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Over the years, I have written extensively about the concept of economic “decentralization” and localization, but I think these ideas are difficult for some people to visualize without proper motivation. By that I mean, it’s not enough that the current centralized model is destructive and corrupt; it has to start breaking down or show its true totalitarian colors before anyone will do anything to protect themselves.

Sadly, the majority of people tend to take action only when they have hit rock bottom.

In recent months the pandemic lockdown situation has provided a sufficient wake up call to many conservatives and moderates. We have seen the financial effects of pandemic restrictions in blue states, with hundreds of thousands of small businesses closing, tax revenues imploding and millions of people relocating to red states just to escape the oppressive environment.

Luckily, conservative regions have been smart enough to prevent self destruction by staying mostly open. In fact, red states have been vastly outperforming blue states in terms of economic recovery exactly because they refuse to submit to medical tyranny.

I outlined this dynamic in detail recently in my article Blue State Economies Will Soon Crumble – But Will They Take Red States With Them?

The data is undeniable: the states and cities that enforce lockdown mandates are dying, the states that ignore mandates are surviving. However, with a Biden presidency there is a high probability that the federal government will now seek to force compliance from all states. In other words, lockdowns will become a national issue rather than a state issue.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Supersedure State

January 30, 2018

The Supersedure State

I said that I wanted to focus on the shape of possible agrarian, post-capitalist states of the future in my forthcoming writing, so I thought I’d anticipate that here by reproducing my article from the current issue of The Land magazine (Issue 22, 2018, pp.28-30). The editors of that august journal in their wisdom entitled it ‘The human hive’ (and accompanied it with some beautiful woodcut illustrations of an apian nature), but here it goes under my preferred title of ‘The supersedure state’. My next few posts are going to attend to various other items of business – though some of them do bear on this theme – but I thought I’d lay this out now as a kind of organising concept for the things I want to write about agrarian states, which I’ll try to fill out in more detail on this site shortly. So I’ll be coming back to this – but in the meantime, of course I’d welcome any comments. I’m not sure if this is exactly the same version as the one that appeared in The Land, but I think it’s close enough.

oOo

The tumult of recent political events in many western countries has brought a new word to the lips of political commentators – populism. Generally, populism and its personification in figures such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage has been presented in mainstream circles as a dangerous political turn, a threat to the established order of things, and not without good reason. But for those who’d like to replace the present global neoliberal economy with a more local, more equitable and more land-based or agrarian society there are overlaps with populism that raise a few questions – in particular, these three:

‘Populism’ means a politics of or for ‘the people’, which doesn’t sound like such a bad idea – so what’s the problem with it?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Buying Local Is the Key to Strong Regional Economies

June 26, 2016

Buying Local Is the Key to Strong Regional Economies

In the leaky bucket analogy for local economies, money flows into a region to circulate through local businesses like water into a bucket. Water that leaks out is money that escapes the local economy to pay for imports. The more watertight the bucket, the more wealth retained.

In the early 1980s, unemployment rose steeply in Lane County, Oregon, because of a downturn in the once-dominant timber industry. The Neighborhood Economic Development Organization (NEDCO) in Eugene, Oregon, was trying to respond by funding job-training programs, but no new jobs were open and it seemed like pouring money into a bottomless bucket. Government economic development efforts focused on tax breaks and other financial incentives in a failed attempt to lure corporations to the region.

Alana Probst, who directed NEDCO, began to develop a different approach, one that would work to plug the leaks. Here’s how Jane Jacobs described the approach in Systems of Survival:

Her idea was simple: Go to several businesses and ask what they were planning to buy from outside the city and county in the coming year. Then immediately see if there were local businesses capable of putting in bids for the work. In the meantime, while those searches were being made and bids prepared, visit more purchasers, start seeking potential suppliers for their items, and so on. In short, the program was to be made up as it went along. No expensive studies that would be obsolete before they were finished. She put together a grant of thirty-eight thousand dollars from the city and county governments and a local bank so she and a staff of two could try the scheme.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How to Grow a Local Job-Rich Economy

March 3, 2016

How to Grow a Local Job-Rich Economy

At a time when huge debates are raging over all the subsidies required by the 1 per cent of the business elite, Michael Shuman is working to shift public attention to the other, ultimately more positive, side of the picture – the sheer neglect of the 50 per cent of businesses that are local and independent, and don’t get much help from governments.

Shuman has long been an expert in the field of small, local and independent business, and has several excellent books to his credit. His latest, The Local Economy Solution, puts the issue of the 50 per cent versus the 1 per cent front and centre.

Half the population in North America works in public service or for large corporations, but half work in small and regional businesses. That half gets talked about a lot, but helped very little.

Shuman poses a choice that needs to be top-of-mind for people interested in the future of food, cities and regions. Victory for one side or the other will determine how food will shape the careers, lives, health and environment of the 50 per cent of the world population living in cities, as well as the 50 per cent of the world population living in countryside regions, where food security for entire nations comes from. From a city and food perspective, this book is about the 100%, not the 1% or the 50%.

A huge amount of taxpayers’ money hangs in the balance. According to Shuman, over 80 billion dollars a year now go to corporate boondoggles in the US that provide little in the way of jobs, community, public health or environmental benefits. In Canada, the level of annual corporate giveaways is even higher on a per capita basis. In 2014, the Fraser Institute documented a total expenditure of $684 billion over the years from 1981 to 2009.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Local Economy Solution

November 24, 2015

The Local Economy Solution

Chelsea Green Publishing

Serving as mayor provides one with an array of opportunities to demean oneself on a regular basis—funny hats and dunk tanks tend to be involved. However, for me, and for most of the mayors I know, the lowest moments occur in the grandest corporate offices during economic development ‘recruitment’ trips. After schlepping the best and brightest ambassadors from our city to visit the target company, a mayor is given 30 minutes to make their pitch that the company will be happier, more productive, and profitable in their community. A PowerPoint presentation is given focusing on the quality of the schools, the vibrant culture, the ready and able workforce and, of course, how the city is “business friendly.” The mayor wraps up with an impassioned entreaty that a good community could be made great if that company would move their offices to town.

The company’s senior vice president of real estate then offers his thanks and notes that your hometown is indeed a wonderful place, but is deficient in the following ways: access to transportation, high cost of housing, proximity to suppliers, or some combination thereof. He then notes that another city, which happens to possess all of these necessary attributes, was just in last week. They have offered a very attractive package of tax breaks and public investments that this mayor would need to beat in order to stay competitive.

Now that the competition and egos between mayors (who are by definition hypercompetitive) are properly stoked, a bidding war ensues and good economic analysis and public policy quickly fall by the wayside. In the end, the company moves to the community it was probably going to move to anyway, but with a generous combination of tax breaks and subsidies that justify the senior Vice President’s salary.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Benefits of Localism

October 20, 2015

The Benefits of Localism

Could you talk about your background and how you became involved in the “buy local” movement?

Since 1982, after completing Stanford Law School, I’ve been trying to connect communities to the world. I spent my first ten years mobilizing cities to get involved in foreign policy through a nonprofit I started called the Center for Innovative Diplomacy. We published a Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy, which went to thousands of local elected officials across the United States, and showed how cities were promoting peace through nuclear-free zones, fighting apartheid in South Africa through divestment campaigns, and opposing the Contras’ war through Nicaraguan sister cities. With support of the Kellogg National Leadership Program, I began to see how these municipal tools could promote North-South development cooperation. I then studied the work of a group based in the Hague called Towns and Development, and wrote an evaluation of their work in a book called Towards a Global Village (Pluto, 1994). I was generally very enthusiastic about the European city-to-city movement, except that I felt that their theory and practice around sustainable economics fell far short of their (and my) aspirations. That led me to start thinking about community economics.

This was also around the time that I moved from San Francisco to Washington, and began working at the Institute for Policy Studies—first as a visiting fellow, then as a paid fellow, and then as director for six years. During this time, I wrote Going Local (Free Press, 1998), the first of four books on localization. Going Local laid out a theory of local economics. The next book, The Small-Mart Revolution (Berrett-Koehler, 2006) showed how local businesses were competing successfully against global corporations. I then concluded that the most difficult challenge local businesses faced was getting needed capital, so my next book, Local Dollars, Local Sense (Chelsea Green, 2006) focused on local investment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the Local Economy the Solution to a Post-Capitalist World?

October 5, 2015

Is the Local Economy the Solution to a Post-Capitalist World?

In his new book, Michael Shuman debunks many of the myths around economic development.

Think local. Buy local. Support your local community. Community investment.

This all makes sense, right? Right. Then why do so many government-funded economic development programs get this wrong?

According to community economics advocate Michael Shuman, mainstream economic development today is a scam. States and local government agencies spend big money to lure corporations to their region but do little to stimulate the local economy or support local businesses. And those small businesses, not the chain stores, are often what give a neighborhood its unique identity and make it desirable to live in.

In his new book, The Local Economy Solution: How Innovative Self-Financing “Pollinator” Enterprises Can Grow Jobs and Prosperity (Chelsea Green, June 2015), Shuman debunks many of the myths around economic development—that tax breaks for wealthy corporations are beneficial for all, that only big businesses create jobs, that consumers only care about price, and that social enterprises can’t be self-financing.

Shuman, who has been a leader in the local economy movement for more than two decades, proposes low-cost pollinator businesses to stimulate the local economy through small business development. He defines a pollinator as a self-financing business with a mission of supporting other local businesses.

Pollinators lead to more dollars spent within that community, and often favor a triple bottom lineapproach that makes a connection between the three Ps: people, planet and profits.

Unlike impersonal chain stores, local pollinator businesses foster more connection between consumers and retailers, food growers and customers, and businesses and their employees, resulting in a healthier, more equitable community, which translates into safer neighborhoods that can weather economic fluctuations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The circular economy’s missing ingredient: Local

September 16, 2015

Chicago the plant circular economy — The Chicago flag, made from wood salvaged at The Plant.

One Saturday in early June, a group of people gathered behind an old meatpacking plant on Chicago’s South Side, armed with shovels and handmade compost sifters.

In teams of three, the group began sifting a huge pile of rubble excavated from the lot in order to install an anaerobic digester. One person scooped rubble on to the screener, while the other two shook the screen back and forth, forcing small particles through while keeping large rocks and branches out.

“Soil has three components: Sand, silt and clay,” explained soil expert Dominic Brose as the group rested between bouts of sifting. “This is mostly sand we’re getting here. Hardly any clay.”

Soil scientist Dominic Brose explaining soil structure at a Plant Chicago soil-building workshop.

The setting was The Plant, a former meatpacking facility turned urban food hub. The occasion wasOpen Source Circular Economy (OSCE) Days 2015, a worldwide hack-a-thon aimed at inspiring people to reconsider waste, production and the economy as we know it.Because Plant Chicago focuses on urban agriculture and material reuse, we decided to host an OSCE Days workshop with the challenge of building soil from all locally available materials.

We invited Brose, a soil scientist with the local wastewater treatment facility. He brought a 10-cubic yard load of composted wastewater solids (biosolids). We also had a truckload of woodchips dumped on site and set to work creating the sand portion of our soil recipe. With Dominic, a few Plant Chicago staff and six other workshop attendees, we sifted for two hours, yielding about a cubic yard of sand.

Estimating that the lot would need about 500 cubic yards of sand to meet our soil-building goals, we’d obviously need to innovate beyond hand-sifting. We spent the rest of the workshop brainstorming and drawing plans for building our own automated sifting machine from salvaged materials.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity

August 26, 2015

A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity

A documentary about simple living, permaculture, and local economy as a response to global crises.

The dominant mode of global development today seeks to universalise high-consumption consumer lifestyles, but this has produced perverse inequalities of wealth and – to an extent that is no longer possible to ignore – is environmentally catastrophic. We are called on to take shorter showers, recycle, buy ‘green’ products, and turn the lights off when we leave the room, but these measures are grossly inadequate. We need more fundamental change – personally, culturally, and structurally.

The purpose of the documentary is to envision a way of life that positively responds to the overlapping global crises of climate change, peak oil, economic collapse, and consumerism. Genuine progress today means building a new, more resilient world based on permaculture, simple living, renewable energy, and localised economies.Most of all, we need to reimagine the good life beyond consumer culture and begin building a world that supports a simpler way of life. This does not mean hardship or deprivation. It means focusing on having enough, for everyone, forever.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The inspiring tale of the re imagining of Preston’s economy.

June 19, 2015

The inspiring tale of the re imagining of Preston’s economy.

We are often asked “what would a Transition local government look like?” It’s a complex question, but one Council taking a pioneering approach to its local economy is Preston in Lancashire. Preston City Council, working with Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) recently published ‘Creating a Good Local Economy: the role of anchor institutions‘, a remarkable document. To find out more, I spoke to Matthew Jackson, deputy chief executive at CLES and Cllr Matthew Brown, Executive Member for Social Justice, Inclusion and Policy at Preston CC. “The game’s up for the old system”, he told me, “if you want to do something really transformative and really radical, it means doing something really new and really creative”. So they did. It’s a deeply fascinating, and inspirational story.

Cllr. Matthew Brown (MB): Traditionally it seems to me we just tried to act as a magnet for outside institutional investments to come in, but with this economic crisis we’re seeing that that’s not working any more. A lot of the investment we had in the last 10-15 years is just not happening. So it’s more of a systemic issue in the economy that needs to be tackled. One way of doing that is to make sure that the wealth of the locality is maintained by the people that live here.

Matthew Jackson (MJ): Local government doesn’t necessarily understand its local market and the types of organisations that are available to deliver the goods and services it requires. So there’s a need for a more intelligent relationship between the public, the commercial and the social sector put in place to enable organisations to be delivering more services.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Inspiration For the Burned-Out Localizer

June 2, 2015

Richard Heinberg wants you to “learn to be successfully and happily poorer.” Photo: video screenshot.

Inspiration For the Burned-Out Localizer

While Marx predicted that socialism would follow capitalism, Richard Heinberg predicts the next thing will be localism.

“All roads appear to lead eventually to localism; the questions are: how and when shall we arrive there, and in what condition? (And, how local?),” Heinberg writes in his latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.

But that’s not what’s new in this collection of Heinberg’s essays. Anyone following the Transition movement has been hearing for nearly a decade that more active local economies are the inevitable future once the triple threat of climate change, peak oil and economic crisis topples global industrial capitalism as we know it. The message came through loud and clear in 2008 with The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins and the world’s local future has been a core tenet of Transition ever since.

What’s new about Afterburn is that it offers two things that Transitioners or anyone else who forecasts a more local future needs today: inspiration and advice for the future that’s better than most of what you’ll read elsewhere.

Inspiration

These days, with gas prices hovering around $2.50 a gallon and all the talk about cheap gas from fracking, if you still care about peak oil, then you’re going to be pretty lonely. It’s easy to feel like you’re the crazy person for seeing an end to fossil fuels and thinking it’s a big deal when everybody else acts like the party of cheap energy and economic growth is going to last forever.

– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/06/inspiration-for-the-burned-out-localizer/#sthash.LLWef4Ru.dpu

Change They Don’t Believe In

April 21, 2015

Change They Don’t Believe In

The unfortunate consequence of not allowing the process of “creative destruction” to occur in banking and Big Business is that the historic forces behind it will seek expression elsewhere in the realm of politics and governance. The desperate antics of central banks to cover up financial failure can’t help but provoke political upheaval, including war.

It’s a worldwide phenomenon and one result will be the crackup of economic relations — thought by many to be permanent — that we call “globalism.” The USA has suffered mightily from globalism, by which a bonanza of cheap “consumer” products made by Asian factory slaves has masked the degeneration of local economic vitality, family life, behavioral norms, and social cohesion. That crackup is already underway in the currency wars aptly named by Jim Rickards, and you can bet that soon enough it will lead to the death of the 12,000-mile supply lines from China to WalMart — eventually to the death of WalMart itself (and everything like it). Another result will be the interruption of oil export supply lines.

The USA as currently engineered (no local economies, universal suburban sprawl, big box commerce, despotic agribiz) won’t survive these disruptions and one might also wonder whether our political institutions will survive. The crop of 2016 White House aspirants shows no comprehension for the play of these forces and the field is ripe for epic disruption. The prospect of another Clinton – Bush election contest is a perfect setup for the collapse of the two parties sponsoring them, ushering in a period of wild political turmoil. Just because you don’t see it this very moment, doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking on the margins.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Broken Template

January 26, 2015

The Broken Template

The more detached from reality American culture becomes the more strictly ceremonial leadership gets, as illustrated by the raft of bromides Barack Obama floated past the assembled vassalage of government last week in another grand effort to avoid the necessities of the moment.

Those necessities include freeing a hostage public from the tyrannical clutches of corporate despotism — the evil empire of big boxes, big burgers, big pharma, Big Brother — and the atrocious rackets fostered by them that masquerade as an economy. The template of the life we have known is broken and the pieces within are flying apart, and no amount of wishing or promising can keep them going. If this society is even going to survive, the people have to smash their way out of this template prison, probably against the efforts of the people and organizations now running it merely for their own benefit.

The future is telling us very clearly: get smaller, get finer, get more local, get less complex, get less grandiose, do it now. Do you want to eat food in the years ahead? Better make sure you live in a part of the country where small-scale farming and backyard gardening is possible because the General Mills Agri-Biz GMO Cheerios model will be folding its big tent along with its financing agents in the debt Ponzi banking system.

Do you want to have a personal economic future? Think about what you can do to make yourself useful in a local economy made up of your neighbors. And if you live in one of the thousands of soulless, neighborless suburban wastelands that amount to nothing but big box and big burger plantations, you better get out and find a real town in some other part of the country.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Local Economies on the Table | Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

November 15, 2014

Local Economies on the Table | Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Communities across the United States and Europe are working to transform local economic systems so that they are more sustainable and equitable. Programs that support the production of nutritious and culturally appropriate food by local farmers and locally sourced renewable energy, construction and even office supplies benefit local producers, businesses, workers and consumers. Many states and communities are utilizing public procurement programs to support those efforts, especially bidding preferences for healthy, locally grown foods, energy or transportation programs that create local jobs, and fair markets. Especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession, Buy American programs have helped ensure that taxpayer-funded programs create local jobs and serve social goals. Farm to School programs that incentivize purchases from local farmers have grown in all 50 U.S. states and many European countries. Innovative efforts are also underway to expand this approach to other institutions such as hospitals, universities and early childcare programs like Head Start.

In a move that could undermine those important initiatives, the European Union has made the opening of U.S. procurement programs to bids by European firms one of its priority goals for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). It has been insistent on the inclusion of procurement commitments at all levels of government, for all goods, and in all sectors. At a speech in San Francisco, French trade minister Nicole Briqc declared, “Let’s dream a little with respect to public procurement. Why not replace ‘Buy American’ which penalizes our companies with ‘Buy transatlantic’ which reflects the depth of our mutual commitment?”1

– See more at: http://www.iatp.org/documents/local-economies-on-the-table#sthash.C8I3FO1O.dpuf

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