For instance, when a brand like Nike decides to make ads in favor of Colin Kaepernick, we want to push back. I get it. It’s blatant pandering to Black Lives Matter, right? It’s a dilution of the values of the movement. But it’s also an indication that a big company wants to show its support for an important cause.

So when a corporation decides to back Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, economic equality, or climate remediation, it is making a bet that those are sides that are going to win. This is good.

Or when Pepsi and Kendall Jenner do a zillion-dollar advertisement paying homage to some sort of Black Lives Matter rally, I know it’s inane. It reduces social justice activism to some sort of fashion statement. But it’s also a sign that Pepsi wants to be down with whatever this thing is as best they can understand it. It may have been a watered-down, issueless protest they were depicting, but no one could miss that they were trying to side with millennial angst and social justice in general — just as many millennials do. (As social satire, in some ways it reveals how a lot of activism is really a form of cultural fashion. Maybe that’s the real reason activists are so bothered by their hip representation in a Pepsi commercial. They know that — at least in part — they, too, are suckered by the sexy fun of protests and rallies, stopping traffic, and flummoxing cable news commentators and yet often have trouble articulating what about “the system” they actually want to change.)

No matter how superficial or self-congratulatory their efforts, however, what the corporations are trying to do is get on the right side of history. Think of it cynically, and it makes perfect sense: These giant corporations are picking sides in the culture wars. It’s not short-lived pandering; they can’t afford that. Unlike politicians, who often attempt to stroke and gratify different, sometimes opposed constituencies and appeal to a local base, corporations necessarily communicate to everyone at once. Super Bowl advertising is one size fits all.

So when a corporation decides to back Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, economic equality, or climate remediation, it is making a bet that those are sides that are going to win. This is good. It’s not simply a matter of employees or shareholders pushing management to do the right thing. No, it’s future forecasters telling the branding department where things are headed. Companies are realizing that their futures better be tied to whichever side of an issue that’s going to win.

The problem is that the more we attack people for whatever they did before they were woke, the less progress we’re going to make.

Cynical? Maybe. But, despite the way the Supreme Court might rule, corporations are not people; they’re just corporations. They don’t have feelings; they only have power. They’re putting their money and reputations on racial equality and social justice over white nationalism. This alone should serve as a leading indicator of where things are actually going. A sign of hope.

Instead of rejecting such efforts, we should welcome them. Maybe think of corporations as dinosaurs that can be trained. Their help is worth more than the pleasure of perpetual righteous indignation.

I’ve been likewise dismayed by many progressives’ take-no-prisoners approach to people who working for social justice. Bernie Sanders, perhaps the person most responsible for bringing the Democratic Party home from its neoliberal vacation, recently became the object of contempt for having used the word “niggardly” in a speech 30 years ago. Though the discomfort is understandable, the word has nothing to do with race. It means stingy. It was on my SATs in 1979. And yet, we’ve now moved into an era where we don’t use such a word because it sounds like a racial slur. I get that.

The problem is that the more we attack people for whatever they did before they were woke or, in Bernie’s case, before progressive standards changed, the less progress we’re going to make. Why agree that we should move beyond a certain behavior or attitude if doing so simply makes us vulnerable to attack? How can a D.C. politician, for example, push for the Washington Redskins to change their name when they know there’s footage somewhere of them rooting for the team or wearing a jersey with a Native American on it? Even though the politician may agree with the need for a change, they would have to resist or at least slow the wheels of progress lest they get caught under the cart. Intolerance and shaming is not the way to win allies.

Progressives are mad, hurt, and traumatized. But they’ve got to dismantle this circular firing squad and begin to welcome positive change rather than punish those who are trying to get woke. Truth and reconciliation work better than blame and shame.

The post Time for Progressives to Stop Shaming One Another appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Continuing our series of reactions to Trump’s electoral victory last month, Helena Norberg-Hodge and Rupert Read provide the following analysis. Originally published in The Ecologist:

The election of Donald Trump was a rude awakening from which many people in the US have still not recovered.

Their shock is similar to that felt by UK progressives, Greens, and those on the Left following the Brexit referendum.

In both cases, the visceral reaction was heightened by the barely-disguised racist and xenophobic messaging underpinning these campaigns.

Before these sentiments grow even more extreme, it’s vital that we understand their root cause. If we simply react in horror and outrage, if we only protest and denounce, then we fail to grasp the deeper ramifications of their votes.

For the defeat of both the Clinton campaign in the US and the Remain campaign in the UK can be explained by their inability to address the pain endured by ordinary citizens in the era of globalisation.

By failing to focus on the reckless profiteers driving the global economy, they allowed their opponents to offer a less truthful and more hateful explanation for voters’ social and economic distress.

In order to move forward, we need to give those who voted for Trump and Brexit something better to believe in. And we can. Because in both countries, voters emphatically rejected the system that has inflicted so much social and economic insecurity: pro-corporate globalisation. And that is the silver lining to the dark storm clouds we see.

Late lessons from early warnings

Before the Brexit vote, we warned that the gigantist, pro-growth rhetoric of most of the Remain side was utterly alienating to many small-c conservatives and to people who have been harmed by the uncontrolled movement of capital, goods, services and workers.

And we pointed out that neither side was painting a big picture that corresponded to the brutal reality of successive trade treaties, including those within the EU itself, that have put ordinary people in permanent competition with each other. It was against that system – and against the elites that alone have benefitted from it – that many millions in Britain voted, in some desperation and anger, to Leave.

Much the same applies to the US election. While many voters saw Hillary Clinton as capable, they did not see her as an alternative to the neoliberal status quo. Bernie Sanders would probably have beaten Trump, precisely because he firmly and explicitly rejected the pro-free-trade, pro-corporate ‘consensus’.

We need to learn from the Brexit and Trump votes that the far-Right thrives because it has a populist answer to the vicious impacts of globalisation. Voters want fundamental change, and the ‘reforms’ sought by mainstream progressives, Greens and those on the Left – like job training programs for displaced workers or voluntary safety standards for Third World factories – are simply inadequate.

Instead, we need to offer an alternative to globalisation itself.

How globalisation drives racial tension

Globalisation and market-driven centralisation actually drive the increase in xenophobia and racism that we have seen, by forcing people from every part of the world to compete against each other in a vicious economic race that only a handful can win.

One of the authors (Helena Norberg-Hodge) was a first-hand witness to this process in Ladakh, a region of India in the western Himalayas known as ‘Little Tibet’. For more than 600 years, Ladakhi Buddhists and Muslims lived side by side with no recorded instance of group conflict. They helped one another at harvest time, attended one another’s religious festivals, and sometimes intermarried.

But over a period of about 15 years starting in 1975, when the region was first opened to the global economy, tensions between Buddhists and Muslims escalated rapidly: by 1989 they were bombing each other’s homes. One mild-mannered Buddhist grandmother, who a decade earlier had been drinking tea and laughing with her Muslim neighbor, told me, “We have to kill all the Muslims or they will finish us off.”

How did relations between these two ethnic groups change so quickly and completely? The transformation is unfathomable, unless one understands the complex interrelated effects of globalisation on individuals and communities worldwide. These included

• the undermining of Ladakh’s local economy through the import of ‘cheap’ but heavily subsidized products;
• the centripetal pull of urban areas where jobs and political power became centralised;
• the consequent breakdown of village-scale cultural and governance structures;
• and the creation of unemployment and real poverty (problems that were preciously unknown in Ladakh).

In combination, these factors led to rising hostility against ‘the other’. (Norberg-Hodge has described these connections more fully in her book Ancient Futures, and in the documentary film The Economics of Happiness.)

Ladakh’s experience is not unique: all over the Global South, cultures have been impacted in a similar manner beginning with the era of conquest and colonialism; so have the UK and Europe starting with the Enclosures. But in recent decades, during the modern era of globalisation, the process has accelerated dramatically.

Destroying jobs, reducing wages, undermining conditions of work

By allowing corporations to move unfettered around the globe, ‘free trade’ treaties put workers throughout the industrialised world in competition with those who will accept a fraction of a dollar per hour.

For example, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) resulted in a net loss of 680,000 American jobs, and the Permanent Normal Trade Relations deal with China led to a net loss of another 2.7 million jobs. And it’s not only the disappearance of jobs that leads to impoverishment, but the threat that jobs can be easily taken elsewhere if workers don’t accept lower wages or fewer benefits.

At the same time, the infiltration of big business throughout the global South – most often with the support of national governments and backed by international financial institutions – has eliminated many of the livelihoods that local economies in those countries once provided.

With locally-adapted ways of life systematically undermined by economic policies geared towards the big and the global, millions of desperate people in the South find themselves with just two options: to accept minimal wages and appalling working conditions in industrial metropolises, or to migrate.

It is estimated that, as a direct result of heavily subsidized corn flooding the Mexican market under NAFTA, 2.4 million small farmers were displaced, and subsequently funneled into crowded urban centers or across the border to the US. So the loss of jobs in the North and the migrant crisis in the South are two sides of the same coin. But people have been steered away from looking at the flawed rules of the global economy that are behind both problems.

Although philosophically opposed to government regulation, the Right is now exploiting a situation – the cultural, economic, and psychological insecurity of vast swaths of the population – that is a product of the systematic deregulation of big business. Rather than allowing them to pull this sleight of hand, Left and Green voices must present a cogent critique of globalisation, and a coherent alternative.

We must show that it is not real progress to force every culture to commodify their commons, to subject every policy decision to the ‘discipline’ of monopolistic markets, to transform citizens into mindless consumers, and to lengthen supply-lines endlessly. The world has become dominated by a neoliberal ideology that makes all of this seem natural, desirable, unavoidable. It is none of those things.

In fact, voters are telling us that the age of David Cameron, Hillary Clinton and Francois Hollande is already over. The question now is: will it be succeeded by the age of Farage, Trump and le Pen. Or will we instead offer a viable green set of alternatives to globalization. If it is to be the latter, then our best option is localisation.

The solution: going local

Essentially, localisation means reducing the scale of economic activity – it’s about bringing the economy home. That doesn’t mean pulling up the drawbridges and retreating into isolationism. Nor does it mean an end to trade, even international trade.

But it does mean a fundamental change of emphasis: away from monoculture for export towards diversification for local needs. In a time of human-induced climate chaos and dwindling energy supplies, we need to reject out of hand the absurdities of the global marketplace, in which countries across the world routinely import and export identical products in almost identical quantities. The subsidies and other supports that currently make such practices ‘efficient’ and ‘profitable’ need to be reversed.

By reducing the scale of the economy, the environmental impacts of economic activity shrink as well. But the argument for localisation goes beyond the environment. Among other things, localisation allows us to live more ethically as citizens and consumers.

In the global economy, it’s as though our arms have grown so long that we can no longer see what our hands are doing. By contrast, when the economy operates on a smaller scale, everything is necessarily more transparent. We can see if the apples we are buying from the neighbouring farm are being sprayed with pesticides; we can see if workers’ rights are being abused.

We can already catch glimpses of localisation in action. Across the world, literally millions of initiatives are springing up-often in isolation one from another, but sharing the same underlying principles. The most important of these initiatives relate to food – which is important since food is the only thing humans produce that we all require every day.

From farmers’ markets to community supported agriculture, from ‘edible schoolyards’ to permaculture, a local food movement is sweeping the planet. But there are also projects underway to localise business, energy sources, banking and finance, and other needs.

Seeing the big picture

The UK decision to leave the EU is a risk, in that it might lead this country to seek to race even faster to the bottom, in particular by abandoning hard-won environmental protections. But it is also a great opportunity. We could choose, now, to disentangle ourselves from a fragile, resource-intensive and utterly-destructive global economy, in favour of re-embedding ourselves back into the Earth and our localities.

Similarly, President Trump is likely to serve up an incoherent mélange of protectionism on the one hand and deregulatory, pro-corporate policies on the other. Localisation, by contrast, represents a coherent and comprehensive shift in direction – it protects not only our countries and workforces but also the Earth, future generations, and the poor.

Relocalising would radically reign in the invisible Right of corporate domination, and would reverse the rising tide of the more visible Far-Right. But this can only happen if we see the bigger picture. It isn’t enough to defend immigrants against bad treatment if we fail to act against the system that drives the breakdown of community and of civility, that pulls people out of their own cultures and economies.

If we do not relocalise – if we continue to throw people into ruthless competition with each other while making local communities unviable – then we are watering the seeds of further anti-immigrant sentiment, and worse. But if we embrace localisation, then we sow new seeds of cooperation and international understanding.

Relocalising won’t be easy. The forces that promote globalisation control most of the avenues of information to which people have access, and their propaganda saturates the media, including the Internet.

It is going to take a linking of hands internationally – among labour and environmental groups, small businesses and family farmers, educators and students, religious groups and peace activists – to put new political leaders in place who do not ratify treaties that devastate our present and our future.

Instead, they need to collaborate to create treaties that protect the local, everywhere. And it will take determined effort in localities everywhere to restore local food and energy systems, and to rebuild local knowledge and local democracy.

Perhaps you are already part of that determined effort. If you are not, we hope you decide to join us in this vital work.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is author of ‘Ancient Futures’ and a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award.

Rupert Read is co-author of ‘The post-growth project‘.

Lead image: Woman preparing herbs for winter at Tso Moriri, Ladakh, India. Photo: sandeepachetan.com travel photography via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND).

The post After Brexit and Trump: don’t demonise; localise! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

2016 will be remembered as the year Donald Trump—a wealthy, narcissistic political novice with a strong authoritarian bent—was elected president of the United States after campaigning against economic globalization. The events are fresh enough in many people’s minds that feelings are still raw and the implications are both unclear and, for many, terrifying. For those who have spent years, in some cases decades, denouncing globalization and seeking to build a localist alternative, this is surely a vexing and confusing moment.

When the World Trade Organization’s ministerial conference in 1999 erupted into “the Battle of Seattle,” demonstrators voiced arguments that might resonate with the average Trump voter. They asserted that, for the United States, globalization was resulting in the offshoring of manufacturing that would otherwise have occurred domestically; that while American consumers were gaining access to cheaper consumer products, the hourly wages of workers were stagnating or falling in real terms due to competition with foreign labor; and that the investor class was benefitting significantly while the wage class was losing ground. All of these points were more recently driven home, to great effect, by The Donald.

However, the localist critique of globalization went much further than anything Trump himself has articulated. Anti-globalization activists decried a “race to the bottom” in environmental protections with each new trade deal, as well as the global loss of thousands of indigenous languages and locally-adapted forms of architecture, art, agriculture, and music in favor of a uniform global commercial culture dominated by corporate advertising and centralized industrial production methods. Further, teach-ins organized by International Forum on Globalization (IFG) beginning in the 1990s; books by the movement’s intellectual leaders (John Cavanagh’s and Jerry Mander’s Alternatives to Economic Globalization; Kirkpatrick Sale’s Dwellers in the Land and Human Scale; Michael Shuman’s Small-Mart Revolution and The Local Economy Solution; Helena Norberg Hodge’s Ancient Futures); and thousands of on-the-ground locally rooted cooperative efforts scattered worldwide promoted a vision of a green, sustainable, equitable bioregionalism.

Throughout the last couple of decades, some on the political left argued against localism and for globalism. Returning to a politics and economics centered in the community, it was said, would undermine the grand liberal vision of a borderless world with protections for human rights and the environment. Liberal globalists argued that climate change can only be fought with international treaties. It is by becoming global citizens, they intoned, that we can overcome ancient prejudices and fulfill humanity’s evolutionary destiny. Localists responded that, in practice, economic globalization has nothing to do with moral elevation or with worker and environmental protections, but everything to do with maximizing short-term profit for the few at the expense of long-term sustainability for people and planet.

That philosophical dispute may continue, but the context has shifted dramatically: the commanding new fact-on-the-ground is that the American electorate has for now sided with the anti-globalist argument, and we face the imminent presidency of Donald Trump as a result. Should localists declare victory? As we’re about to see, the situation is complicated and holds some opportunities along with plenty of perils.

True, voters rejected a predatory trade system that, in Helena Norberg Hodges’s words, “put ordinary people in permanent competition with each other.” However, Trump is not a one-man government; nor does he stand at the head of an organization of people with a coherent critique of globalism and a well thought-out alternative program. His administration will reflect the ideas and ideals of hundreds of high-placed officials, and Trump’s key appointees so far consist of business leaders, Republican insiders, and former lobbyists. They also stand to be the wealthiest cabinet in the history of the U.S. government. Crucially, not even Donald Trump himself has a clear idea of how to actually implement his stated intention of bringing back jobs for American workers. His first stab at the task, persuading the Carrier company not to move its air conditioner manufacturing operations to Mexico (actually, fewer than half the jeopardized jobs were saved), entailed doling out huge tax breaks—a tactic that Bernie Sanders rightly points outwill simply lead to other companies announcing outsourcing plans so they can win similar concessions.

Let’s be clear: Trump’s ascendancy probably represents not a victory for localism or even populism, but merely a co-optation of legitimate popular frustrations by a corporatist huckster who intends to lead his merry band of cronies and sycophants in looting what’s left of America’s natural and cultural resources. This would be the antithesis of green localism. Indeed, we may see an activist federal government attempt to trample local efforts to protect the environment, workers’ rights, or anything else that gets in the way of authoritarian corporatism. Congress may train its gun sights on local ordinances to ban fracking and GMOs, and on firearm regulations in states with the temerity to stand up to the NRA. Trump’s message appeals as much to tribalism as to anti-globalization sentiments—and only to members of certain tribes.

What should we localists do, then? Bernie Sanders, who ran on a far more genuinely localist platform than Trump’s, says he might work with the new president if conditions are right. In a recent interview with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, Sanders said he would cooperate with Trump where there was common ground, but oppose him wherever the new President impinged on the interests of workers, people of color, immigrants, women, or the environment:

[T]his guy talked about ending our disastrous trade policies, something I’ve been fighting for 30 years. He talked about taking on the drug companies, taking on Wall Street, taking on the overall political establishment—‘draining the swamp.’ We will see to what degree there was any honesty in what he was saying.

Trump has also promised to keep America from invading more countries. Good luck with that.

Specifically for localists, there may be opportunities to collaborate on the revival of domestic manufacturing. However, if that happens on Trump’s terms, the lion’s share of benefits will likely go to business owners. Trump says he wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure for the country, and many localists would agree the nation needs an enormous investment in electric rail, public transportation, and renewable energy technologies if it is to mitigate climate change and the impacts of oil depletion. Yet the infrastructure Trump favors consists mostly of more fossil fuel-dependent highways and airport runways, which we already have way too much of, thank you very much; and he proposes to get that infrastructure built by giving tax breaks to corporations, whether they actually produce anything or not. Collaboration with authoritarian leaders always leads to moral quandaries, as Masha Gessen details in a recent thoughtful essay in New York Review of Books. But there may be few incentives to tempt localists to work with a Trump administration.

Another strategic response to the new leader would be resistance: block him from doing bad things, voice displeasure in creative and strategic ways, and pour metaphoric sand in the gears of the new administration. There will likely be lots of awful things to oppose, including efforts to privatize public assets, including federal lands and even whole government agencies; efforts to weaken consumer protections, women’s rights, immigrant rights, worker protections, environmental regulations (including reversals of steps to deal with global climate change and stays on oil pipeline construction); assaults on civil rights and civil liberties, workers’ rights, prisoners’ rights, public education, and more.

Resistance at the local level actually holds considerable promise. As Heather Gerken wrote in a recent article in The Nation,

States can significantly slow down or reverse federal policies simply by dragging their feet and doing the bare minimum necessary. That’s how state and localities have thwarted federal education reform over the last several years. Sometimes states just pull their enforcement resources. . . . Some states even engage in a form of civil disobedience, as many did in refusing to enforce parts of the Patriot Act.

If Trump’s authoritarian personality were to become the main driver of public policy, non-compliance could be the order of the day for elected or appointed state officials, local police officers, prosecutors, juries, state and local agencies, school boards, and teachers—and not just in blue states, nor just in big cities or college towns. Already, according to Gerken,

. . . cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have promised to be sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants, while Governor Andrew Cuomo has insisted that New York will be a “refuge” for Muslims and other minority groups. These promises have made the incoming administration so nervous that it has threatened to cut off all federal funding—a threat that is plainly unconstitutional.

Consider a worst-case scenario: At some point after Donald Trump is fully ensconced in the White House, a widespread disaster occurs—perhaps an economic crisis for which the Great Recession was only a dress rehearsal; maybe a natural catastrophe—and the president declares a national emergency, suspending the Constitution. Congress and the Supreme Court decline to resist this unprecedented power grab. While he is making well-publicized efforts to deal with the immediate crisis, Trump decides to use the opportunity to punish his enemies, issuing arrest orders for journalists, left-leaning college professors, immigrant-rights and environmental activists, and anyone else who has managed to offend him. Public vocal opposition to the administration becomes foolhardy. In such circumstances, only quiet but effective local resistance would stand much chance of saving careers and perhaps even lives. Thankfully, as Gerken notes, “As hard as it is to control Washington, it’s even harder for Washington to control the rest of us.”

This Trumpocalypse scenario probably won’t materialize, and we should all pray it doesn’t; I describe it here only because it seems far more likely to occur under the coming presidency than any in recent memory, for reasons I’ll return to below. In any case, the Trump administration may be shaping up to be one of the most centralist and anti-local in history, battling thousands of communities determined to thwart and resist federal policies at every step.

One line of resistance deserves special attention: the protection of vulnerable places. All geography is local, and the salvation of that grand generality, “the environment,” often comes down to a fight on the part of local citizens to defend a particular river, forest, or at-risk species. This is likely to be especially true during the tenure of a federal administration committed to rolling back national environmental regulations.

As important as resistance efforts will be, pouring all our energy into opposition may be poor strategy. Just as important will be building local alternatives—cooperative institutions and enterprises, including community land trusts, city-owned public banks, credit unions, and publicly owned utilities investing in renewables. Such constructive efforts have, after all, always been the main work of committed localists.

Transition U.S. recently published a report highlighting “25 enterprises that build resilience,” including Bay Bucks, a business-to-business barter exchange program in California’s greater San Francisco Bay Area with more than 250 participating local businesses; CERO in Boston, MA, a worker-owned energy and recycling cooperative; Cooperative Jackson, in Jackson MS, which is developing a network of cooperatives engaging in a range of services and pursuits from child care to urban farming; and Co-op Power, a network of regional renewable energy cooperatives in the Northeastern U.S. These are merely representative examples of what amounts to a fledgling global movement that has emerged partly in response to the Global Financial Crisis. It goes by various names—the sharing economy, the solidarity economy, the cooperative economy, the local economy movement—and takes many forms, all with the aims of decentralization and self-organization, and of meeting human needs with a minimum of environmental impact. Sometimes municipal governments get involved, investing public resources into worker-cooperative development. Further, localist successes are often shared internationally—in programs such as Sister Cities International and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), which is effectively an international league of municipalities—so as to seed similar efforts far afield.

The next four years may be a time when much that is beautiful and admirable about America is attacked, looted, liquidated, and suppressed; and when some of the more shameful elements of the country are empowered, amplified, and celebrated. If there is a political corollary to Newton’s third law (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction), then the radical policy shifts promised by Trump will engender an enormous backlash. It is as yet unclear what forms that backlash will take, but much of the energy unleashed will be expressed locally.

The wider historical context within which Trump and anti-Trump forces collide will have enormous significance. While there is often no way to predict events like natural disasters, major terrorist attacks, or the outbreak of a major war, there are sometimes prior warnings. Currently one warning sign is flashing bright: the likelihood of a serious economic downturn within the next four years. Debt levels are unprecedented, a cyclical recession is already overdue, and our oil-based energy system is running on fumes. Hard times for the economy usually result in rejection of the government that’s in charge when the crisis happens to hit. Which means the anti-Trump reaction will likely eventually be intensified even further, though it also means the Trumpocalypse scenario described earlier in this essay might have a handy trigger.

Trump voters were not all racists, misogynists, and xenophobes. Many were simply ordinary Americans fed up with a government that tolerated or actively supported the dismantling of the American middle class through global trade deals and corporate influence, and who also sensed the decline of American civilization (which, it must be said, is inevitable in some way or form). They voted for a man who promised to make America great again; what they’re actually likely to see is more economic turmoil. Trump promised not to touch Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, but the team he’s heading promises to gut those programs. One way or another, many Trump voters will likely feel betrayed. This could translate to a deepening national political cynicism, or to action.

Can we enlist those people and many others not just in opposing Trump, but also in building genuine local alternatives to the globalist excesses that elected Trump in the first place? That can only happen as the result of thousands, perhaps millions of honest conversations among neighbors, friends, and relatives, in towns and cities across the nation. Arguments about politics often accomplish little, but efforts to find common ground in community projects that meet people’s needs could eventually change everything. . And stronger communities, local economies, and greater self-reliance are all things that many people in Trump’s America would support.

Localism is a long, slow, patient path that requires trust, patience, and hard work. Such mundane work may sound boring in a time of political crisis and turmoil. But it may soon get a lot more interesting.

Photo by Littlelixie

The post Localism in the Age of Trump appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Liberals seem to be about freedom, because freedom is in their name.  Indeed, historically they were all about freedom, freedom from the social strictures of monarchy and feudal power.  The liberals were wealthy bourgeois who wanted the “freedom” to run the country.  In the early days, many of these used populist rhetoric to catalyse the power of the general population behind their campaign.  However, if you look at any of their writings, for example those of Locke, Adam Smith or Rousseau, you can see that the freedom of liberalism was intended not for everyone but specifically for an educated elite. Liberal freedom means even the queen is free to sleep under the bridge.

Once liberals had displaced hereditary feudal power and become ruling parties in the great industrial states, they changed the thrust of their emancipatory campaign. Instead of civic freedom for all, liberals used their power to entrench their economic position and began to apply another notion of freedom, free markets and free trade. To this day liberals “freedom” is principally about free markets and free trade, i.e. global corporatism and its rentier property system.
The Left, on the other hand, advocate an international solidarity economy, the evening out of the inequalities of wealth and opportunity, an economy where value is produced by each according to their abilities and for each according to their needs. The Left reject the false freedom of free markets which generate cabals of colluding monopolists who inevitably abuse their wealth to exercise inordinate political power over the many. The Left reject any form of nationalistic, racist, sexist, or any other normative discriminatory political disenfranchisement. The Left struggles for an economy where rentier title has been mutualized and the value of the productive contribution of each is set towards ensuring the best conditions of the flourishing of all.

In terms of freedom of expression, both the Left and liberals are permissive. However liberals believe in the freedom of the wealthy to make their expression heard louder than anybody else’s, and they exercise this “freedom”.  Liberals also believe in the super-national privilege of corporations to silence criticism of their business as being damaging to their profitability.[1]  The Left attempts to build utopian forums and other social forms of civic organisation where in principle everybody’s views can be negotiated. This highly democratic ideal is still in its infancy, it remains one of the most important sectors of social innovations of the Left.

In the US, it is said, there is a crisis of the liberal media. But the liberal media with their Purple Revolution is showing itself perfectly able to function and adapt to the new reality under Trump.  Times will now only get more difficult for the disenfranchised who voted for Trump and Sanders, and the liberal media will ignore them, because MSM are the voice of free-market bankers and free trade colonial business. Wall street revenues pay the paychecks of the news anchors researchers, journalists and actors on the liberal media, it is no wonder that Bernie Sanders was given such paltry coverage, unlike Trump who blamed illegal workers and minorities for the crisis facing the US, Sanders pointed his finger squarely at the 1%, the owners of the media.

The solidarity Left economy is small, it does not have the luxury to fund massive media juggernauts which crush popular opinion into submission. Nevertheless the movement which rallied behind the Sanders candidacy was able to break fundraising records of small contributions without any benefit of MSM publicity. This is because Sanders’ message, like that of Trump, resonated the suffering and represented the conditions to the vast majority, rendered despondent under liberal austerity economics. Whereas the MSM were fine to showcase the egregious, insulting and offensive excesses of the extreme right candidate, they ignored the one which threatened to truly undermine liberal power through advocating such things as progressive taxation and banking reform.

In the US, all the Left or “progressive” media is constrained, for budgetary reasons to the margins of the Internet.  Despite what we are told about the MSM being “dead”, it is still the authoritative source for news for the vast majority of people, especially the old, who still vote.  Even Wikipedia, apogee of democratic erudition, is biased towards mostly liberal MSM with their condition that only “reliable sources” be used as references in articles.  What are “reliable sources”? The academic publications, liberal media press and publications, or the conservative ones.[2]

The monopolization of broadcast media by a collusive wealthy oligarchy is illegitimate, as is all private rentier title. Unfortunately the Left can have no chance to politically challenge both liberals and conservatives without a truly Left media of scale. Under Trump, the majority of the American people will have it demonstrated again that their best interests will never be served by either the Democratic party or Republican party because they are two sides of the moneyed elite. The conditions of the vast majority will not improve and the emancipation of the human potential of the youth will be suppressed for another generation.

Only a truly Left and not a liberal media can coalesce the political movements which can withstand the crushing intellectual and physical assaults of the elites. We have seen during the democratic primary how independent media can play a transformative role in bringing people into and supporting communication, exchange and collaboration within a movement which truly has their interests at its core. But such media must burst into the mainstream, and this will require great economic resources. Organizations like TYT [3] demonstrate, as did the Sanders campaign, that progressive values can be supported long-term with small donations from a wide base. This model needs to be expanded and extended. In the meantime let us not confuse liberal with Left… it is not helping anyone face down the challenge from the right.

Notes

[1] see https://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/digital-journalists-legal-guide/can-corporation-sue-me-harm-its-reputatio

[2] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources

[3] the Young Turks, originally a progressive political news network, now offers a wide range of programming primarily for millennials. https://tytnetwork.com/  Photo by david_shankbone

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Zinn’s observation has never been more true than in this election year, when the two candidates running under major party banners have the fewest redeeming features of any presidential candidates in my lifetime.

I have no moral qualms at all against strategic voting in self-defense. Until a few weeks ago, I was inclined to boycott the election altogether. I thought and still think that Hillary Clinton is godawful and had considerable sympathy for the Sanders insurgency. But a handful of recent developments like revelations by the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal” and the howls of fascist bloodlust at the GOP convention have convinced me that Trump’s threat goes beyond the ordinary and reaches Germany 1932 levels — or maybe Greg Stillson in “The Dead Zone” levels. So yeah, I’m willing to vote Clinton if my state is close just to avert that threat.

But the choice is still one between merely godawful and apocalyptically bad. Trump is a rallying point for outright fascism by social reactionaries and racists who want to reverse the tide of history. Trump openly threatens, in rhetoric unmatched for authoritarianism since Giuliani held office in New York, to use the full power of the state to harass and shut down his critics in the press.

As for Clinton… Well, the prominence given to retired Gen. John Allen’s jingoistic ravings were featured at the Convention, and the fact that delegates chanting “No more wars!” were shouted down by mindless barking of “USA! USA!”, says it all. She’s more hawkish than Obama. She’s fully committed to Obama’s program of murderous drone warfare and legal persecution of whistleblowers, and agrees with Trump on the substance of his stances on mandatory encryption backdoors and Internet surveillance. On issues like the Trans Pacific Partnership, fracking and the Keystone pipeline she has — reluctantly and with great equivocation — responded to pressures on her left flank by making leftish sounding noises. But nobody outside the most sycopanthic “I’m With Her!” Kool-aid drinkers expect her to honor them once elected. If her economic policy team isn’t made up of appointees from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, I’ll eat my shorts.

So the outcome of this vote will, at best, slow down the rate at which the American government gravitates towards plutocracy, police statism and global corporate Empire.

It’s pretty unrealistic, when you get right down to it, to expect anything else. The American state is part of a complex of institutions whose job is to prop up corporate capitalism and enforce white supremacy, and the two major parties — including the establishments and finance systems that filter the candidates you’re allowed to choose between in the primaries — are very much a part of that system.

That’s not to say that political action is useless — but its main purpose is to run interference, to deter state repression, and to safeguard our primary task, which is outside the realm of electoral politics: actually building the kind of society we want to live in.

Insurrectionary and revolutionary approaches to systemic change, and Old Left approaches like Leninism and Social Democracy, take a strategic approach focused on capturing the centers of political and economic power and using the state to transform the socio-economic system. Such approaches require a verticalist organizational model based on institutional mass and hierarchical structure — for example centrally coordinated mass political parties, establishment lobbies and NGOs.

But this model of influencing or capturing the state is becoming less and less relevant as a growing share of functions performed by governments and large corporations become obsolete.

In the 19th century the economy became dominated by the giant corporations that could afford the increasingly expensive machinery required for production. And around these giant corporations, there grew a complex of other centralized, hierarchical institutions like government agencies, universities, charitable foundations and public school systems for providing the corporations with organizational inputs they needed or stabilizing their functioning within the larger society.

Today we’re experiencing a reversal of that transformation. We have a set of tools for building a cooperative, horizontally organized counter-economy under our own democratic control. Permaculture and other intensive farming techniques can produce far more food from far less land than the giant agribusiness operations on their stolen land. Open source micro-manufacturing tools, like routers, 3-D printers, cutting tables and the like that can be produced for $1000 or less apiece, mean that a small shop with CNC tabletop machine tools worth six months’ factory pay can do the former work of mass production dinosaur industry. Self-organized networks are far more efficient, as coordinating mechanisms, than the old institutional bureaucracies with their Taylorist work rules and Weberian job descriptions.

Put them all together, and you’ve got a junkyard dog counter-economy that can not only operate on a tiny fraction of the enormous piles of stolen capital and land of the corporate economy, but — because of its high-overhead and bureaucratic ossification — run circles around it in agility.

Throughout most of history, class exploitation was based on physical control of access to the means of production, which were scarce and expensive. The propertied classes enclosed the land and then extracted rents from those who lived and worked on it. They used their accumulated stolen wealth to build factories, and with the help of their state’s police and military controlled the terms on which the working class, robbed of its property in the land, was allowed to work in them.

Today, when the physical means of production are becoming radically abundant and cheap, and the most important productive resource is the knowledge and social relationships of workers themselves, capitalists must instead enforce, not physical control of the means of production, but legal monopolies on the actual right to produce.

The capitalist state’s central strategy, through instruments like TPP and other “Free Trade” Agreements, is to impose ever more draconian “intellectual property” laws that enforce legal monopolies on the very right to produce: on the right of associated labor to apply general intellect to physical nature, without the permission of the corporations that “own” those human relationships and knowledge. And the biggest threat it faces is networked, horizontal movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and assorted movements to hack “intellectual property” in culture, software and hardware; hence the rapid growth in the machinery of the surveillance state.

But even here, the capitalists and their state find themselves at a disadvantage. Because of the agility of networked organization and the stupidity of hierarchy, the technologies for circumventing monopoly are always three steps ahead of the technologies for enforcing it.

So if you feel the need to vote in order to avert the immediate threat of fascism, by all means do so. But the state and the class system it enforces are doomed in the long run. And in the meantime, we have a new society to build.

Photo by Darron Birgenheier

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Stein goes even further than Sanders on several key issues, and one of them is her economic platform. She has proposed a “Power to the People Plan” that guarantees basic economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities; living-wage jobs for every American who needs to work; an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health insurance program; tuition-free public education through university level; and the abolition of student debt. She also supports the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall,  separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.

Going beyond Bernie, she calls for large cuts to the bloated military budget, which makes up 55% of federal discretionary spending; and progressive taxation, ensuring that the wealthy pay their fair share. Most controversial, however, is her plan to tap up the Federal Reserve. Pointing to the massive sums the Fed produced out of the blue to bail out Wall Street, she says the same resources used to save the perpetrators of the crisis could be made available to its Main Street victims, beginning with the students robbed of their futures by massive student debt.

It Couldn’t Be Done Until It Was

Is tapping up the Fed realistic? Putting aside for the moment the mechanics of pulling it off, the central bank has indeed revealed that it has virtually limitless resources, as seen in the radical “emergency measures” taken since 2008.

The Fed first surprised Congress when it effectively “bought” AIG, a private insurance company, for $80 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remarked, “Many of us were . . . taken aback when the Fed had $80 billion to invest — to put into AIG just out of the blue. All of a sudden we wake up one morning and AIG has received $80 billion from the Fed. So of course we’re saying, Where’s this money come from?”

The response was, “Oh, we have it. And not only that, we have more.”

How much more was revealed in 2011, after an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the 2010 Wall Street reform law prompted the Government Accounting Office to conduct the first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve. It revealed that the Fed had provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the economic crisis. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else,” said Sanders in a press release.

Then there was the shocker of “quantitative easing” (QE), an unconventional monetary policy in which the central bank creates new money electronically to buy financial assets such as Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities (many of them “toxic”) from the banks. Critics said QE couldn’t be done because it would lead to hyperinflation. But it was done, and that dire result has not occurred.

Unfortunately, the economic stimulus that QE was supposed to trigger hasn’t occurred either. QE has failed because the money has gotten no further than the balance sheets of private banks. To stimulate the demand that will jumpstart the economy, new money needs to get into the real economy and the pockets of consumers.

Why QE Hasn’t Worked, and What Would

The goal of QE as currently implemented is to return inflation to target levels by increasing private sector borrowing. But today, as economist Richard Koo explains, individuals and businesses are paying down debt rather than taking out new loans. They are doing this although credit is very cheap, because they need to rectify their debt-ridden balance sheets in order to stay afloat. Koo calls it a “balance sheet recession.”

As the Bank of England recently acknowledged, the vast majority of the money supply is now created by banks when they make loans. Money is created when loans are made, and it is extinguished when they are paid off. When loan repayment exceeds borrowing, the money supply “deflates” or shrinks. New money then needs to be injected to fill the breach. Currently, the only way to get new money into the economy is for someone to borrow it into existence; and since the private sector is not borrowing, the public sector must, just to replace what has been lost in debt repayment. But government borrowing from the private sector means running up interest charges and hitting deficit limits.

The alternative is to do what governments arguably should have been doing all along: issue the money directly to fund their budgets.

Central bankers have largely exhausted their toolkits, prompting some economists to  recommend some form of “helicopter money” – newly-issued money dropped directly into the real economy. Funds acquired from the central bank in exchange for government securities could be used to build infrastructure, issue a national dividend, or purchase and nullify federal debt. Nearly interest-free loans could also be made by the central bank to state and local governments, in the same way they were issued to rescue an insolvent banking system.

Just as the Fed bought federal and mortgage-backed securities with money created on its books, so it could buy student or other consumer debt bundled as “asset-backed securities.” But in order to stimulate economic activity, the central bank would have to announce that the debt would never be collected on. This is similar to the form of “helicopter money” recently suggested by former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to the Japanese, using debt instruments called “non-marketable perpetual bonds with no maturity date” – bonds that can’t be sold or cashed out by the central bank and that bear no interest.

Green Party 2016 presidential candidate Jill Stein. (Gage Skidmore / CC-BY-2.0)

The Bernanke proposal (which he says could also be used by the US Fed in an emergency) involves the government issuing bonds, which it sells to the central bank for dollars generated digitally by the bank. The government then spends the funds directly into the economy, bypassing the banks.

Something similar could be done as a pilot project with student debt, Stein’s favorite target for relief. The US government could pay the Department of Education for the monthly payments coming due for students not in default or for whom payment had been suspended until they found employment. This would free up income in those households to spend on other consumer goods and services, boosting the economy in a form of QE for Main Street.

In QE as done today, the central bank reserves the right to sell the bonds it purchases back into the market, in order to reverse any hyperinflationary effects that may occur in the future. But selling bonds and taking back the cash is not the only way to shrink the money supply. The government could just raise taxes on sectors that are currently under-taxed (tax-dodging corporations and the super-rich) and void out the additional money it collects. Or it could nationalize “systemically important” banks that are insolvent or have failed to satisfy Dodd-Frank “living will” requirements (a category that now includes five of the country’s largest banks), and void out some of the interest collected by these newly-nationalized banks. Insolvent megabanks, rather than being bailed out by the government or “bailed in” by their private creditors and depositors, arguably should be nationalized – not temporarily, but as permanent public utilities. If the taxpayers are assuming the risks and costs, they should be getting the profits.

None of these procedures for reversing inflation would be necessary, however, if the money supply were properly monitored. In our debt-financed system, the economy is chronically short of the money needed to support a dynamic, abundant economy. New money needs to be added to the system, and this can be done without inflating prices. If the money goes into creating goods and services rather than speculative asset bubbles, supply and demand will rise together and prices will remain stable.

Is It in the President’s Toolbox?

Whether Stein as president would have the power to pull any of this off is another question. QE is the province of the central bank, which is technically “independent” from the government. However, the president does appoint the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, Chair and Vice Chair, with the approval of the Senate.

Failing that, the money might be found by following the lead of Abraham Lincoln and the American colonists and issuing it directly through the Treasury. But an issue of US Notes or Greenbacks would also require an act of Congress to change existing law.

If Stein were unable to get either of those federal bodies to act, however, she could resort to a “radical” alternative already authorized in the Constitution: an issue of large-denomination coins. The Constitution gives Congress the power to “coin Money [and] regulate the value thereof,” and Congress has delegated that power to the Treasury Secretary. When minting a trillion dollar platinum coin was suggested as a way around an artificially imposed debt ceiling in January 2013, Philip Diehl, former head of the U.S. Mint and co-author of the platinum coin law, confirmed:

In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years. The Secretary authority is derived from an Act of Congress (in fact, a GOP Congress) under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8).

The power just needs to be exercised, something the president can instruct the Secretary to do by executive order.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt engaged in a radical monetary reset when he took the dollar off the gold standard domestically. The response was, “We didn’t know you could do that.” Today the Federal Reserve and central banks globally have been engaging in radical monetary policies that have evoked a similar response, and the sky has not fallen as predicted.

As Stein quotes Alice Walker, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

The runaway success of Sanders and Trump has made it clear that the American people want real change from the establishment Democratic/Republican business-as-usual that Hillary represents. But real change is not possible within the straitjacket of a debt-ridden, austerity-based financial scheme controlled by Wall Street oligarchs. Radical economic change requires radical financial change, as Roosevelt demonstrated. To carry the baton of revolution to the finish line requires revolutionary tools, which Stein has shown she has in her toolbox.

Cross-posted from Truthout and originally titled “Can Jill Stein Carry Sanders’ Baton? A Look at the Green Candidate’s Radical Funding Solution”

Photo by 401(K) 2013

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George Lakey disagrees. Lakey, for his part, has been involved in several generations of social change in the United States, often through his Quaker communities—marching against racism in the civil rights movement, sailing a medicine-bearing “peace ship” into the war zone in Vietnam, organizing men against sexism and forging interracial alliances with the Movement for a New Society in West Philadelphia. Since then, he has mentored younger activists as a professor at Swarthmore College, a founder of Training for Change and a member of the the Earth Quaker Action Team, which mounts strategic campaigns against the systems that pollute the planet for profit.

I came to know George as editor of his columns at Waging Nonviolence, where he shared stories and lessons from his long experience, attuned to the challenges of ongoing struggles like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. One column, published as Occupy’s enthusiasm was beginning to wane, explained “How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent.’” It was one of the most popular articles we ever published—a message of hope that a well-organized population really can transform the economy. Now, he has published a book-length tribute to the Nordic countries’ pragmatism and spirit, “Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got it Right — and How We Can, Too.” It insists that those who dismiss the Nordic model, which has produced some of the world’s fairest and most democratic societies, do so at their peril.

We once published a widely circulated article about “Viking economics.” What led you to develop these ideas into a book?

The yearning to share with my compatriots what’s going on in Northwestern Europe is actually an old one—it dates from when I married into Norway as a young man and studied and worked there. When my wife Berit and I settled in the United States, I naturally wanted to share some of what I learned overseas, since I regarded the Nordic peoples as having created a kind of lab where they could try out new approaches and find out what worked. They made mistakes and also discovered a lot of lessons that were really international best practices, so I assumed people back home would be eager to learn. To my disappointment, my people were defensive, stuck in the belief that only Americans knew how to invent the best ways to do things.

Then, when the U.S. banking bubble burst in 2007 and 2008 and people could see we were in serious trouble, I found acquaintances were suddenly eager to hear about anything that worked better. In the meantime, I’d worked in Denmark and Sweden, so I decided to write a book about those countries, along with Norway and Iceland, all of which had ancient Viking ancestry. These countries now have a 60-plus-year track record of remarkable achievements, like free higher education and universal affordable child care and a health care system that takes care of everyone at less cost per person than we pay for a system that doesn’t even meet our whole population’s needs. Those countries even gave up poverty, a huge change from the massive poverty they had before they adopted their new economic model.

I think many of us assumed that the Scandinavian welfare state just appeared out of the sky one day, a natural outgrowth of cold weather plus a small and homogeneous population.

I actually attack the phrase “welfare state” in my book. Americans imagine that “welfare state” means the U.S. welfare system on steroids. Actually, the Nordics scrapped their American-style welfare system at least 60 years ago, and substituted universal services, which means everyone—rich and poor—gets free higher education, free medical services, free eldercare, etc. Universal totally beats the means-testing characteristic of their dreadful old welfare system that they discarded and that the United States still has.

So, properly speaking, in the U.S. context the Nordics should be regarded not as welfare states but as “universal services states.” Nobody has gotten rid of poverty through charity, philanthropy and welfare, whereas poverty can be abolished through universal services.

Point taken! So, what made that transition happen?

A century ago a majority of the people saw through the pretense of democracy that they had—free elections with a parliamentary system in which the key decisions always took the direction the economic elite wanted. The people then mobilized in several different ways. They formed producers’ cooperatives to handle their fishing and logging and farming activities, and also consumer cooperatives to pay less for quality goods and even insurance and housing. At the same time, they were learning how to wage nonviolent direct action campaigns to get specific changes. For example, workers waged strikes in their workplaces. People also learned more about boycotts and demonstrations to use in their campaigns. All of that, plus study circles, produced people’s movements in which people empowered themselves to make their countries genuinely democratic.

The economic elite pushed back, of course, even calling out the troops to defend their privileged status. Activists were imprisoned; marchers were killed. Still, the people persevered and made their nations ungovernable by the elite. In 1931 the Swedish Conservative government fell during a widespread general strike and the Social Democrats took over, to rule for decades. People’s struggles in other countries were variations of this, at different moments (as recently as 2008 in Iceland!), but in all cases it took a major mobilization of nonviolent direct action to force a power shift and give the majority a chance to create what came to be known as the Nordic model.

You’re pretty evangelistic about that Nordic model. Does it have shortcomings, too?

Norwegians call themselves “a nation of complainers,” and I have friends in Denmark and Sweden who have strong critiques of their countries’ not having gone farther and faster on the road to equality. They say that just because their countries are at the top of the international charts for equality, that is no reason to be smug. Sure, the Nordics invented a system that prevents people from being poor according to the U.S. definition of poverty, which is not being able to count on the basic necessities of life like food and shelter and medical care. I live in Philadelphia and personally know a dad who shared his shoes with his nearly grown teenage son, because between them they have only one pair, and the other one wears sandals or sneakers with holes in them. That’s what I don’t find in the Nordic countries. But they haven’t gotten rid of “relative poverty”—the international definition—which compares people at the bottom with middle income people.

Several times, you write about the role of Christian faith to explain the Scandinavian urge to take care of one another. Yet these countries are, in terms of church attendance and theistic belief, among the most secular in the West. That’s not something you write about much. Can you untangle the role of religion here?

It’s a complicated story, with variations among the four countries, so I’ll focus on Norway, since I learned to speak Norwegian and know more about the country. Christianity came to Norway because King Olav was converted, which a thousand years ago meant all citizens automatically became “Christian.” It was a state church set-up, paid for by government-enforced taxation, so there was not really that much incentive for religious orders to win the hearts of the people—winning their minds was sufficient. When the state church abruptly became Lutheran, the basic set-up continued, and the lack of people’s everyday practice of faith did not have to be of great concern to pastors. Of course, some religious were evangelical and did reach people’s hearts, thank God, but many Norwegians continued to find more spiritual solace in their communion with nature than inside the church buildings. Some Roman Catholics did manage to keep congregations together, and in recent centuries, Methodists and Baptists made inroads by building congregations where community could be experienced.

In some ways the big religious upsurge was the Free Church movement: Lutherans denouncing the state church for being overly attached to its privileges—and also to the most privileged in society—and uncaring about the common people. Free Church pastors integrated everyday concerns with biblical passages in their sermons and urged a piety that became a seven-days-a-week religion. Even while so many Norwegians still found their spiritual nourishment in the wonder of creation, and preferred to go cross-country skiing through their endless woods rather than go to church, the Free Church movement did gain strength and was also more in alignment with the egalitarian impulse of the labor movement and the small farmers who together were largely responsible for opening the political space in which the Nordic model could be invented.

If you were to write a sequel to this book on “Viking religion,” or some such, what would the thesis be?

The thesis would be that even when the precious movement of the Holy Spirit appears completely submerged in the bureaucracy and worldliness of a state church, it remains alive and able to inspire deeply courageous faithfulness. I would tell stories from the Nazi German occupation of Norway during World War II, when state-church bishops defied Nazi commands and church members helped some Jews escape the Holocaust. I would tell about the Gestapo officer who stalked into the study of a pastor who had been preaching against Nazism, sat down at the pastor’s desk and laid his gun on the desk. The pastor then laid his Bible beside the gun. The officer asked, “Why did you do that?” The pastor replied: “You took out your weapon, and I took out mine.” So many examples!

When Islamophobia appeared in Norway in response to increased immigration of Muslims, the Bishop of Oslo attended Oslo’s largest mosque to join the celebration of Eid, the end of Ramadan. When a prominent politician began to promote Islamophobia, a group of Norwegian bishops visiting Israel and Palestine made a point of going to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. Two years later, Norway finally gave up having an official religion. I interviewed a prominent bishop who was visibly relieved, and delighted that he could now meet with other faith groups on the basis of a somewhat more equal playing field. Humility—I believe that has something to do with Christianity.

What resonance with your own Quaker tradition did you find in Scandinavian culture? What provocations?

An important belief among Quakers is in a “continuing revelation,” that is, that God is still quickening the hearts and minds of his children with knowledge and wisdom that, in earlier times, we might not have been able to hold. Most of the earliest Quakers—in the 17th century—did not see slavery as wrong, and some held slaves themselves. Because the Spirit was alive, tenderizing hearts with what today we might call empathy, Friends came to understand that slavery is an evil practice and, after cleansing their own religious society of the practice, fought (nonviolently) for its abolition. This, to Friends, is not surprising—how can we humans understand at any given moment in history the whole of divine truth?

At one point Jesus reportedly rebuked his disciples for not taking more responsibility for their own relationship with God’s truth, and said that it was time they think of themselves as his friends. For me that resonates with Nordic cultures; none of them wants to be frozen in time with yesterday’s partial understanding of the potential of human relationships. Henrik Ibsen railed in his plays against the subordination of women, and the Nordics have become world leaders in changing societal structures to ensure that women can enjoy their full capacity as having been made in God’s image.

While the Nordic cultures can teach us much about clearing away the economic and political obstacles to human development so that more people are accorded the dignity they deserve, I don’t find those cultures as broadly encouraging of delving into the inner life and using spiritual practices to do so. The disadvantage of the medieval church’s greater interest in capturing Nordic minds than nurturing their hearts may be that the cultures might have come to value rationality to a fault. As a professor, I have to like that! But as a Quaker, I know we are so much more.

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Throughout the 20th century, the chief legislative option in the United States for confronting monopolistic firms has been to break them up into pieces with antitrust law. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders now proposes this remedy for dealing with big banks, which appear no less “too big to fail” than they were when we bailed them out a few years ago.

This week, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp determined that five of the country’s biggest financial institutions still have no plan, in the event of insolvency, other than turning to the public for more bailouts. But size is only one of the moral hazards at play.

The real disaster of the 2008 crisis was not what happened to the banks – which shuffled their boardroom chairs a bit, paid back the government and kept on banking. The disaster was in what happened to millions of Americans, disproportionately people of color, who lost what little wealth they had to the banks’ predatory lending and perverse incentives. This led to cascading fallout around the world. Perhaps we should consider a new approach to antitrust policy, one that puts the would-be victims in charge.

It’s not entirely clear that the bigness of banks, per se, is the main problem. We live in a much more globalized world than that of the late 19th century, when the present logic of antitrust law was concocted. If you want to use the same piece of plastic to pay for hotel rooms in Shanghai and in Durban, you need financial institutions capable of reaching that far.

I loved my old neighborhood credit union, but it wasn’t much help when I moved out of the neighborhood; my new credit union is a bit bigger, and a lot more convenient. Even the call to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, and split deposits and lending from investing, could become harder to justify at a time when even individuals are making that distinction less and less.

Perhaps the problem, then, is not bigness so much as badness. I suspect that, when many of us talk about banks being “too big to fail”, what we really mean is “noxious institutions have come to dominate the economy so completely we can’t get rid of them”.

As Jamie Merchant pointed out at In These Times recently, the idea of breaking up big companies assumes that what we need is more healthy, ruthless, capitalist competition. That might make particular banks less dominant, but it won’t necessarily make them less noxious. The competition, in fact, could spur them toward greater recklessness.

Some institutions need to be big, but they can at least be accountable. So, consider an alternative: rather than breaking up the big banks, what if a new generation of public policy created a pathway toward more democratic ownership?

What if, for instance, a bank seeking new borrowers had to bring them on as co-owners, with a vote in the boardroom? They’d be less likely to hoodwink those borrowers with a predatory loan; too many bad loans, and the new co-owners could rise up and get the CEO fired. What if those votes were counted according to the number of people, not by their wealth? Then institutions would have to be more accountable to the common good, not just to a few top shareholders.

The ballooning financial industry might naturally shrink in the process, as institutions are forced to replace rampant speculation with responsible caution. Rather than buying up credit default swaps against its own customers, such banks might act more like my old credit union, which had a special office just for helping members avoid foreclosure and eviction.

It’s the difference between what Marjorie Kelly, in her lucid book Owning Our Future, refers to as “extractive” and “generative” ownership. One seeks only to maximize profits for shareholders who may or may not be directly affected by the enterprise; the other seeks to align the prosperity of an enterprise with the prosperity of those it serves.

In the last century, governments alternated between breaking up overgrown businesses into competitive pieces, or nationalizing them by handing them to state bureaucrats. This century, we should consider another approach: make them too good to fail. Make them accountable.

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Those students helped Sanders win Colorado. But in most other Super Tuesday states, his bid for the Democratic nomination sputtered. I’m worried about what will become of the sense of possibility that this candidacy created – and the millions of young people who are done bowing to the dictates of capitalism. I’m worried about the fate – and the future – of the Bern.

All along, Sanders himself has promised a “political revolution”, not just a candidate. Yet what he has delivered, at least so far, is pretty much just a candidacy. As winning looks less likely for Sanders, the possibility of cascading disappointment is nigh.

I feel a bit of deja vu. In my book Thank You, Anarchy, I charted the rise and fall of Occupy Wall Street – a phenomenon with more than a passing resemblance to the Bern, and some of the same leaders. Much of that experience was rapturous, too, for those who experienced it. But after a coordinated crackdown cleared the encampments, I watched that rapture collapse in on itself. The movement-in-the-making turned out to be just a moment. Many of those who experienced it came away frustrated and fragmented.

Consider, in contrast, the 15-M movement in Spain, which spread across that country several months before Occupy in 2011, and which partly inspired it. After occupying their city squares for a few weeks, the 15-M activists in many cases decided to close down their encampments on their own, and to take the movement to their neighborhoods. They continued meeting in assemblies, and created cooperative enterprises to help support themselves. In the process they built power. Less than five years later, cities like Madrid and Barcelona have elected candidates drawn, in part, from the ranks of the protests, promulgating policies that would make a protester proud – like cutting perks for city officials, crowdsourcing ideas from neighborhood assemblies, and penalizing companies like Airbnb. It’s an electoral strategy built on durable organizing.

How could this translate to the United States? There’s a hint in Bernie Sanders’ own past, such as a set of proposals that he published in late 2014, before announcing his campaign. “Instead of giving huge tax breaks to corporations which ship our jobs to China and other low-wage countries,” he wrote, “we need to provide assistance to workers who want to purchase their own businesses by establishing worker-owned cooperatives.” Long before that, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders supported the use of community land trusts (CLTs) to keep housing affordable.

Cooperatives and CLTs are both time-tested forms of enterprise that share ownership and control among the people who depend on them. They bring democracy out of the voting booth and into daily life. They don’t rely on big banks or secretive trade deals. With or without a president on your side, one way to dethrone the 1% is to build an economy that doesn’t need them. That’s the start of a revolution, as well as a livelihood for the revolutionaries.

The Next System project, for instance, is an effort to envision this kind of inclusive, ecologically sustainable and just economy. With backers like Annie Leonard and Danny Glover, it’s holding a three-day gathering in New York next week and teach-ins across the country.

“Bernie has opened the door to a bigger conversation on what a next system could look like,” says political economist Gar Alperovitz, a co-chair of the Next System Project. “We hope to open up a serious and sophisticated discussion about what that means.”

They’re not the only ones. Detroit will be host next month to the North American Social Solidarity Economy Forum, drawing on the legacy of Black Power activists James and Grace Lee Boggs. In July, the New Economy Coalition will hold its CommonBound conference in Buffalo. I’m helping to organize sessions about technology there, as part of a broader effort to create a new generation of cooperative online businesses – a real sharing economy.

Sanders’ political revolution may be on the rocks right now, but it doesn’t need to be. It requires more than a presidential candidate anyway – always did. We can build strength by bringing democracy to our schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and smartphones. With that foundation, whatever revolution comes will be not a candidate’s, but ours.

Photo by DonkeyHotey

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After his presidential announcement this week, many wondered how Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would distinguish himself from the other candidates running in the Democratic primary.

With his newly-published issues page, he offers some clues.

Among the 12 platform planks that he published there are several traditional ideas such as rebuilding American infrastructure and guaranteeing health care to all. But the very last platform offers a genuinely fresh idea: boosting America’s worker co-ops.

The Sanders campaign writes:

We need to develop new economic models to increase job creation and productivity. Instead of giving huge tax breaks to corporations which ship our jobs to China and other low-wage countries, we need to provide assistance to workers who want to purchase their own businesses by establishing worker-owned cooperatives. Study after study shows that when workers have an ownership stake in the businesses they work for, productivity goes up, absenteeism goes down and employees are much more satisfied with their jobs.

In the United States, co-ops are often associated with small businesses such as coffee shops or groceries. But with the right regulatory incentives and support, worker-owned businesses can be much larger. Take the Mondragon corporation of Spain, for example. Today it has over 70,000 employees and brings in annual revenues of over $12 billion Euros. Within the various units of the corporation, workers decide on the direction of production for the company as well as what to do with the profits. While CEO-to-worker pay ratios in the United States have reached over 300-to-1, in Mondragon the cooperative model ensures that in most of its operations, “the ratio of compensation between top executives and the lowest-paid members is between three to one and six to one.”

Today, there are 11,000 worker-owned companies in America, and there are up to 120 million Americans who are involved in some form of co-op if you include credit unions in the tally. By endorsing their expansion, Sanders is proving that his differences with his opponents are not just in style but in substance – providing an alternative to the top-down corporations that run our economy.

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