleven.

In the public sector, the American people have been treated to the latest round of corrupt officials and Senate nominations. Recently, a former governor was impeached after the discovery of a connection between a Senate seat appointment and his own lucrative ambitions. The unoccupied position belonged to former Senator and now President of the United States, Barack Obama. Another illustration in corruption, almost negligible in contrast, is the tale of a governor and a wealthy American “aristocrat” with a famous last name seeking a vacant Senate seat in New York.

I don’t know what is worse, a politician acting in typical fashion, or an inexperienced rich woman nearly buying a Senate seat. Both almost succeeded in their own way. But if they did, it would be simplistic to say greed was their only excuse. I would argue their ambitions were nearly clinched due to their hubris. They believed they could get away with this, nonchalant. But are they as dumb as we think or is the joke on us? After all, any man convinced he can sell a Senate seat from the “privacy” of his home or office telephone must be confident enough in a sleepy press, a powerless law enforcement, and an idle public.

This is Just Nuts
In the private sector, Peanut Corporation of America files for bankruptcy amidst a salmonella contamination, which led to at least nine deaths and 636 cases of poisoning. “Turn them loose,” was the response from CEO Stewart Parnell after learning about the contamination at his plant. Sitting in front of Congress, Mr. Parnell pleaded the fifth in the tradition of Enron. Even after his lack of concern for the safety and well being of the public, he stands defiant, unapologetic, and unwilling to take responsibility.



Thank You, FDA
Those militant regulators for “the family,” the Food and Drug Administration, recently gave the green light to cloned meat. The FDA has a history of rubberstamping products that should never pass inspection. Remember Vioxx, the nonsteriodal anti-inflammatory drug? During a Senate Hearing following the Vioxx/Merck controversy, the FDA was charged with rushing drug approval, ignoring red flags, delaying the addition of cardiovascular labeling, and ignoring feedback that questioned regulatory decisions.

Revolving Doors
The Food and Drug Administration also has a history of “revolving doors,” in other words, some of their regulators previously held positions in the companies they are supposed to keep tabs on. The conflict of interest is obvious, but not to the FDA.

No greater example has been made in recent history of the danger of revolving doors, than the relationship between Dick Cheney and his former employer, Halliburton the Energy Services Group. By the time Dick Cheney left Halliburton, he was CEO. Once Cheney was elected Vice-President and the nation went to war, Halliburton acquired contracts to provide services for our military bases stationed in Iraq. Mr. Cheney also received stock options and deferred compensation while still Vice-President of the United States.

The same revolving doors exist for Democrats. Bill Clinton has received many donations for his not-for-profit, The William J. Clinton Foundation, and Hilary Clinton has intervened on behalf of his contributors and business interests numerous times.

One doesn’t need to be Father Brown to see the problems involved with “revolving doors.” Perhaps we should send the FDA some copies.

If Only Cows Had Guns
Although they have relatively short and poor test studies, biotech companies like Monsanto, responsible for Agent Orange, rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone), and for operating 90% of all GMOs (Genetically Modified Organism), are generally given carte blanche by the FDA.

One example of this is Posilac or “rBST,” which is a synthetic hormone that when injected into a cow’s blood stream, excites the natural hormone IGF-1 used for milk production, found in both humans and cows. It restricts mammary cell death in cows, by manipulating their natural chemistry so nearly 10% increase in overall output may be achieved. The stimulation of IGF-1 has been controversial, as IGF-1, an ingredient in breast milk, has been rumored to have adverse effects on non-infants, specifically in accelerating breast, prostate, lung, and colon cancers. rBST has been banned in Japan, the European Union, New Zealand, and Australia.

Is there a link between cancer and rBst? Or perhaps I should ask, would you bet your children’s lives on the results of a 90-day trial conducted by the FDA…on rats?

The following clip comes via the documentary, “The Corporation” and involves two former Fox News whistleblowers, prevented from airing their controversial expose of the Monsanto Corporation.



Monsanto lobbyists, including large Dairy conglomerates, have successfully swayed lawmakers that the labeling of organic milk as “rBST-free” has damaged their right to maximize on profits. From 1995-2001, Dan Glickman was the United States Secretary of Agriculture under Bill Clinton. In the following video clip from the documentary, “The World According to Monsanto,” French filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin interviews the former Secretary about the collusion between government and Agribusiness.



The concentration of power and the alliance of government and business is just one consequence of trade usurping its natural order in the world. The Socialist finds these results one more reason to throw out the baby with the bath water, and control the private sector. Of course, history proves those Socialists are indeed the very Capitalists using government to eliminate their competition. The Distributist response must be to create a parallel economy and restore our farmlands. Already many like-minded organizations have begun the hard, long road toward recuperating our land and we must join them.

Friends, remember that with every night, there is always one dawn.

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The Shape of the City

One thing that a consumerist society requires is a lot of space devoted to consumption. Just how much space? Joe the Planner has written an excellent article on just this topic. The growth of the consumer economy can be seen in the amount of space devoted to consumption.

To get some idea of just how disproportionate this is, we can compare it with other developed nations:








The disparity in these numbers is stunning, and go a long way to explaining at least a portion of the real estate boom. But this is not sustainable. Soon, most of this space will be unoccupied, a wasting asset with no immediate use.

This situation was not really created by "market forces," but by government policies and subsidies. The shape of our cities, or perhaps their shapelessness, was dictated by the way government favored the car over public transportation, the suburb over the city, the homeowner over the renter.

Distributism has been accused of being an "agrarian" movement, a nostalgic "back to the land" ideology. This is only partially true. It is "agrarian," but this is not so much about getting back to the land as it is about establishing the proper relationship between town and country. You might say that the Distributist is concerned with how far your tomato travels before it reaches your salad. Ideally, it would travel from your own backyard garden. But failing that, it would come from a nearby field.

But the fields are no longer nearby, as urban sprawl has chased the farm farther from the city. Moreover, the vast transportation subsidies have made him compete with the farmer in distant corners of the nation and the world; the humble tomato is now a national and international tomato.

The result is that everybody has forgotten what a tomato tastes like; they are picked green and turn red on the truck or in the warehouse as it winds its long way to your table. But turning red is not the same as ripening; the former can happen in the truck, the latter only happens on the vine. The closer that vine is to your table, the better the tomato tastes. And the greater effect it has on the local economy.

The rather artificial economic system that makes this rather artificial national and international tomato possible is coming to an end. We can no longer afford the network of subsidies that make the 2,000 mile tomato profitable. And with the collapse of the tomato will come the collapse of the suburb, at least on its current scale.

Our current "recovery" plans--whether Democrat or Republican--focus on getting things back to the way they were. They are "reactionary" in the truest sense of that word. But they are not viable. Returning to the conditions that gave us the current condition ensure that the current condition will not end. Or rather, will end in collapse. And the more money we spend on going backward, the fewer resources we will have for going forwards.

We don't need to re-create the past, but to restructure the future. That future, I am convinced, is neither in globalization nor suburbanization. It is in rebuilding the regional and local economies. The good news about this is that it does not require more gov't, but less. Not more spending at the top, but more revenues at the local level. It does not require "rescuing" failed institutions, but rebuilding older and more stable ones.

By the way, Joe, since you work as a planner in Buffalo, check out Médaille College. I am sure that I am one of the few bloggers whose family name graces a college.

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Jefferson vs. Hamilton

While I do not share Jefferson's enthusiasm for European revolution, among other conflicts I have with Jefferson's political thought, we may certainly contrast him with his opponent's support for central banking and national debt accumulation. Jefferson was a distributist at heart who believed property ownership to be the antidote to debt. The following is a clip from HBO's miniseries, John Adams.]

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Interview with Dale Ahlquist Today!

Dear friends,

While perhaps an informal post, I wish to first apologise for my recent absence, but as can be expected, I am preparing for the upcoming "Catholicism and Economics" conference. Shortly, the fruit of my work, which includes an "FAQ/Recommended Reading List," the nonprofit brochure, as well as a couple of pieces of distributist literature, will be available to readers of The Distributist Review and The ChesterBelloc Mandate.

This evening, Jeremiah Bannister of Paleocrat Radio, will be interviewing Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society. We hope our readers will tune in and listen to this exciting broadcast. Dale will no doubt talk about the life and works of our beloved Chesterton, as well as touch upon his distributist thinking.

The program begins at 6pm EST, and you can listen to it here (Internet Explorer users only). Jeremiah also wishes to convey that the phone lines will be open for questions starting at 6:20pm EST, so please call 269-749-7398, and ask Dale a question about distributism!Remember to email your friends and let them know to tune in and call the show.

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Capitalism Hits the Fan

One striking feature of a profound crises is that it is often the catalyst for the convergence of what would otherwise be contending lines of thought. In more tranquil times, the Georgist, the distributist, the mutualist, the “libertarian socialist” and so forth all have leisure to pick holes in each other's coats. But when things seem to be falling apart, the opponents of the system may find that they have more in common with each other than would otherwise be apparent.

Those trapped in the system remain clueless. The stock market, that bastion of cluelessness, rises three percent on a day that job losses of 600,000 are announced (really, more than 700,000, when “seasonal adjustments”—political manipulations of the numbers—are taken out.) The grounds for the market's optimism are unclear, but seem to be related, so the pundits assure us, to hopes for a general Bailout of Everything and Everybody by the state. Politicians debate endlessly the “stimulus” of the economy without ever asking whether there still exists an economy to stimulate. Indeed, the oft-heard statement that “70% of the economy is in consumption” doesn't strike our chattering classes as the absurdity it patently is. The only things that such a statement can mean is that we consume far more than we produce, and will soon end up producing and consuming very little. Why anybody would want to “stimulate” such an economy is beyond me. The major reason they think this way, I suppose, is that for the last 30 years they have been able to stimulate it, but only at the cost of unrepayable debts and an ever-weakening productive sector. Further, each round of “stimulus” has been both more expensive and less effective than the last; even small achievements cost more dollars. Eventually, we must come to a point—and we seem to have already come to that point—were we will spend everything to achieve nothing.

Clearly, the economy doesn't need stimulus, it needs to be restructured. The distributists and their allies already know how to do this: a great number of small owners of capital are better a few owners of large capitals; small scale better than the gargantuan; cooperatives better than anonymously-owned corporations (see Buy it Out! Break it Up! Fund it Right!)

However, there is one group that has been slow to join any real movement for reform. This is the group which many call “socialist,” but in fact are really “liberals” or “progressives,” or whatever name is now fashionable. This kind of liberalism has become, if anything, more wedded to the current system than even the hardened capitalist. After all, the capitalist wants socialist access to the public purse whenever he finds himself in need, which he usually does. The Liberal wants a “reform” of the system, which usually means no more than more regulation and higher taxes. This has to do with the history of English and American socialism, which become “Fabian” at the beginning of the 20^th century. The Fabians sought merely gradual changes without fundamental reform. As Belloc predicted, this would lead to a merging of the capitalist and socialist ideals into The Servile State: the corporate and state bureaucracies would become responsible to the welfare of the people, who would increasingly lose any real economic freedom.

The capitalist has always been comfortable with this arrangement. The regulations had the effect of keeping down competition, since they were a mere annoyance to a large corporation, but a crippling barrier to a small start-up. Hence, they get security of profit along with power and influence; their position becomes more entrenched, not less so. And if they get into trouble, as they frequently do, they can themselves become the objects of public charity and welfare, but at a much higher level than the average welfare mom.

Another group that has been AWOL in this struggle is the Marxists. The Marxists do want fundamental change. However, it is a change in the direction of even fewer owners, not greater. Indeed, there will be only one owner, the state; it is really just capitalism on steroids. Marx, for all his blather about the proletariat, never really trusted the working man to run his own affairs; he would always need a dictatorship to direct even the minutest of his actions. Further, Marx was a great admirer of capitalism; he loved its gargantuan scale and its terrifying power, and especially its power to replace religion as the focal point of men's lives. So we wouldn't expect much help from that quarter.

However, some Marxists take the theory in a different direction. These are the “Marxians,” which seems to refer to a Marxism stripped of its revolutionary and political ideology and its statist assumptions. The odd thing about this “Marxianism” is that it more resembles pre-Marxist socialism than Marxism, a “socialism” that was also anti-statist. The pre-Marxist socialists blamed the state for the vast accumulations of property that made the corporation the dominant economic and political institution; only the police power of the state could guarantee such an unnatural accumulation. Pre-Marxist socialists like Proudhon wanted to see an end to the state as a means to ensure a more equitable division of ownership, an ownership based on actual use of the land rather than legal convention. Indeed, Marx's “withering away of the state” is really just a sop to the non-Marxist socialists of his day.

An excellent example of the “Marxian analysis” comes from Richard Wolff, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts. Professor Wolff has an excellent lecture, Capitalism Hits the Fan, which offers an analysis of “the root causes of today's economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown. By placing the crisis within this larger historical and systemic frame, Wolff argues convincingly that the proposed government “bailouts,” stimulus packages, and calls for increased market regulation will not be enough to address the real causes of the crisis - in the end suggesting that far more fundamental change will be necessary to avoid future catastrophes.”

What are these "fundamental changes" that Wolff calls for? It is nothing less than the belief that the worker rather than the capitalist ought to own the means of production, and own it directly, unmediated by the state. But at this point, the difference between the “Marxian” and the Distributist becomes a matter of the means rather than the ends.

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Market Meltdown 101: Richard Wolff on Economic History from Amherst Wire on Vimeo.



Market Meltdown 101: Richard Wolff's Alternative Proposal from Amherst Wire on Vimeo.

We can note how Wolff's conculsions track with John Paul II's in Laborem Exercans:

But this socialization of property cannot be achieved by merely eliminating private property, which would simply take the means of production out of the hands of one group of people and put them in the hands of another group (68). We can say that property is properly socialized only “when on the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself part owner of the great workbench at which he is working with everyone else” (69).

We can also consider Pope Bendict's rather surprising praise for the Post-modernist and Marxist Frankfort School in Spe Salvi (See Post-Modernist Pope).

The days ahead will be difficult, no matter what happens. Almost anything is possible, and most of the possibilities are unpleasant. Those who wish to see a rational and peaceful restructuring of the economy must be constantly on the lookout for allies. The powers that be will not give up power easily, and in their unease there is no telling what they may do.

Incidentally, some of the more vociferous critics of the film are old-line socialists, who see in Wolff's work a mere call for syndacalism, which is also an ally of Distributism.

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Mondragon: A Distributist Beacon of Hope for a Troubled World

What follows was in part written at the invitation of the editor of the Chesterton Review, Fr Ian Boyd, for inclusion in his excellent journal's current issue symposium on the relevance of distributism to the global economic meltdown, but may also be of wider interest.

The current global economic meltdown will not have been in vain if the world is reminded by it that grass roots initiative can triumph over seemingly overwhelming adversity. Following the Spanish Civil War, the economy of Spain's Basque region was in ruins. Franco destroyed its industrial base on a scale reminiscent of the destruction of Ireland's agricultural economy - the 'sowing of Ireland's fields with salt' - at the hands of Cromwell, shot some seventeen of the local priests, butchered or confined in concentration camps many more of the best and brightest in the community and systematically set about the creation of unemployment, under employment, impoverishment and immiseration on a scale now unimaginable in the developed world other than among the thinning ranks of those who still remember the direst depths of the Great Depression.  

Against that sombre background, the young priest Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, himself only recently released from concentration camp confinement and narrowly spared imminent execution, was sent by his bishop to the small steel industry town of Mondragon, where through patient pastoral care, grassroots organisation, community development, consciousness-raising and technical education he brought to fruition the triumphant exemplification of 'evolved distributism' that the world now knows as the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation.

Mondragon bears witness to the indispensability of subsidiarity and the wisdom of Belloc when he wrote in his An Essay on the Reconstruction of Property that 'The evil has no gone so far that, though the preaching of a new doctrine is invaluable, the creation of a new and immediate machinery is impossible. The restoration of property must essentially be the product of a new mood, not a new scheme. It is too late to re-infuse it by design, and our efforts must everywhere be particular, local, and in its origins at least, small'.

 The need, as the French personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier likewise so eloquently remind us in his 1938 A Personalist Manifesto, ... is not, then, to unite incoherent forces for an attack upon the coherent and powerful front of bourgeois and capitalist society. It is rather to implant in the vital organs, at present diseased, of our decadent civilisation the seeds and ferment of a new civilisation'.

I set out in my 1999 book Jobs of our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society - currently sold out in both its European and Australian editions, but shortly to re-appear in a US edition - to set distributism in the historical context of its evolution from the teachings of Rerum Novarum through the British Distributism of Belloc and the brothers Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton and the Antigonish Movement of Fr Jimmy Tompkins and Msgr Moses Coady in Atlantic Canada to Arizmendiarrieta and Mondragon, and explain exactly how Mondragon works and to what its success is attributable.  

In the decade since that account of distributism appeared, the 'evolved distributism' philosophy of the Mondragon co-operatives has continued to deliver exceptional levels of job security, social well-being and responsibility and economic growth. As of 2008, Mondragon has moved up from the ninth to the seventh largest business group in Spain, comprising some 260 industrial, retail, agricultural, construction, service and support co-operatives and associated entities. 

Annual sales increased between 2006 and 2007 by 12.4 percent, to some $US20 billion, and overall employment by 24 percent, from 83,601 to 103,731. Exports accounted for 56.9 percent of industrial co-operatives sales, and were up by 8.6 percent. Mondragon's Eroski worker/consumer co-operative now operates some 2,441 retail outlets, ranging in size from petrol stations to small franchise stores to hyper-markets and shopping malls, in locations that now extent beyond Spain, to France and Andorra. Mondragon co-operatives now own or joint venture some 114 local and overseas subsidiaries. 

No less has Mondragon adhered closely to the 'evolved distributism' teachings that have been Arizmendiarrieta's legacy to it, and the source of its outstanding success.  Consistent with 'evolved distributism', Eroski is adopting new measures to enfranchise the 35,000 of its 50,000 workers who are not currently worker members. The co-operatives have entered into a solemn commitment to extend worker ownership measures to their local and overseas subsidiaries on a case by case basis, consistent with their differing cultural, legal, business and financial circumstances. 

Just as the Basques were empowered by Arizmendiarrieta's 'evolved distributism' to lift themselves by their bootstraps from their poverty and privation in the aftermath of the Civil War, so too may others now be encouraged by Mondragon's example to transcend along similar lines the grief and fear to which the greed and folly of rampant capitalism and insufficiently regulated market forces have so wantonly given rise. As Victor Hugo reminds us, 'Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come'.

Take from Mondragon the distributist lessons it has for us irrespective of our current disappointments or the differing circumstances in which we may find ourselves, and we may at last move forward along the path to which Belloc, Mounier, Arizmendiarrieta and so many more have directed us. 

   

      

  

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Distributism is Dying...

... or so I've been told.

It wasn't but four years ago that I stumbled upon Distributist Perspectives Vol. 1. It was a Christmas gift from my parents. Along with it came two other books. The first was "I'll Take My Stand" by the Twelve Southerners. The second was "Who Owns America?" edited by Agar and Tate. Unbeknownst to me, the writers and content of both "I'll Take My Stand" and "Who Owns America" were in some way or another linked to those persons and ideas contained in Distributist Perspectives Vol. 1. Chalk it up as a strike of providence. 

Upon reading these books, it didn't take me long to see the similarities. All three were traditionalist, skeptical of all things big, and agrarian to the core. Furthermore, the writers all appeared to see a connection between the political economy and culture. They talked of art, literature, and architecture. In brief, there was a consensus amongst the contributors that the debates surrounding the political economy were not merely academic. Rather, these debates hit to the very center of who we are as individuals, as a city, and as a nation.

Some may insist that the ideas advanced within these books fall within the losing column of history. I would beg to differ, though only with the luxury of hindsight. While one should readily admit that there was relatively little progress made during the lifetimes of these particular men, it would be foolish to confine the win and lose columns of history to the lifespan of a group of writers. 

At any rate, there are those who point to the burgeoning of Big Business, Wall Street, and the service economy as proof that the American people have no interest in the ideas typically associated with distributism. Some may even note the fact that a large portion of Americans claim to love Capitalism, while very few have ever heard the word distributism, and even less of its substance. These facts, at least for the anti-distributist, serve as evidence that distributism is on its deathbed waiting to be put out of its misery. Or, if they are generous enough to grant that there will always be a remnant of those willing to identify themselves as distributists, they will ridicule the school of thought as a fringe movement made up of discontents and those overly infatuated with all things nostalgic. 

But are these so-called evidences proof, as the antagonist would insist, that distributism is dying? As I said earlier, I would answer this in the negative. For these so-called evidences can be seen and interpreted in many other ways. 

Take for instance Big Business. It certainly appears to be thriving. On the other hand, even giants like Wal-Mart are having to rally the troops in hope of figuring out ways to bypass what has recently become a storm of opposition.  One need only watch the documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" to see just how strong, and coordinated, the opposition has become. 

But this, in and of itself, does not answer the question as to why so many people continue to frequent these behemoths. Truth be told, the answers are as simple as they are complex. We know that there many shoppers that have been pigeonholed into believing that they cannot afford to shop anywhere else. There are others who could shop elsewhere, and who decry the loss of small business, but who would prefer watching the local hardware dealer go out of business than to pay what could only be described as a reasonable price for goods  and services of better quality. Sadly, there are also those who simply don't care what happens to their neighbor, so long as they save a few pennies here and there. Of course, they shun from their conscience all guilt for having fed companies that rely for their existence on what amounts to nothing less than slave labor in foreign countries. For these particular shoppers, it is a matter of "out of sight, out of mind." To make matters worse is that the vast majority of these people don't realize that their low prices are also tied to government subsibies. These come from local, state, and federal dollars, and they come in frequency and figures that would be the envy of any local business owner. So while the answer to this question may seem easy to the antagonist, the truth of the matter is that the issue is much more complicated than it may first appear.

Wall Street is an entirely different story. The average Johnny Q and Sally Sue have little care for what goes on there. As The Nation pointed out so accurately in 2002, people don't typically go to work in order to purchase stocks. Where the common folk of yesteryear may have been somewhat indifferent to Wall Street, this can no longer be said. Instead, indifference has turned into outrage. Faulty prices, rabid speculation, credit swaps, and the stock market's subtle, but now apparent, interconnectivity with even those who know little about the numbers and letters flashing across the bottom of the television screen, has resulted in a collective man-hunt, with Wall Street as its target. Add to the flames the "revelation" concerning the government's obvious preference for the well-being of Wall Street insiders over against the common good, and you have a sure recipe for populist outcry. 

People are outraged. This much is certain. But what is more telling than their outrage is their not wishing to better familiarize themselves with the beast. Rather, many prefer to see it go the way of the dinosaur, or at least to be treated like a plague that needs isolation and strict supervision. Regardless of how the hucksters on Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue wish to spin this, the American people have quickly grown a healthy distaste (and distrust) for Capitalism's casino and the gamblers who frequent its halls.

As for capitalism, while the word is commonplace amongst the citizenry, very few know what it really entails. Most tend to boil it down to a free market where people can compete with others and earn money along the way. This is typically dovetailed with the notion that less government intervention is good. 

While all this sounds well and good, it fails to take into account the fact that, as Chesterton put it, one of capitalism's greatest inadequacies is that it creates too few capitalists.  To add insult to injury, the average citizens knows as little about little of the current status of wealth in the United States as they do about the meaning of capitalism. I'm willing to bet the farm that were the citizenry to be fully aware of the figures concerning the distribution of wealth and land in this so-called capitalist society, they would, unlike Chesterton, be astounded. 

Let's take the 2006 Federal Reserve, Department of Treasury survey as a practical example. We begin with $100. Then we add 100 people. Now,  a perfectly equal distribution of wealth (which is not the goal of distributism) would be $1 per person. As it stands right now, the 50 individuals at the bottom of the stack have $0.05. Collectively, they make up $2.50, leaving $97.50 to be divided between the remaining 50. The next 40 have $0.70 of wealth, or $28 collectively. The next nine have $4 of wealth, or $36 collectively. Now this leaves one person remaining. This single individual would, per $100 mentioned earlier, have in his or her sole possession $33.50. 

To say that this is horrifying would be to trivialize the meaning of horror.

One may rest assured that when these figures come to light, as they are with the passing of every day, people will begin to see the forest for the trees. They'll begin to connect the dots, finding a line between Big Business, Wall Street, and what parades around as capitalism. It is here, at this moment and at this time that distributists can smile and wink at the antagonist, knowing full well that the confidence of the naysayer was built on what was little more than a phantasm waiting for the right moment to disappear.

Distributism isn't dead. It isn't even dying. No, distributism is coming to light. It is, as John Medaille would say, "the wave of the future."

The road is destined to be hard, as money and power never fail to put up a good fight. But those rumbling underfoot, fueled by ideas penned by those of old, may be too much for even the giants of today to withstand. In the end, being perceived as finding a home in history's losing column may have turned out to be a boon rather than a bust. 

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If You Think its Bad Here...

...look out for China. There are 20 million migrant workers who have lost their jobs, and social unrest is growing. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/25/china-globaleconomy
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George W. Obama?

A thread worth following on the Vermont Commons site.

I usually give a new President at least a month in office before I start dissing him; that's just part of my fundamental fairness. But Obama's cabinet has been a real disappointment. The economic team are all persons who were involved one way or another with the crash. And the effort appoint a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical companies to head Health and Human Services was a real shocker. Everybody was down on Daschle for his taxes; I would have put up with the taxes if it wasn't for the source of his income.
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