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“Dig deep enough into many of the problems this country faces, and you will soon hit land,” writes Monbiot. “Soaring inequality and exclusion; the massive cost of renting or buying a decent home; repeated financial crises, sparked by housing asset bubbles; the collapse of wildlife and ecosystems; the lack of public amenities – the way land is owned and controlled underlies them all. Yet it scarcely features in political discussions.” (The six report coauthors are Robin Grey, Tom Kenny, Laurie Macfarlane, Anna Powell-Smith, Guy Shrubsole and Beth Stratford.).

The report contains recommendations to the British Labour Party as it develops a policy agenda in preparation for the next general election. Given that much of the world suffers from treating land as a speculative asset, the report could be considered a template for pursuing similar reforms around the world. (Monbiot’s column summarizing the report can be found here.)  

For me, the report is quite remarkable:  a rigorous, comprehensive set of proposals for how land could be developed, used, and protected as a commons.

There are succinct, powerful sections on making land ownership data more open and available; ways to foster community-led development and ownership of land (such as a “community right to buy”); and codifying a citizen’s “right to roam” on land for civic and cultural purposes. One effective way to curb speculative development and revive farming and forestry is by creating community land trusts and curbing tax privileges and subsidies.

The bald financial realities about land are quite troubling. The report notes that in the UK, “land values have risen 544% since 1995, far outpacing any growth in real incomes.” Housing is simply unaffordable for many people. “Two decades ago, the average working family needed to save for three years to afford a deposit [downpayment] on a home,” the report notes. “Today, it must save for 19 years.”

Much of the blame can go to tax laws and other policies that encourage people to treat homes as financial assets. This fuels fierce speculation in housing that raises prices, greatly benefiting the rich (landowners) and impoverishing renters. Similarly, thanks to speculation and tax subsidies, wealthy landowners consolidate more land while small farmers are forced to give up farming.  Fully one-fifth of English farms have folded over the past ten years. 

Politicians are generally far too wary to propose solutions to these problems. It would only enrage a key chief constituency, the wealthy, and alienate some in the middle class who aspire to flip homes as a path to wealth. But there are in fact many ways to neutralize the speculative frenzy associated with land and mutualize the acquisition and control of land to make something that can benefit everyone.  

Land for the Many recommends a shift in “macroprudential tools” – financial assessments of systemic risk – to prod banks to make fewer loans for real estate and more loans that help productive sectors of the economy. The report also urges restrictions on lending to buyers intending to rent their properties.Other healthy ways to make land more accessible and affordable for all:  a progressive property tax on land; a reduction of tax exemptions for landowners; and a cap on permissible rent increases at no more than the rate of wage inflation or the consumer price index, whichever is lower.

Since profit-driven development can have catastrophic long-term effects on ecosystems, wildlife, and future generations, the report calls for the creation of Public Development Corporations. These entities would have the power to purchase and develop land in the public interest.

I especially like the idea of creating a Common Ground Trust, a nonprofit institution to help prospective homebuyers buy homes. As the request of a buyer, the Trust would buy the land underneath a house and hold it in trust for the commons. Since land on average represents 70% of the cost of a house, the Trust’s acquisition of land under housing would greatly reduce the upfront downpayments that buyers must make. “In return,” write Monbiot et al., “the buyers [would] pay a land rent to the Trust.”  Home buyers could reap any appreciation in value of their house, but land would effectively be taken off the market and its value would be held in the commons.

“By bringing land into common ownership, land rents can be socialized rather than flowing to private landlords and banks,” the report notes. “Debt-fueled and speculative demand can be reined in without the risk of an uncontrolled or destabilizing fall in values.”

Land for the Many is major achievement. It consolidates the progressive case for land reform and explains in straight-forward language how law and policy must change. Of course, the politics of securing this agenda would be a formidable challenge. But given the grotesque inequalities, ecological harms, declines in farming, and unaffordable housing associated with the current regime of land ownership, this conversation is long-overdue.

Originally posted on bollier.org

Header image: mini malist/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

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A new VICE Special Report: The Future of Work premieres April 19 on HBO.

This video has been reposted from the HBO youtube channel.

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Within just three months, 42 councils have signed the pledge – representing over 17 million people between them in the UK  – and more than 34 million in the US, Australia, Canada and Switzerland.

Declaring a climate emergency creates an opportunity to:

1. Involve citizens through citizen’s assemblies and other processes of participation and consultation in setting priorities for ambitious carbon reduction and understanding and engaging with the difficult choices that implies.
2. Create healthier, more resilient and sustainable local communities powered by locally generated low carbon energy, served by affordable and sustainable transport, higher quality and more efficient housing stock and fed by sustainable food and land systems.
3. Un-do business as usual. In a time of cut-backs, reverse costly policies and investments in carbon-intensive infrastructures such as roads or airports and divest council pension funds from fossil fuels.

What does it mean to declare a climate emergency?

For a council to have called a ‘climate emergency’, commonly advanced guidelines say that they must have: used these specific words in a motion or executive decision; they must set a target date to reduce their local climate impacts consistent with the IPCC report; they must set up a working group to report within a short timescale; and they must engage with a cross section of the community.

When in ‘emergency mode’, councils must allocate discretionary funds towards climate action. That includes things such as: educating the community, advocating for action from higher level governments, mitigating and building resilience against the impacts of climate change, and funding or undertaking the planning and research needed to implement full state and national emergency mobilisation.

So far, councils’ pledges and aims have varied enormously. For example: Scarborough council has committed to a target of zero carbon emissions by 2030, and will seek up to £80,000 in funding over two years for a sustainability officer to help achieve their goals. Meanwhile, Liverpool City Council deleted all references to declaring a ‘Climate Emergency’ and many of the suggested actions to be taken. Its plan has no stated target, no timeline and no budget. In Lancaster and Oxford a Citizen’s Assembly is being set up as part of their process; this is a deliberative process in which a representative group of citizens selected at random from the population, learn about, discuss, and make recommendations in relation to a particular issue or set of issues.

Local governments are often in the front line of dealing with climate change impacts (such as flooding, fires, storm damage) and the on the receiving end of demands for mitigation action. A key issue is working out what local governments have exclusive control over (as opposed to national and regional authorities): and where the boundaries of responsibility lie, because with climate change they are often very complex and diffuse. Clearly councils also facing funding difficult constraints. Yet, across transport, energy, housing, waste, buildings, people are looking to councils for leadership.

So what can they do?

We are not short of concrete ideas about what to do. Reports such as Zero Carbon Britain show sector by sector analysis of what’s possible in the UK by 2030. Many cities have already taken the lead with emissions reduction pledges and zero carbon targets including commitments from Bristol and Manchester aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030 and 2038 respectively. Across the world, the cities organisation C40 has been calling for fossil free streets: commitments to procure only zero-emission buses from 2025; and ensuring a major area of the city is zero emission by 2030.

Planning is key and so is reducing demand. The services people want, such as heat and mobility, are often those they show the greatest indifference towards. We are often fearful of challenging people’s attachment to their cars, for example. But if safe, reliable and affordable alternatives are provided, people will use them. When affordable and accessible infrastructures are built for buses and bikes and pedestrians, people use them as numerous examples around the world have shown.

Around housing, councils can help to deliver on the government pledge to halve energy use from new build by 2030 and for all new homes to be heated by fossil free systems by 2025. They can promote energy efficiency schemes and exploit other grant funding, promote new carbon neutral housing schemes, either as authority owned projects or with partners and transform council’s own properties to maximise their own potential for energy production and saving.

Regarding transport, councils can promote energy efficiency in local transport, promote cycling and car sharing, consider car exclusion zones or access charges, promote the use of electric cars by providing charging points and invest in EV infrastructure, improve public transport integration (bikes, buses and trains) and consider how transport contracts can be used to promote green travel.

On energy, councils can promote low energy use- smart energy, energy efficiency and conservation. They can consider providing funding for solar energy installations on the basis of shared returns, review the authority’s own energy use and consider setting up ESCOs (energy service companies).

Others areas include waste and food. Councils can review waste and recycling policies- take pressure off land-fill and reduce methane and other emissions. Where possible they might target food consumption through procurement and menus in schools to include less meat and dairy.

In terms of business, they can promote support services for local businesses. Preferential business rates for local firms, for example, as part of much needed regional redevelopment, or creating Local Enterprise Partnerships to set up low carbon enterprise zones with tax breaks to nurture jobs, investment and innovation.

What can we stop doing?

As well as thinking creatively about how to deliver services in low carbon ways, we also need to accelerate the shift away from the fossil fuel economy.

Declaring an emergency permits a veto over actions which are incompatible with radical decarbonisation in line with the Paris agreement, and climate-proofing all areas of policy. This should mean divestment from fossil fuels. Local councils in the UK invest over £14 billion in the fossil fuel industry. Divestment from cities assets from fossil fuels though pension funds sends a powerful signal and makes a major contribution. Of the 1032 institutions that have divested from fossil fuels worldwide, just 15% are governments. But there are now more than 15 UK councils – from Sheffield to Stroud, Brighton to Birmingham –calling for divestment from their pension funds.

Beyond the local

Local council action doesn’t exist in a vacuum of course. Some of the measures described above require a supportive national regulatory environment. Financing could be delivered as part of a Green New Deal. Carbon budgets need to be set and enforced by independent national agencies such as the climate change committee. National government needs to give direction by laying down limits and reversing major decisions that produce carbon lock-in incompatible with 1.5 around airport expansion and fracking for example. Local government can make their voice heard to lobby government on this.

Declaring a climate emergency is just a starting point, and not without its challenges. But the good news is there are numerous policies that can be put in place as well as initiatives bubbling up from below that can be harnessed to scale up and accelerate the pace of change.

So what are we waiting for?

Reprinted from Rapid Transitions Alliance. You can find the original post here!

Featured image: Climate Emergency – PeoplesClimate-Melb-IMG_8280. By Takver. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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Mattei is the noted international law scholar, lawyer and activist who has been at the center of some of the most significant commons initiatives in Italy. His chapter is a welcome synthesis of how the commons discourse in Italy arose from the misty-eyed imagination of a few far-sighted legal commoners, to become a rally cry in critical fights against the privatization of water, the Teatro Valley theater in Rome, and other cherished shared wealth. The concept of the commons has since gone mainstream in Italian political culture, animating new initiatives and providing an indispensable vocabulary for fighting neoliberal capitalist policies.

Ugo’s piece is called “Institutionalizing the Commons: An Italian Primer.” (PDF file) In it, he describes the history of the commons in Italy as “a unique experiment in transforming indignation into new institutions of the commons,” adding, “perhaps this praxis ‘Italian style’ could become an example for a global strategy.”

The story starts in 2005 with a scholarly project at the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, which examined the many ways in which public authorities were routinely privatizing public resources, often with no compensation or benefit to the public. This project later led to a national commission headed by Stefano Rodotà, a noted law scholar and politician. In April 2008, the Rodotà Commission delivered a bill to the Italian minister of justice containing, as Mattei puts it, “the first legal definitions of the commons to appear in an official document” in Italy.

The Rodotà Commission defined the commons (in Italian beni comuni) by dividing assets into three categories – commons, public properties, and private properties. Resources in commons were defined as

such goods whose utility is functional to the pursuit of fundamental rights and free development of the person. Commons must be upheld and safeguarded by law also for the benefit of future generations. The legal title to the commons can be held by private individuals, legal persons or by public entities. No matter their title, their collective fruition must be safeguarded, within the limits of and according to the process of law.

Specific common assets mentioned included “rivers, torrents and their springs; lakes and other waterways; the air; parks defined as such by law; forests and woodlands; high altitude mountain ranges, glaciers and snowlines beaches and stretches of coastline declared natural reserves; the protected flora and fauna; protected archaeological, cultural and environmental properties; and other protected landscapes.

This early (modern) legal definition of the commons is rooted more in state law and its recognition of certain biophysical resources as public, than in the sanctity of self-organized, customary social practices and norms. The definition nonetheless has provided a valuable language for challenging privatization, most notably, the alarming proposal by the Italian Senate in 2010 to sell Italy’s entire Italian water management system.

This outrage led to the collecting of over 1.5 million signatures to secure a ballot referendum to let the public decide whether the state should be allowed to privatize the water commons. In June 2011, Italian proto-commoners prevailed by huge margins and helped make the commons – beni comuni – a keyword in Italian politics. As Mattei puts it, the commons provided “a unifying political grammar for different actions.”

Over the past eight years, the commons has continued to gain currency in Italian politics as the economic crises of capitalism have worsened. The language of enclosure showcased how government corruption, neoliberal trade and investment policies, and state subsidies and giveaways were destroying the common wealth.This was underscored by parallel protests by the Indignados in Spain, the Occupy movement, and the Arab Spring protests, which also focused on inequality and enclosures of the commons. Mattei’s short book Beni comuni: Un Manifesto helped bring these themes to further prominence and connecting many single-issue struggles that had long been seen as separate, but which in fact share common goals, adversaries, and values.

I like to think that most towns, cities and regions of the world could and should begin to write their own modern-day histories of their distinctive commons. It’s imperative that we recover and learn these histories if we are going to learn from the terrible disruptions and struggles of the past, and invent new forms of social practice, culture and politics.

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Transnational corporations have become the dominant force directing our world. Humanity is accelerating toward a precipice of overconsumption, and the large transnationals are the primary agents driving us there. We’re rapidly losing the earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. The earth is becoming denuded of its bounty as every living system ­is ransacked for resources—not to mention the looming emergency of climate breakdown. As a result, twenty thousand scientists have recently issued a public warning to humanity, while prominent academics consider the collapse of civilization this century to be a serious threat.

Changes in our personal consumption patterns are important, but are ultimately inconsequential compared with the impact of the transnationals that have come to dominate our global economic and political system. Of the world’s hundred largest economies, sixty-nine are now corporations. Political parties in many of our so-called democracies are funded in large part by billionaires, while government cabinet positions are staffed by corporate executives. International bodies setting global policy are infiltrated by corporate agents so successful at entrenching corporate power that even those governments that still prioritize their people’s needs can no longer make autonomous decisions without risking crippling lawsuits from the transnationals whose interests they threaten. Meanwhile, countries and cities compete with each other to beg their corporate overlords for investment dollars, even it means undermining public services and legal protections for their own populations.

Environmental groups, recognizing where ultimate power resides, try to pressure corporations to improve practices through the threat of public shaming, with some appreciable results. However, these attempts are necessarily constrained by the very structure of big corporations, which exist to enrich their shareholders regardless of the consequences. The common goal of corporations around the world is to monetize human activity and what’s left of nature’s abundance as rapidly and efficiently as possible. The overriding purpose of the world’s powerful institutional force is thus directly at odds with a flourishing earth or a viable future for humanity.

Having spent the first part of my career in the heart of the capitalist system, consulting to major international banks and corporations, I developed a sense of the underlying forces that direct the centers of financial power. These ideas are my distillation of what I believe could be effective levers for humanity to take back some control from the increasing hegemony of corporations and billionaires.

If we are to avoid disaster, our global economic system with its gaping inequities and deranged consumption will eventually need to dismantled and replaced by one based on life-affirming principles rather than wealth maximization. These suggestions, even in aggregate, wouldn’t do that. They represent mere tweaks in a system that ultimately needs to be completely transformed. But like a modest trim tab that helps redirect an ocean liner, perhaps they could begin to curb the destructive force of transnationals and redirect their enormous power toward a more sustainable path.

1. Triple bottom line required for corporate charters

A fundamental reason for the rapacious behavior of transnational corporations is their drive to maximize shareholder value above anything else. While there is no explicit requirement for this in the standard corporate charter, a century of case law has entrenched this principle into the behavior of large corporations to the point that is has become the de facto standard of operation. As a result, if corporations were people, they would be considered psychopaths, utterly devoid of any caring for the harm they cause in the pursuit of their goals.

It is easier, however, to change a corporation’s values than those of a human psychopath. All you need to do is change the legal basis of their charter. Instead of pursuing shareholder interests alone, they could be re-chartered with the explicit purpose of achieving a triple bottom line of social and environmental outcomes as well as financial—sometimes known as the “triple Ps” of people, planet, and profit.

This alternative corporate value system is already available through chartering as a benefit corporation or certifying as a B-Corp, and has been adopted by over 2,000 corporations in over fifty countries around the world—including several multibillion-dollar transnationals.  My proposal is that, instead of being a voluntary step taken by a select few, this would be a requirement for all corporations above a certain size.

Overnight, the intrinsic character of the corporation would be transformed. Currently, CEOs and corporate boards are faced with continual pressure to grow their earnings at all cost. If they chose to make a humane decision, such as not to exploit a copper mine because of the consequent pollution, they could expect to be sued by shareholders, and possibly acquired by a more ruthless competitor. However, if they were legally required to achieve a triple bottom line, they would weigh up decisions in a more balanced way, as a rational person might. With the board responsible for all three bottom lines, they would have to consider the risk of being sued if they caused excessive pollution, or if they were callous to the needs of the communities where their plants were located.

Currently, large corporations boast of their corporate social responsibility departments that are supposed to care about issues such as employment practices of their suppliers, sustainability of their raw materials, environmental impact of their packaging, gender balance and ethnic diversity in the workplace, and investments in local communities. Suddenly, they would have to stop paying mere lip service to these issues and take them as seriously as marketing costs, revenue growth and distribution channels—the things that CEOs actually worry about when they go home at night.

2. Charter renewal required every five years

Changing the corporate charter requirement might not, however, be enough by itself to halt the relentless pursuit of profits by large transnationals. After all, executive pay packages consist of dollars rather than goodwill, and those dollars are linked directly to the share price, which is driven by shareholders’ expectation of financial returns. If they could get away with it, they might continue their rapacious practices, while trying harder to look like they’re meeting the other two bottom lines.

That’s the reason for my second proposal, which is to require that corporations, which currently enjoy what’s known legally as a “perpetual existence,” get their charters renewed every five years. If they failed to meet pre-established criteria on their two non-financial bottom lines, they would not be permitted to continue in business. Currently, if a company can’t meet its financial obligations, it’s forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and the value of its stock generally tanks to zero. Under my proposal, executives would also have to consider the risk of declaring “social bankruptcy” or “environmental bankruptcy” as they made their business decisions.

As in currently regulated industries such as banking, the final step of losing their charter would not have to be immediate. If a corporation failed to meet its basic parameters, it could be given a warning, with a time period set to fix things. However, the mere threat of this happening would lead corporate executives to make sure they were well above the criteria required to keep their charter.

Corporations are, of course, highly adept at using their financial resources to influence regulatory bodies through bribes and other mechanisms. To avoid this, panel members responsible to renew the charter would be representatives of the communities and ecosystems covered in the company’s scope of operations. Their task would be to weigh up the findings of experienced independent auditors on the company’s performance. To minimize corruption, the panel could be chosen by a process of random selection called sortition, just a like a trial jury is chosen in our legal system.

3. Tax stock trades based on the length of the holding period

Powerful as they are, even corporations have their masters: their shareholders. But don’t think of the typical shareholder as a Warren Buffet type, sitting back in his leather armchair perusing his holdings. Instead, corporate stocks are subject to the frenetic activity of financial markets, where split-second computer algorithms govern much of the trading. Investment firms spend hundreds of millions of dollars enhancing their computing networks to shave as little as three milliseconds off the timing of their trades. The hyper liquidity of global markets means that investors are obsessed with short-term market trends, which leads corporate CEOs, forever anxious about their stock price, to focus their time horizon on the next quarterly earnings report. Financial valuations apply discount rates to future earnings, which means that an investment paying off thirty years in the future can be worth as little as five percent of its future payoff in the present. Under these conditions, why would any CEO care about the state of the planet—or even their company—thirty years from now?

During the 2016 US election campaign, Bernie Sanders proposed a Financial Transaction Tax to pay for free college tuition, setting the rate at 0.1% of the transaction. In Europe, discussions are under way to apply a similar EU-wide tax. My proposal increases the tax rate by orders of magnitude, and differentiates based on the length of the stock holding. For example, the tax rate might look like this:

• 10% if the stock is held less than a day
• 5% if less than a year
• 3% if less than 10 years
• 1% if less than 20 years
• Zero if more than 20 years

The effects of this single step would be enormous. The financial services industry would be transformed overnight. High frequency stock trading and same-day traders would disappear. The short-term orientation of the stock market would be replaced by carefully considered long-term investment decisions. A typical mutual fund, which in the US currently turns over its portfolio at the rate of 130% a year, could no longer afford to do so, and would have to change its investment decision-making based on sustainable returns. The tax could be waived for individuals experiencing a life-changing event or for simple hedging techniques where, for example, farmers need to lock in the price of their produce at a future time.

The result would be a massive shift away from destructive extractive industries and toward sustainable businesses. For example, the fossil fuel industry is recognized to be vastly overvalued as a result of its “unburnable carbon”: the amount of fossil fuels in the ground that can never be burned if the world is to keep climate change below the 2° rise agreed at COP21 in Paris. A recent study estimates the overvaluation as high as $4 trillion. Investors, however, play a game of musical chairs, hoping they won’t be the ones left holding the stranded assets. This proposed transaction fee would incent them to dump fossil fuel investments immediately for opportunities in renewable energy with longer-term payoffs.

4. Cap on billionaire’s assets over $5 billion

As corporations have taken increasing control of the global system, they have catapulted founding shareholders and their heirs to previously unimaginable pinnacles of wealth.  The combined wealth of the world’s 2,754 billionaires is now $9.2 trillion, an amount that has doubled in the past six years, and increased tenfold since the beginning of this century. The magnitude of this wealth is difficult to conceive. The top six billionaires own as much as the lower half of the entire world’s population. Taken together, the world’s billionaires would represent the third largest economy in the world, behind only China and the United States, with wealth equivalent to the GDP of Germany and Japan combined.

There is no legitimate rationale for this outrageous concentration of such wealth in a few individuals. The argument that the founders of Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook deserve such excessive wealth is no more valid than the belief of the ancient Egyptians in the divinity of their Pharaoh, or the Medieval notion of the divine right of kings. Mark Zuckerberg, aged 33, currently owns over $70 billion. If someone had singlehandedly miniaturized the transistor, developed the logic for computer code, invented the PC, and come up with the internet, then maybe they’d deserve having close to that amount as a reward for the value they created. But all Zuckerberg did was figure out a way to connect people up in a network that became a bit more popular than other networks, and because of the internet’s scale effects, he was the lucky one who hit the jackpot. Zuckerberg merely took advantage of all the other infrastructure work that led to the internet, painstakingly pieced together by millions of people over decades, which has been the real value creator for the world.

In response to this excess, my proposal is to cap billionaires’ wealth at, say, $5 billion. It’s an arbitrary amount, still obscenely high and presumably more than enough for those who argue that people should receive ample financial rewards for success. Beyond a certain level of wealth, however, what drives these people is power and prestige. This could be tapped by requiring them to donate their excess wealth to a trust over which they could retain some influence.

Such a trust, however, would need to have some strict criteria. While the billionaire could influence the trust’s priorities, he would not have control over its activities. The current Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, while a step in the right direction, is under the total control of the Gateses and Warren Buffet. The foundation set up with much fanfare by Mark Zuckerberg is viewed by experts as little more than a fancy tax dodge.

Each trust would need to avoid interference in a country’s political system and be dedicated to life-affirming activities, the scope of which could be based, for example, on the principles of the Earth Charter, a framework for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society endorsed by over 6,000 organizations.

The positive impact that these trillions of dollars could have on human and natural welfare would be prodigious. Imagine a country the size of Germany and Japan combined dedicated entirely to serving human and natural flourishing. It would have the resources to end extreme poverty, increase regenerative agriculture to over a billion acres worldwide, educate hundreds of millions of girls through the Global South, disseminate up to a billion clean cookstoves, and much, much more.

The billionaires of the world, meanwhile, would continue to enjoy enormous wealth, and when they jet to Davos to hobnob with other luminaries for the annual World Economic Forum, they could finally have something worthwhile to boast about.

5. Declare a crime of ecocide at the International Criminal Court

Even with all these constraints, the powers of transnational corporations would remain enormous, and there would still be times when, through willful negligence or intentional bad faith, corporate action causes massive environmental damage. A UN study, which remained unpublished, found that the world’s largest companies had caused over $2 trillion of environmental damage, which would cost a third of their overall profits if they were forced to pay for it. Because of their extensive political influence, even their most damaging activities go unpunished. This leads to my final proposal: to declare a crime of ecocide at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The ICC is an independent judicial body set up by international treaty, the Rome Statute, in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, genocides, and crimes against humanity. While it continues to face serious challenges to its enforcement powers, it has had the effect of putting tyrants everywhere on notice that they can no longer act with impunity. If ecocide—the loss, destruction, or severe damage of an ecosystem—were declared a crime by the ICC, this could have a similarly daunting effect on those corporate tyrants who currently know they can get away with devastating the world’s “sacrifice zones” where they are pillaging the earth’s resources for profit.

There is a campaign, Eradicating Ecocide, already under way to make this happen. A model law has been drafted, and an Earth Protectors Trust Fund has been set up to permit common people everywhere to become legal Earth protectors. If a two-thirds majority of the Rome Statute signatories were to approve this as an amendment, it would become enforceable globally. Suddenly, corporate boards and CEOs everywhere would realize they are no longer above the law.

*                                   *                                   *                                   *                                    *

There is a strange paradox to consider about these proposals.  One the one hand, notice how limited they are in scope. Even if they were all implemented overnight, the global system would not be overturned. People would still go to work and get paid, food would still be on the shelves of the grocery store, the same governments would still be in power, and the internet would still work. The gaping structural inequities of our current world order would continue unabated, and we’d still be consuming far more than our planet can sustain. Ultimately, we need a complete transformation of our global system if our civilization is to survive intact through this century.

On the other hand, it doesn’t take a political genius to realize that these ideas are so far from mainstream thinking that they have virtually no chance to be adopted any time soon. They would be considered too radical for even the most progressive mainstream politician to endorse. What does this tell us about our current political dialogue? To me, it suggests that our conversations are too severely constrained by what we’re “allowed” to think in terms of how our system works. We need to cast our gaze outside the norms that our billionaire-controlled mainstream media permits us to consider.

Imagine a world where these ideas (or others like them) began to be seriously entertained. How would they even be enforced? The only way corporations could be brought to heel, or billionaires compelled to give up their excess billions, would be a concerted effort led by the United States in conjunction with the European Union, and joined by the preponderance of other countries.

This, of course, could only happen if grassroots demand for these ideas spread so powerfully that politicians had to take notice. This is not such an unrealistic scenario, given the worldwide disavowal of the dominant capitalist model: most Europeans have a higher opinion of socialism than capitalism, and even in the US, the overwhelming majority see big business as unethical and unfair.

Then, there is the potential “trim tab” effect of adopting these ideas. Even though these proposals alone wouldn’t fundamentally transform our system in the way that’s needed, they might set changes in motion that could eventually take us there. There may be other ideas more effective than these, and of course each proposal contains within it complications that would need to be worked out carefully. However, my hope is that these ideas invite a new mode of political dialogue, along with a recognition that even in the darkest times, realistic pathways exist toward a thriving future for humanity and the natural world.

When the Occupy movement failed to achieve its initial promise, many people pointed to its lack of specific demands as a reason for its demise. If and when the next radical grassroots movement emerges, which may be sooner than you expect, let’s make sure they have an array of ideas such as these in their quiver to focus public opinion on actual political deliverables.

There are very few people who really want to see our civilization collapse. If these proposals eventually did get implemented, perhaps even the executives of the transnational corporations might sleep better at night, knowing that they can become part of the solution rather than a force of destruction.

Jeremy Lent is author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, which investigates how different cultures have made sense of the universe and how their underlying values have changed the course of history. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a sustainable worldview. For more information visit jeremylent.com.

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Corporate-branded hashtags may seem trivial, but they point to serious structural issues undermining some of our most important conversions. Rich Mason explains.

Yesterday, a few days on from the launch of our latest Future Work Centre report, I logged into Twitter to see the response. Had it begun to foster a broader, more imaginative thinking about the future of work, as we had hoped? Then I noticed something: in many of the tweets discussing our report was the hashtag #FutureOfWork, which was followed by a miniature Microsoft logo.

These days it’s common to see these little logos automatically accompanying Twitter hashtags. High profile social movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have them. Users don’t even need to input them as an emoji – Twitter appends it to the hashtag automatically.

And they can be paid for, if your pockets are deep enough. Most commonly, you can spot them around major product launches and movie releases; all part of a corporation or movie studio’s multimillion dollar advertising campaign. In this case, it seems, Microsoft have made a strategic decision to pay Twitter for association with the term ‘Future of Work’.

Fair enough, you might think. Social media platforms aren’t free to run, after all – they’ve got to have a business model. There’s nothing particularly new about advertising, or even in corporations laying claim to certain phases through trademarks (when I say “I’m Lovin’ It”, what do you think of?). And a hashtag is just a hashtag at the end of the day – what does it really matter?

Co-opting, commodification, control

However I argue this is more insidious than mere advertising. Fundamentally, unlike a traditional advertising campaign, this is simply not Microsoft’s content to buy, nor is it Twitter’s to sell.

The future of work debate is one of the most hotly discussed topics globally, and for good reason. It captures so many of the most pressing issues of our time: economic security, quality of life, the huge opportunities and risks of new tech, who will win, lose, and who gets to decide. Besides us here at the RSA Future Work Centre, think tanks, consultancies, academics, legislative and regulatory bodies around the world are working tirelessly in search of answers to these vital questions, igniting a vibrant public debate.

Search the #FutureOfWork hashtag (many hundreds of tweets per hour at the time of writing) and you’ll see people excitedly sharing blog posts, talks, videos of experimental new technology, along with their own commentary and opinions. All, at this moment, bearing Microsoft’s logo without the choice of the contributors (remember, these are not adverts placed around the tweets, but inserted automatically right into what the person has written); almost none of the content attributable in any way to Microsoft or Twitter.

So here we have two tech Giants who are, respectively, embellishing their reputation and receiving substantial sums of money by means of commodifying and co-opting an essential public debate, possibly altering or stymieing the discussion in pursuit of their narrow self-interest. Picture this for a moment: a packed Town Hall discussion for a pressing local issue, and a salesman walking around slapping a branded sticker on anyone who rises to speak.

This is not without consequence. For example, someone coming across a discussion for the first time may be put off from joining by a perceived association with a brand. A hashtag is sometimes not just a hashtag. It can be a gathering point for people to have a conversation, a place where new understanding emerges, and this should not be taken so lightly. One infamous example among many of what can happen when its not, a conversation between domestic abuse survivors around the hashtag #WhyIStayed was derailed by a blundering contribution by a pizza restaurant.

Most of us would probably agree that terms specific to, say, a movie release are probably fair game for advertising, but there is apparently no judge or standard at play in the social media realm. Compare the older example of trademarks: any attempt to trademark the term ‘Future of Work’ would be assessed by an accountable abiter, and surely rejected, being too widely used to be attributed to any one owner or source.

Which gets to the fundamental point beneath my hashtag gripe. The platforms created and run by social media Giants are not mere apps: they are public amenities and gathering places, a new kind of public sphere used by millions of us for both recreation and knowledge-sharing. Yet in the hands of their creators, vital decisions – such as what terms can be owned, by what right, and who gets to profit thereby – are kept from our view, without public oversight or recourse, invariably prioritising profit and narrow self-interest over public good.

Do we have a choice?

In the report I mentioned at the top of this blog, you can read our imagining of the Big Tech Economy, one possible future which might await us in 2035. In this future, the tech behemoths of Silicon Valley and Shenzhen wield enormous power over many facets of our lives, keeping public concerns and backlash in check via well-oiled PR operations. However as we also make clear in the report, we should consider our agency and not resign ourselves to any particular future outcome. So can we avoid our conversations being hijacked and appropriated for tech company profits?

We can, of course, just refrain from using Twitter. The problem is that there are currently few alternative spaces, so this option amounts to forsaking potentially invaluable conversations, at least until an alternative is on offer. A better response may be to use public pressure or regulatory intervention to change tech company behaviour. Activist campaigns such as Redecentralize are working on ways to challenge the unchecked power of tech Giants, including encouraging the development of genuine alternative spaces. And ‘Power in the New Economy’, a forthcoming major programme of work from the RSA’s Economy Team will examine concentrations of power in tech with a view towards policy intervention. This inquiry deserves all of our attention – the future of work conversation, and many others besides, are at stake.

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As alarm bells sound over the advancing destruction of the environment, a variety of Green New Deal proposals have appeared in the US and Europe, along with some interesting academic debates about how to fund them. Monetary policy, normally relegated to obscure academic tomes and bureaucratic meetings behind closed doors, has suddenly taken center stage.

The 14 page proposal for a Green New Deal submitted to the US House of Representatives by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez does not actually mention Modern Monetary Theory, but that is th it’s e approach currently capturing the attention of the media – and taking most of the heat. The concept is good: abundance can be ours without worrying about taxes or debt, at least until we hit full productive capacity. But the devil is in the details….

MMT advocates say the government does not need to collect taxes before it spends. It actually creates new money in the process of spending it; and there is plenty of room in the economy for public spending before demand outstrips supply, driving up prices.

Critics, however, say this is not true. The government is not allowed to spend before it has the money in its account, and the money must come from tax revenues or bond sales.

In a 2013 treatise called “Modern Monetary Theory 101: A Reply to Critics,” MMT academics actually concede this point. But they write that “these constraints do not change the end result,” and here the argument gets a bit technical. Their reasoning is that “The Fed is the monopoly supplier of CB currency [central bank reserves], Treasury spends by using CB currency, and since the Treasury obtained CB currency by taxing and issuing treasuries, CB currency must be injected before taxes and bond offerings can occur.”

The counterargument, made by American Monetary Institute researchers among others, is that the central bank is not the monopoly supplier of dollars. The vast majority of the dollars circulating in the United States are created, not by the government, but by private banks when they make loans. The Fed accommodates this process by supplying central bank currency (bank reserves) as needed; and this bank-created money can be taxed or borrowed by the Treasury before a single dollar is spent by Congress. The AMI researchers contend, “All bank reserves are originally created by the Fed for banks. Government expenditure merely transfers (previous) bank reserves back to banks.” As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis puts it, “federal deficits do not require that the Federal Reserve purchase more government securities; therefore, federal deficits, per se, need not lead to increases in bank reserves or the money supply.”

What federal deficits do increase is the federal debt;  and while the debt itself can be rolled over from year to year (as it virtually always is), the exponentially growing interest tab is one of those mandatory budget items that taxpayers must pay. Predictions are that in the next decade, interest alone could add $1 trillion to the annual bill, an unsustainable tax burden.

To fund a project as massive as the Green New Deal, we need a mechanism that involves neither raising taxes nor adding to the federal debt; and such a mechanism is actually proposed in the US Green New Deal – a network of public banks. While little discussed in the US media, that alternative is being debated in Europe, where Green New Deal proposals have been on the table since 2008. European economists have had more time to think these initiatives through, and they are less hampered by labels like “socialist” and “capitalist,” which have long been integrated into their multiparty systems.

A Decade of Gestation in Europe

The first Green New Deal proposal was published in 2008 by the New Economics Foundation on behalf of the Green New Deal Group in the UK. The latest debate is between proponents of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), led by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, and French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling Capital in the 21^st Century. Piketty recommends funding a European Green New Deal by raising taxes, while Varoufakis favors a system of public green banks.

Varoufakis explains that Europe needs a new source of investment money that does not involve higher taxes or government deficits. DiEM25 proposes for this purpose “an investment-led recovery, or New Deal, program … to be financed via public bonds issued by Europe’s public investment banks (e.g. the new investment vehicle foreshadowed in countries like Britain, the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund in the European Union, etc.).” To ensure that these bonds do not lose their value, the central banks would stand ready to buy them above a certain yield. “In summary, DiEM25 is proposing a re-calibrated real-green investment version of Quantitative Easing that utilises the central bank.

Public development banks already have a successful track record in Europe, and their debts are not considered debts of the government. They are financed not through taxes but by the borrowers when they repay the loans. Like other banks, development banks are moneymaking institutions that not only don’t cost the government money but actually generate a profit for it. DiEM25 collaborator Stuart Holland observes:

While Piketty is concerned to highlight differences between his proposals and those for a Green New Deal, the real difference between them is that his—however well-intentioned—are a wish list for a new treaty, a new institution and taxation of wealth and income. A Green New Deal needs neither treaty revisions nor new institutions and would generate both income and direct and indirect taxation from a recovery of employment. It is grounded in the precedent of the success of the bond-funded, Roosevelt New Deal which, from 1933 to 1941, reduced unemployment from over a fifth to less than a tenth, with an average annual fiscal deficit of only 3 per cent.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was largely funded through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), a public financial institution set up earlier by President Hoover. Its funding source was the sale of bonds, but proceeds from the loans repaid the bonds, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms, and much more; and it funded all this while generating income for the government.

A System of Public Banks and “Green QE”

The US Green New Deal envisions funding with “a combination of the Federal Reserve [and] a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks,” which could include banks owned locally by cities and states. As Sylvia Chi, chair of the legislative committee of the California Public Banking Alliance, explains on Medium.com:

The Green New Deal relies on a network of public banks — like a decentralized version of the RFC — as part of the plan to help finance the contemplated public investments. This approach has worked in Germany, where public banks have been integral in financing renewable energy installations and energy efficiency retrofits.

Local or regional public banks, says Chi, could help pay for the Green New Deal by making “low-interest loans for building and upgrading infrastructure, deploying clean energy resources, transforming our food and transportation systems to be more sustainable and accessible, and other projects. The federal government can help by, for example, capitalizing public banks, setting environmental or social responsibility standards for loan programs, or tying tax incentives to participating in public bank loans.”

UK professor Richard Murphy adds another role for the central bank – as the issuer of new money in the form of  “Green Infrastructure Quantitative Easing.” Murphy, who was a member of the original 2008 UK Green New Deal Group, explains:

All QE works by the [central bank] buying debt issued by the government or other bodies using money that it, quite literally, creates out of thin air. … [T]his money creation process is … what happens every time a bank makes a loan. All that is unusual is that we are suggesting that the funds created by the [central bank] using this process be used to buy back debt that is due by the government in one of its many forms, meaning that it is effectively canceled.

The invariable objection to that solution is that it would act as an inflationary force driving up prices, but as argued in my earlier article here, this need not be the case. There is a chronic gap between debt and the money available to repay it that actually needs to be filled with new money every year to avoid a “balance sheet recession.” As UK Prof. Mary Mellor formulates the problem in Debt or Democracy (2016), page 42:

A major contradiction of tying money supply to debt is that the creators of the money always want more money back than they have issued. Debt-based money must be continually repaid with interest. As money is continually being repaid, new debt must be being generated if the money supply is to be maintained.… This builds a growth dynamic into the money supply that would frustrate the aims of those who seek to achieve a more socially and ecologically sustainable economy.

In addition to interest, says Mellor, there is the problem that bankers and other rich people generally do not return their profits to local economies. Unlike public banks, which must use their profits for local needs, the wealthy hoard their money, invest it in the speculative markets, hide it in offshore tax havens, or send it abroad.

To avoid the cyclical booms and busts that have routinely devastated the US economy, this missing money needs to be replaced; and if the new money is used to pay down debt, it will be extinguished along with the debt, leaving the overall money supply and the inflation rate unchanged. If too much money is added to the economy, it can always be taxed back; but as MMTers note, we are a long way from the full productive capacity that would “overheat” the economy today.

Murphy writes of his Green QE proposal:

The QE program that was put in place between 2009 and 2012 had just one central purpose, which was to refinance the City of London and its banks.… What we are suggesting is a smaller programme … to kickstart the UK economy by investing in all those things that we would wish our children to inherit whilst creating the opportunities for everyone in every city, town, village and hamlet in the UK to undertake meaningful and appropriately paid work.

A network of public banks including a central bank operated as a public utility could similarly fund a US Green New Deal – without raising taxes, driving up the federal debt, or inflating prices.

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This article was first published under a different title on Truthdig.com. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. A 13^th book titled Banking on the People: Democratizing Finance in the Digital Age is due out soon. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

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Since 2001 the Mexican government has been pushing municipal governments to privatize water. If this trend continues, 35 million people will be affected and community water management – with water systems built by the people and dating back more than a hundred years in some cases – will be destroyed. SAPTEMAC is challenging this through its Water School, giving local people the tools to defend their water supply.

Mexico’s Water School came about in 2016 when SAPTEMAC representatives saw the concept at work in Colombia. With the support of national umbrella group Water For All, Water For Life – and with no major funding – professionals including lawyers, engineers, accountants, geographers and teachers have been running training sessions in different locations to give people the professional and political means to defend themselves. Topics covered include water rates, account-keeping, billing, organisation and inventories, pipes and water pumps.

So far there are 25 systems involved in the project, and water users, students and academics who have participated in the project have volunteered to strengthen the school by contributing new theoretical and political tools for use in the second round of training sessions in 2018.

Water For All, Water For Life already runs a citizens’ initiative for a General Water Law, but SAPTEMAC is now complementing this with a campaign for local water laws with the same human rights approach in 16 states around the country. The most significant result achieved to date is that colleagues from other community water systems have expressed interest in participating in the Water School project in its second round of training.

“What inspires me about this initiative is its professionalization of a collective (community-based) water management mechanism and the explicit pedagogical dimension in the work they do. The national and international linkages of this initiative are also very inspiring.”

– Evaluator Lorena Zarate

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us.

Or visit Tecámac Saptemac’s Facebook

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

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Forthcoming in: Marta Cantero Gamito & Hans-Wolfgang Micklitz (eds.) The Role of the EU in Transnational Legal Ordering: Standards, Contracts and Codes, Edward Elgar 2019

Christoph Busch

University of Osnabrück – European Legal Studies Institute

Abstract

Digital platforms are not only market intermediaries between different groups of platform users. They are also providers of governance mechanisms that are essential for the functioning of digital markets. Moreover, public regulators are increasingly relying on platforms as regulatory intermediaries, drawing on their superior operational capacities, data pools and direct access to platform users. A future EU regulatory policy for the platform economy should consider these multiple roles of digital platforms. Considering the rapid pace of technological innovation and the variety of different business models, the regulatory framework should be flexible enough to adapt to technological and economic developments. The chapter suggests a combination of principles-based legislation and ‘techno-legal standards’ elaborated by European standard-setting organisations involving all relevant stakeholders. A model for co-regulation could be the ‘New Approach’, which has been tried and tested over many years in the field of product safety and which could be transferred to platform regulation.

Read more and download the paper at SSRN.com

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