Cleveland works

http://blip.tv/file/2749165

Dear Colleague,

“Something important is happening in Cleveland.” That was the theme of the community event that inaugurated the opening of the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry on October 21st – a worker-owned commercial-scale “green” business based in the Glenville neighborhood, one of the most severely disinvested areas in Cleveland.

More than 300 participants – including leaders of the city’s major anchor institutions, business, and government representatives, and community development practitioners and neighborhood residents – heard Mayor Frank Jackson call the laundry, “a model for how we can put our people back to work and rebuild our community.”

The Evergreen Laundry is the first in a network of worker cooperatives that is being launched in the city. Next up: Ohio Cooperative Solar and Green City Growers. For more background on the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative:

View the 5-minute Evergreen video and meet the worker owners of the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry.
Read the article that appeared on the front page of the business section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer
Learn more about the Evergreen Initiative through The Cleveland Foundation’s newest publication.
Listen to this six-minute radio broadcast by journalist Daniel Denvir.
For the past two years, The Democracy Collaborative has been privileged to work with our partners in Ohio – including The Cleveland Foundation, ShoreBank Enterprise Cleveland, Towards Employment, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center at Kent State University – to develop and implement a community wealth building strategy. All of us are committed to making the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative a pioneering and innovative model of job creation, wealth building, and sustainability.

We look forward to continuing to update you in the coming months and years. If you would like to explore how the Evergreen strategy might be adapted to your community’s needs, please feel free to be in communication with us.

As always, we have added dozens of new links, articles, reports, and other materials to the site. Look for this symbol *NEW* to find the most recent additions. And don't forget to view our regularly updated C-W Blog.

Ted Howard
Executive Director, The Democracy Collaborative

http://www.evergreencoop.com/

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Is America Ungovernable?

Otto von Bismark, the 19^th century Iron Chancellor and architect of modern Germany, once remarked that “If you like law and sausages, you shouldn't watch either being made.” One could observe that this is not quite correct; the process of stuffing offal into sausage skins is far less disgusting than that of stuffing bribes into legislators. Still, statute law will always be a matter of negotiations between those who have an interest in the bill at issue. Thus it has always been, and thus it will always be. In itself, this is not too bad; everybody should have a voice in drafting legislation, and compromise, while cumbersome, is likely to be better on the whole.

Democracy is supposed to solve the problem by giving everyone a voice in the process. And this would certainly be true, if we were speaking of a local assembly. But in a nation of 300 million plus, it can't be true; the very size limits the number of voices that can be heard. Hence, a “place at the table” becomes a scarce commodity, and like all scarce commodities it has a market price, a price that prices the public out of the process; as the nation grows, the size of the legislative “table” shrinks; there aren't enough places to go around, and the form of democracy is easily converted into the substance of oligarchy. But even at the local level, government must be guided by some notion of the common good, even when the parties are seeking their own interests. But as the cost of participation rises, this becomes less possible.

Think on this: A congressional race can easily cost $1,000,000 but the congressman is in office for only 730 days. That means he must raise $1,370 for each and every day he is in office, weekends, Christmas, Easter, and Flag Day included. And now consider that this office represents but 1/435^th of ½ of 1/3^rd of the Federal power. When you do math, enormous sums of money are involved, and there are limited sources for that kind of money. The money appears as a “donation,” but it is in fact a purchase, an investment, and the investors expect a decent return on their money. Or rather, an indecent return.

What kind of returns? Well, when the prize is the public purse, the rewards are unlimited, far higher than one could possibly achieve from making things or providing a service. Thus we read with no surprise Gretchen Morgenson's column in the New York Times that the bill to extend unemployment benefits for another 20 weeks also includes a $33 billion dollar gift to businesses, especially the home builders, whose overbuilding is part and parcel of the current crises. These businesses will be allowed to offset their 2008/9 losses against profits going back to 2004, and hence receive huge refund checks from the Treasury. According to Ms. Morgenson, Pulte homes will reap $450 million, Hovanian $250 million, Standard Pacific $80 million, while a Beazar Homes will get a measly $50 million.

How much did it cost them to get these rewards? Gretchen counts their costs:

Securing this tax break was a top priority for home builders, lobbying records show. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that through Oct. 26 of this year, home builders paid $6 million to their lobbyists. Last year, the industry spent $8.2 million lobbying. Much of this year’s lobbying expenditures were focused on arguing for the tax loss carry-forward, documents show. Among individual companies, Lennar spent $240,000 lobbying while companies affiliated with Hovnanian Enterprises spent $222,000. Pulte Homes spent $210,000 this year. That’s some return on investment. After spending its $210,000, Pulte will receive $450 million in refunds. And Hovnanian, after spending its $222,000, will get as much as $275 million.

Again, none of this surprises us, no matter how much it may sicken us. But the raid on the public purse is not half as problematic as the disappearance of the common good in government. The whole purpose of government is to look towards the common good, however imperfectly; when governments lose this function, they gradually cease to function.

I had some hopes for Obama. Not so much for his politics—certainly not that—but for his fund-raising. He was able to raise enough on-line to make a credible candidacy. He was thus in a position to establish an independent force in American politics. But in the end, he accepted more corporate money than any of his rivals. In that success was his failure.

Obama will fail. Indeed, he has already failed. I believe he failed before he started, as soon as he became dependent on big money. The biggest sign of that failure was his appointment of Timothy Geithner to the Treasury. Geithner was President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and the person more than any other responsible for the AIG bailout, which was shameful. His is Big Money's man in Washington, one of many such men.

The Health Care Bill is a perfect example of the process. Starting with decent motives, whether one agrees with them or not, it becomes merely a series of subsidies to established monopolies. Big Pharma is on board, of course. In exchange for removing any threat of public control of prices, they voluntarily agreed to lower their prices by $80 billion over ten years. But first they raised the prices by 9%. Obama was totally out-maneuvered by them. They will end up with a huge public subsidy. The AMA, the AARP, and most other big players are on board, all for the same reasons. The only holdout is the insurance industry. They will get on board once the public option disappears; they like the prospect of 30 million new customers supported by the government.

But the bill will not fix any of the problems because it does not address them. It is the current system, only more so, and with more public money going to an elite group. It will hasten the collapse of the health system. The same failures are evident in the bailouts and in the stimulus package. Even the administration's best impulses make them look ridiculous, as with the effort to make the spending transparent by posting it on a website, along with bogus estimates of the number of jobs created.

There is no chance, I suspect, that things will get better in time for the 2010 elections, and by 2012 the Republican Party will give us another Bush, or Palin, or Cheney to rule. But none of them will rule anymore than Obama does. They will campaign to run the country, only to find upon victory that the country runs them, or rather that small slice of the country that controls the political funding. While this is profitable in the short run, it is disaster in the long, and the long is about to overtake the short; without some notion of the common good, the government collapses.

Von Bismark understood how laws were made, but being a good aristocrat, he retained some notions of the common good. After the revolutions of 1848, he understood that new terms would have to be negotiated between the classes, if Germany were to survive. Even though he was a monarchist and no supporter of democracy, nevertheless he accomplished great social reforms in the 1880's, reforms that included health insurance, Accident insurance, and old-age pensions. In doing so, he laid the foundations of the modern European states. He gave the powers their due, simply because they were powerful. But for all his “blood and iron” talk, he did have a notion of the common good. He could actually govern.

We cannot. We have no real place at the table, a table that is itself shrinking, even as our debts grow. If you want to see the future of America, look at Europe of the 1920's and 30's.

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More on Mondragon & the USW

http://www.companywekeep.net/an-historic-alliance/

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The Fall of the Wall

In my misspent youth, I was a politician. And in my role as a politician, I did all the things that politicians do. Well, not all the things; I say that in case there are law-enforcement agents who read this blog. Now, one ought to repent of one's sins, and in general I try to do so with a sincere heart. For example, I generally repent of all the boondoggles I took at the expense of the taxpayers. Of course, I doubt that I will ever reimburse the city treasury, so one may question the sincerity of my repentance. But there is one boondoggle at least that I do not repent. It was a trip that allowed me to witness a unique moment in history in a unique way. And for that, I will always be grateful to all the anonymous visitors to Our Fair City who paid their room taxes to the city's Convention and Visitors Bureau.

These were high taxes, and we have a lot of hotels, which makes the Bureau a rich organization. And since the taxes were paid by visitors and not our own citizens, the council didn't really watch the activities of the Bureau all that closely. Besides, the Bureau was adept at keeping the council happy with the odd boondoggle, among other things. And in March of 1990, the Bureau wanted to keep me happy, being a senior member of the council and the Mayor Pro Tempore.

And so it was in March of 1990 I was dispatched by the Bureau to the International Tourist Trade Fair in Berlin, and the date is important. The world is now celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. But in fact, the Wall did not fall on that date. What did happen on that day was that a minor East German Politburo member, Günter Schabowski, let it slip in a press conference that the travel restrictions which trapped East Germans in the East would be lifted. He said “sofort” (immediately) but in fact the decision had not yet been formally made. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of East Berliners moved towards the crossings, and the outnumbered and demoralized guards, who in the past would simply have opened fire, first stalled for time and finally gave way. The Wall was not down, but it was irrelevant.

The dismantling of the Wall would not begin until June of 1990, and reunification would not take place until October of that year. And so the Berlin I visited was still a divided city, and still divided by the Wall. But the celebrations that had begun on the ninth of November continued, although somewhat more commercialized. Still, there were constant parties at the wall, immense crowds, unending music, couples making love, vendors making money, and tourists making pictures. It was the entire world's Kodak moment.

And the joy was justified. The history of the world since 1918, and particularly since the end of World War II, had been dominated by the struggle with communism, and most of that time it looked like we were losing. Yalta had allowed Stalin to swallow up Eastern Europe, which quickly became a prison for its own people. China fell, and a bloody stalemate was reached in Korea. The United States suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, where I served nearly two years (the loss of that war, I want to make clear, was not my fault.) Castro brought communism to the Western hemisphere, and it appeared to be on the march in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The Triumph of the West was by no means assured. But suddenly, communism fell. Just like that. It was like a dream. The joke was that it took 10 years Poland, 10 months in Germany, 10 weeks in Czechoslovakia, 10 days in Bulgaria, and 10 hours in Romania. The Great Political Question of my youth was settled, or so it seemed.

One thing a politician does NOT do is to pass up a photo op, and so it was that we went out early one morning to take some pictures, “Mayor Pro Tem Tears Down the Berlin Wall.” One of the pictures in its full absurdity is reproduced here. But while making the pictures, something marvelous happened. We went out very early in the morning to avoid the crowds that would so be there. We were at a spot on the wall near the Brandenburg Gate, where there was a small gap between the Wall and the Gate. Then we heard, “psst, psst.” There in the gap, the East German border guards were motioning us to enter the German Democratic Republic in a rather unauthorized fashion. These were the men who had shoot to kill orders for anybody attempting to exit the Workers' Paradise, and had in fact shot hundreds of them over the years. And so of course, we went into East Berlin. Now the guards had not murder but commerce on their minds. They were selling their bits of the Wall, the Eastern side. The contrast was startling. While the Western was covered with a riot of graffiti, the Eastern side was whitewashed and without a single mark on it. I could not resist having tangible evidence of the contrast between East and West. I bought a bit of the Wall, I bought one of the guard's medals, I bought his uniform blouse. He would sell anything, Deutschmarks only; nobody, not even the GDR wanted the East German Reichsmark.

And that was when the Marvelous Thing happened. The guard picked up that weapon common to bureaucrats the world over, be they communist, or capitalist, or corporate, or Fascist, or whatever. He picked up the date stamp and click-thump stamped the clean bit of wall. I am sure he would have stamped the medal as well, had there been a practical way to do so. I was amazed. And amused. “He will do well in the new order of things, since they are likely to be a lot like the old order.” More on this point in a moment.

I will be returning to Eastern Europe in a few days, this time to Romania. Much has passed in the East in the last 20 years. In 1991, John Paul II issued his encyclical Centesimus Annus which dealt with the question of what the East should do with its new-found freedom. He warned the people against thinking that “the defeat of so-called 'Real Socialism' leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization.” but the Pope's warning would not be headed. Indeed, the Solidarity movement of John Paul's native Poland of which he was so proud for the leadership it had shown in its ten-year struggle with communism, whitered shortly after that freedom was won. Instead “Experts” from the West flooded the East with plans for economies they knew nothing about based on models which had never actually worked in the West. The best minds of Harvard were easily outsmarted by a small number of players who gamed the new system to loot the wealth of their countries and become the new ruling oligarchs.

It is small wonder, therefore, that the Pew Foundation, in its recent poll of Russia and Eastern Europe has found that,

The initial widespread enthusiasm about these changes has dimmed in most of the countries surveyed; in some, support for democracy and capitalism has diminished markedly. In many nations, majorities or pluralities say that most people were better off under communism, and there is a widespread view that the business class and political leadership have benefited from the changes more than ordinary people.

Currently, most of the nations of the former Soviet block must go hat in hand to the moguls of the IMF or the European Union to ask for loans that cannot be repaid but which will bind these nations further to the Western oligarchs and make them as dependent on today as they were on new Sultanate in Brussels as they ever were on Moscow.

I will not be going to Romania as an “expert” on anything, and I certainly don't have plans for remaking its economy. Rather, my message is not to listen to experts at all, and not to listen to foreigners, not even me, or especially not me. Rather, they should look at what works and devise their own plans. The should look at Mondragón, or Emilia-Romagna, or the thousands of successful cooperatives large and small that make goods from the simple to the most complex, and allow a nation to chart its own course, a course neither capitalist nor communist. I will simply state the obvious, that it does no good to replace the old “SovRoms” (Soviet-Romanian joint enterprises used to drain the wealth of Romania into Russia) with EuroRoms or AmerRoms; what they need are RomRoms.

The Wall has long since fallen, but in many ways it remains. Globalism has not worked, nor for us and not for the East. This new collapse, which is hitting the East particularly hard is also a new opportunity to think in ways apart from the now outdated paradigms of the bloody 20^th century. If this century is to avoid the mistakes of the last, it must avoid the political and economic systems of the last. The celebrations over the Fall of the Wall should be a time for seriously thinking how to build a new order.

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Who Invented the Internet?

Capitalists, we'll often hear. Just about any discussion of distributism on the Internet will, at least once, involve the phrase, "I can't believe you're attacking capitalism on the Internet, one of the greatest of capitalism's inventions!" Take, as a typical case, the example of John Clark, from the distributism debates of 2002:

Seeing an attack on capitalism appear on the Internet is like hearing a sermon on the evils of flying from the cockpit at 40,000 feet. Using capitalist tools to spread anti-capitalist thought is a strange irony.

This argument lacks merit in any case; it's like saying that fighting a war against the Chinese using gunpowder is a strange irony. But leaving that aside, is it true? Is the Internet one of the vaunted "capitalist tools," an invention of private enterprise operating unstinted by the interference of evil government?

Before we begin to examine this historically myopic claim, let's define what the Internet actually is. It is not the World Wide Web, which is only a part, albeit a large one, of the Internet. The Internet is, in fact, simply a global network of computers connected via a computer communications protocol called TCP/IP. It operates by a very simple server-client system; the client (like the computer you're reading this on right now) asks the server (where the document resides) for a given file (like this one), and the server responds by sending that file to the client. There are some complications to this description, some of them significant---we haven't even mentioned server-side and client-side scripting, for example---but for our purposes, this description is accurate enough.

Where are the servers for "the Internet"? Everywhere and nowhere. Servers all over the world are responsible for answering clients' requests for various files; requests are sent to the appropriate servers---that is, the ones that actually have the requested files---via a complex system of routing that we don't really need to worry about here.

The Internet has no government. There is no entity that controls the Internet or makes sure that it's working properly. However, there are some organizations that make sure things don't go completely crazy. Various standards organizations ensure that the protocols and languages used on the Internet are standard; that is, conform to a given specification in order to ensure that everyone will know what to expect when they use them. Most importantly, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is in charge of making sure that names and numbers are kept unique and orderly; its board is made up of members from across the spectrum of private enterprise, voluntary organizations, and academia. The United States federal government is still more or less in charge of ICANN.

Notice that I said "still." I said this because the United States federal government has always been "in charge" of the Internet, insofar as anybody has been (and strictly speaking, nobody is). In other words, insofar as anybody keeps the Internet running, it's the government, not private enterprise. Hardly a capitalist tool. But moving beyond that: who invented the Internet? Is it a creation of capitalist ingenuity, as so many assert?

In its earliest incarnation, the Internet was invented by the United States government's Advanced Research Project Agency, ARPA. In an attempt to ensure that we stayed ahead of the Russians in every field of technical endeavor, the government funded ARPA, which in turn funded a variety of programs, including the one that led to what we now call the Internet. The first connection in this network, originally called the ARPANET, was made on 29 October 1969, between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. (You may also hear the ARPANET referred to as the DARPANET, formed from adding the "Defense" to the beginning, which gives you an idea of what it was originally designed for.)

Still no profit motive involved here; this is merely the government funding programs which it deemed useful for itself. ARPANET continued to grow, going international for the first time in 1978. It utilized "IP," or "Internet Protocol," for its communications. This still isn't technically "the Internet," however, because by definition the Internet uses TCP/IP, as we mentioned earlier. However, it's definitely the precursor to the Internet, and as yet private enterprise has had no significant role in its development.

The TCP/IP protocols were developed in the mid-1970s at Stanford University; their specification, RFC-675, was the first time the word "Internet" was used in reference to a global TCP/IP network. In 1983, the entire ARPANET was placed on this protocol. In 1985, the National Science Foundation started its own network, NSFNET, which elected to use the TCP/IP protocols of ARPANET. Already at this time the bedrock of the Internet was in place. People had email and could work on and contact other computers around the world. Once the NSFNET was connected to the ARPANET, the Internet could, for the first time, really be said to exist. And still private enterprise had had no significant role.

Indeed, commercial use of the Internet was strictly forbidden; it wasn't considered appropriate to allow private corporations to profit from a publicly funded international network. Private enterprise wasn't involved in the Internet until 1989, when the commercial MCI Mail was added to the NSFNET. Usenet arose about that time, along with the first of the Internet service providers (ISPs), including the recently defunct Compuserve. But the fact of the matter is that the Internet was conceived and developed entirely by non-profit entities, not by capitalists engaged in private enterprise attempting to make a profit.

Well, what about the World Wide Web, then? Surely that must be credited to capitalism?

No. The World Wide Web is that subset of the Internet which is governed by a weblike system of interlinked pages, largely written in HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. The "hypertext" part refers to what we now mostly call "links," which keep documents linked in to one another. HTML and the World Wide Web were developed primarily by one person, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (the French name of which becomes CERN). CERN is itself a governmental laboratory with many member states contributing to it; this development, too, cannot be credited to capitalism.

Nor was the popularization of the World Wide Web a capitalist phenomenon. The Internet, already widely used by academia, governments, and to a lesser extent hobbyists, was accessed through a number of different means prior to the development of the World Wide Web. Computer old-timers (and even not-so-old-timers like myself) will remember the old gopher system (also developed by a public organization, the University of Minnesota), along with many others. The Web, however, with its hypertext system, made all of this much easier and more manageable. But it needed a browser, capable of displaying and following hypertext links, in order to function properly. The Internet therefore really took off among hobbyists and other private systems with the development of the Mosaic web browser---another creation of a government entity, this time the University of Illinois. Its development was funded by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, sponsored by Al Gore. (Incidentally, sponsoring this act was the source of his infamous comment about taking "the initiative in creating the Internet," which is hyperbole at the very best.) None of this is even remotely capitalism at work; as late as 1993, when Mosaic was released, private enterprise had still had little role in the development of the Internet at all, much less a significant enough role to justify calling it a "tool of capitalism."

Only at this point did private industry begin to get involved, and even then governments and voluntary, non-profit agencies continue to play an enormous role. Indeed, such non-profit organizations govern the Internet. Standards organizations like W3C and ISO make sure that the protocols, languages, and other structures at use on the Internet are well-defined and universally accepted. The United States government plays a large role to this day in ensuring the orderly operation of the Internet as a whole. All in all, this can hardly be counted a great triumph of capitalism.

Indeed, capitalism didn't create the Internet, nor did capitailsm perfect it. Capitalism swept down on a fully formed and fully functional Internet, developed and supported by the efforts and money of the community as a whole, and turned it to their own personal profit. While utilizing the work of others to benefit oneself is perfectly acceptable at times, it's the height of vanity to them appropriate that work as one's own and call it one's own tool.

Now, of course, large portions of the Internet are commercial, large portions are government, and large portions are neither, which is really as it should be. But the Internet certainly wasn't created by these commercial interests; it wasn't popularized by these commercial interests; it wasn't perfected by these commercial interests; and it's not maintained by these commercial interests. All of these things were done by governments and government-funded organizations, supposedly the antithesis of all free enterprise.

Does it still seem incongruous to use the Internet to argue against capitalism?

Praise be to Christ the King!


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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